A high school student posted in an interesting blurb on Blue Oregon earlier today. While mowing his grandparents lawn, he witnessed a group of passing 8 year-olds shout "Vote for Kerry!" at random motorists.

While Portlanders have been turning out in droves to express their support for the Kerry, the situation down in Ashland is a wee bit different. I was down there yesterday and ran into a SOU student collecting donations for the campaign. Curious to see how southern Oregonians are reacting to their grass root efforts, I figured he would offer a quick, boring anecdote about how well things have been going. Instead, he painted a unexpectedly bleak picture.

In his first day of promoting the campaign, the worst he had endured was a few tense arguments and the ocassional obscenity from a passing car. However, he was working the downtown beat near a crowded theater showing Farenheit 9/11. His door-to-door colleagues, on the other hand, have been assualted with not only naughty words but gun-totting Bush-supporters. He didn't go into details.

And I always figured that Ashland, with its laid-back campus, world craft shops and Shakespeare festival, would be a total Kerry burg.