The headline is far more portentous than this post warrants, for if you combine the faint ripples of my scribblings with the mildness of the substance, there's not much to "reveal." But I decided nevertheless that, before the election, I didn't want to write anything that could in the slightest way be construed as negative.

I ended up working for the Obama campaign three times. I wrote about the first time previously, so I won't detail it here. But in short, it was not rewarding or uplifting in the slightest, and I had to content myself with the knowledge that I was there for a cause, not for entertainment, and that if that's what they wanted me to do, then that was what was needed.

I really needed that attitude the second time, last Saturday, when I accompanied a friend and a friendly woman who rode up with us up to Manchester, N.H. We were assigned 50-60 specific residences — identified previously as likely pro-Obama — and it really sucked. At many of the houses, there were three cars in the driveway and signs of movement inside, but no answer at the door. There was no doubt — these people were avoiding us!

A couple of the times that people did come to the door, they expressed their extreme weariness at the pesterings of people like us. "You're the fifth person to knock on the door," one woman said. I didn't want to make the intrusion worse, so I didn't ask if they were all for Obama, or over what period it was, but it didn't matter anyway. It was hard to see how we were helping anyone or anything.

That night, I related this story to a friend who lives in Manchester, and he confirmed the basics. He then followed up the next day with a call from the scale in his kitchen: "Just from the weekend, the leaflets left on our porch weigh 1.4 pounds. Just from the weekend!"

It's fair to point out: It was the final-weekend push, and it was general inundation, not just from Obama. And New Hampshire, of course, has longer campaigns than anyone, so they are more prone to canvass fatigue.

Even so, I had no idea there was a resource/profligacy issue tangled up in this! Think of all the trees that died, and for what? To annoy those the campaigns want to draw close? Not just waste, but alienation — the vote-for-me double play!

Yesterday, on my third try, I finally found my niche, entering data in the back room — literally — of the Arlington Obama office. Because the place was packed — the fever pitch was palpable, as the body heat of three dozen volunteers, many of them using their own cell phones to call Indiana, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, raised the atmosphere to stuffy — it was still semi-social, but I finally felt as if I wasn't being a public nuisance.

Even then, I couldn't escape evidence of it. My role was to enter results of other people's calls into a voter database, to help the campaign focus its get-out-the-vote effort. More than once, the same names came under my cursor from different lists, and several times, I saw callers' margin notations that this person had just been called by someone else.

The conventional line is that the Obama campaign was exceptionally organized, and I wouldn't challenge that — it is on the verge of electing a mixed-race Illinoisan to the leadership of a nation built, in part, on slavery — but in tiny sliver I was exposed to, there sure were lots of warts.