Finnish citizen campaigning for Barack Obama in Virginia

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Finnish citizen Jaakko Helleranta is one of the volunteers collecting data for the Barack Obama presidential campaign in the City of Alexandria in Virginia.
     
Resident in the USA for more than five years, Helleranta, 33, works as a development finance specialist for the World Bank. He regrets that he is not eligible to vote, as he is not a US citizen.
      Nevertheless, he has been knocking on doors for a couple of months. In addition, the Helsinki-born man has persuaded even other individuals - foreigners as well as Americans - to campaign for Obama.
      One of them is Mark Schweikert, 44, who works as an accountant for a real estate company and lives in Washington. He has never participated in an election campaign before.
      Because Washington is an area where most people vote for Democrats, Schweikert chose to do his campaigning in Virginia on the west side of the Potomac River.
     
Helleranta says that he regards as very regrettable the way George W. Bush’s government reacted to the September 2001 terrorist attacks and how the war in Iraq as well as other mistakes have starkly polarised the American people.
      ”It has been a really embarassing and awful period”, he concludes, speaking of the past few years.
      Helleranta and his Finnish wife moved to the USA on March 17th 2003, on the day the war in Iraq was set to start. He found the first days in the new country very uncomfortable.
     
That was until Barack Obama, 47, a Senator of Illinois and a brilliant and eloquent political comet, came across his radar.
      ”Obama has been the right person in the right place at the right time”, says Helleranta, wearing an Obama t-shirt that carries a simple mathematical expression meaning ”Hope is bigger than fear”.
      Helleranta praises Obama’s ability to inspire people with a belief in change and with a willingness to work for it.
      As for John McCain, Helleranta says that the man is an unpredictable politician, whose victory could mean ” hard times for this country - really gloomy”.
      Nearly one in six out of 305 million US citizens does not have health insurance, which is ”really bewildering in the richest country in the world”, Helleranta feels.
      He thinks that Obama’s philosophy of social justice takes into account even the American way of thinking that an individual has to take responsibility for himself or herself, in which Helleranta also believes.
     
The State of Virginia, with just under eight million inhabitants, has traditionally been a Republican stronghold, but in the upcoming elections it will play a pivotal role as a "battleground state".
      The current financial crisis in particular has been eroding McCain’s support recently, and a poll this week indicated that Obama held a narrow two-point advantage over his rival in the state.
      Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Florida, and a clutch of other states that were held by the Republicans in 2004 are now being targeted furiously by the Democrats.
      The nature of the US Presidential Election is such that victory and defeat often hinge on a few swing states, while most of the nation's voters live in "safe states" that are solidly red or blue, and may see little or nothing of the candidates during the campaign.
      Virginia has not gone into the Democrat column since 1964, but recent demographic changes, especially in the north, have made it once again competitive for Democrats and the Obama/Joe Biden ticket.


Links:
  Jaakko Helleranta´s Blog

Helsingin Sanomat