Pinning down support for Obama

Mercer County for Obama’s (Mercer4Obama) Princeton volunteer headquarters sponsor a variety of activities, including canvassing and phone banking as well as making thousands of buttons.

An assembly line of raw materials, Obama cut-outs and pin-making machines ends in boxes of various buttons carrying slogans such as “Felines for Obama,” “Babies for Obama,” “Barack the Vote,” “Hockey Moms for Barack,” “Knitters for Obama” and “Scientists for Obama.” The buttons also come in French, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese.

Joanna Dougherty, who coordinates the button-making effort, said that the group has made roughly 15,000 buttons. The suggested donation is $2 per button, and Dougherty said in an e-mail that she is not sure of the exact amount of money made by Mercer4Obama button sales.

While she has given away buttons for as little as $1, Dougherty said that her “personal best” was “a man who donated $300 to the Obama campaign and frugally took a button. He returned a few minutes later to see if he could also get a button for his wife.”

Those who donate to the Obama campaign through the button project must fill out a form regardless of the size of their donation. The form is then sent to Obama’s campaign office.

Obama’s website has a page devoted to button-making where volunteers can blog, post designs and keep a record of money raised for the campaign. Obama, who announced earlier this summer that he will forgo public financing, is the first major-party presidential candidate to run a general election campaign solely based on private donations since the passage of campaign finance regulations in the 1970s.

Joe Summers, one of the volunteers, said he drives into Princeton from his home in Lawrenceville to help make buttons, noting that he works at an average rate of 150 buttons per hour.

Summers added that he considered volunteering for several Obama campaign centers but “chose Mercer4Obama because they were the most receptive.”

The grassroots button-making efforts of Mercer4Obama have also garnered some national attention and were recently mentioned in the liberal media blogs The Huffington Post and Daily Kos.

A bulletin board in the Mercer4Obama office features an announcement that every Sunday there are button-making parties where families, seniors and students can work together on pins.

“Sometimes the parent wants the kid to participate in this election, sometimes the kids get their parents to take them in because even though they are too young to vote, they want to do their part,” Dougherty said.

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