“I’m not interested,” said the annoyed man, eager to return to the din of the television behind him. He wore a concert t-shirt of a half-rate band and smirked as if to say, “Are you kidding me? I came to the door for this?!”

“Thanks anyway,” we replied, forcing ourselves to smile as the annoyed man shut the door in our faces. “Not interested?” I asked my friend and fellow door-knocker, Brent. “Not interested in what, contributing to society?”

Part of Howard Dean’s “Perfect Storm,” we had caravanned with three carloads of volunteers, all the way from Chicago, past what claimed to be the “World’s Largest Truck Stop,” to Iowa City. There we met up (no pun intended) with other Deanites at the Super 8 Motel for a quick training and our assignments. We had all come to help win Dean the Democratic nomination, but many of us would leave humbled after confronting the raw face of the voting and non-voting public.

Brent and I were sent out to go door-knocking at a low-income housing project near the University of Iowa. It was one of those mid-70s complexes designed more to prevent free assembly than to live in. Each building was like a small hive of ten or so apartments encased in an abundance of fire doors and surrounded by way too much parking.

Using our outdated list of registered Democrats and Independents as a guide, we started knocking on doors. “Hello, this is Brent and I’m Ben,” I’d say. “We’re volunteers for Howard Dean. We’re out today to see if you’re planning on attending the caucus on Monday?” Then we’d wait for some sort of response to see how to proceed. The vast majority of people were not at home. Of those that were home, many had a response similar to our annoyed man, brushing us off as if we were trying to hawk satellite dishes. While this was disheartening, we kept our spirits up by composing witty comebacks for each apathetic, non-voter (of course we’d do this after the door had been closed).

Thankfully, we were rewarded with some  interesting, even politically engaged characters. I was about to knock on one door when I was greeted with a loud, “Oh yeah, you like my cock inside you, don’t you?!” We decide not to knock on that particular door. But down the hall, a man answered the door and, for a moment, restored our hope in the future of the democratic process. He was a tall, gray-haired, black man dressed in a light blue kaftan. When the door opened, out wafted what smelled like lamb stew. As we gave him our standard Dean pitch, a big smile grew across his face. “I support Dean,” he responded in a thick accent we’d later learn was Sudanese. “But I cannot vote yet because I am not a citizen. Perhaps next year,” he added confidently. Delighted to find someone with a genuine appreciation of the unique freedom we have in our electoral system, we shook the man’s hand and thanked him.

In the end, our trip to Iowa didn’t do much for Dean. In fact, it’s possible that our presence hurt the campaign. What it did do was afford us, and countless other volunteers, a glimpse of both the full potential of our democracy as well as its greatest disappointment. I returned to Chicago humbled by this vision but determined to return as often as I could to the doorsteps of America.

Benjamin Helphand