Spike Lee Does the Right Thing in Florida Early Voting

[babylonsister]

http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2008/11/01/spike-lee-does-the-right-thing-in-florida-early-voting/

Spike Lee Does the Right Thing in Florida Early Voting
By: Lisa Derrick Saturday November 1, 2008 7:40 am




Director Spike Lee got a call from the Obama campaign help get out the vote in Miami Friday, and he heeded the call. Unlike Matt Damon who got out the vote in suburban West Palm Beach, Lee went straight into Liberty City, described by the Miami News' blog Riptide as "Miami's very own 24-hour war zone."

Arriving with a bus to drive people to the polls, Spike and the campaign worker had to call on a local community organizer to rustle up residents who were unaware they could get a lift for early voting. Once that snafu was corrected, Lee and a busload of voters went to the polls, where the director chatted with people waiting in line while the Liberty City residents voted.

According to Riptide not everyone was excited about, or aware of, Lee's presence:

An older black man wheeling through the ensuing fracas in a wheelchair, who clearly didn't give two shits about the famous guy trying to shake his hand. The old man nudged Lee's grips away and, perhaps thinking Lee was a stumping politician, declared: "Let me through, dammit! I already done voted!"

But really, does Lee's face recognition matter? The main point is that a group of folks who might not have voted were mustered and taken to the polls.

[Billy Burnett]

1. Check the description of Miami's Liberty City.

First of all, an introduction to Liberty City for the un-acquainted: take your average middle-class inner-city neighborhood. Flood it with crack, heroin, and guns. Zap it with 80-percent unemployment. Add a liberal sprinkling of communal self-loathing, and lather the whole casserole with eight decades of governmental ineptitude, apathy, and corruption. Add a few lovingly painted Colt .45 murals. And voila, you got this place: an eerily-quiet, bombed-out slab of a hood' where all the windows are completely obscured by metal armor, and outside of every bodega, a dozen people slouch the day away-- the older, mostly toothless, set drinking; the younger, white-T'd-set hustling, or so Young Jeezy informs me.

It ain't pretty.