(The following column by Mary Beth Schneider appeared on the Indianapolis Star website on August 21.)
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Mike Fisher doesn’t plan to talk about what he calls “the political stuff” when he takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention on Monday evening.
But the story the 53-year-old Beech Grove father and railroad worker tells during his three minutes in the spotlight could put a personal face on the political issues that will decide who is the next president.
It’s a story that Fisher — one of at least 20 everyday people invited by the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama to speak at the convention — first told Obama on April 30.
That’s when the senator and his wife, Michelle, drove their giant campaign bus down Fisher’s quiet Beech Grove cul-de-sac to join him for a lunch of Subway sandwiches and potato chips.
Fisher, along with his wife, Cheryl, told the Obamas about his fears that his job at Amtrak was about to be cut or transferred, and how he’d end up jobless rather than uproot his family.
They told them about their worries for their son-in-law, Nick Maddox, who is in the Indiana National Guard, and now in Texas training, while his wife, the Fishers’ daughter, Abby, is back here, due to give birth in early October.
And they told the Obamas about their daughter-in-law, Abbey, whose insurance company denied her the surgery she needs after a complicated pregnancy.
Their circumstances have eased somewhat. Fisher still has his job, though friends lost theirs; their son-in-law isn’t scheduled — yet — to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan; and his daughter-in-law just found a new job with better insurance.
Still, the family’s worries, shared by so many Americans, remain.
Fisher hopes that when he talks to the nation, viewers will see the Obama he met sitting around his dining room table, and again on May 3, when he choked up while introducing Obama to an Indianapolis crowd.
“After meeting him and talking to him and seeing how down-to-earth he was with us and understanding, he just sold me 100 percent,” Fisher said.
In fact, he said, his father-in-law, Norvel Wheatley, Franklin, came to the April luncheon sure he would not vote for Obama but left as an Obama supporter.
Obama’s convention planners in Denver did not return calls seeking comment about how Fisher was chosen. They did issue a statement saying the convention “will include a broad spectrum of speakers and delegates from across the country, including everyday people whose own stories reflect the challenges and opportunities Americans in communities across the country face, and who are committed to change.”
But the reasons for the selection seem obvious: Fisher, a family man who helps coach softball at the local high school while also holding down a part-time job working security at Conseco Fieldhouse, is the kind of working-class voter targeted by Democrats and Republicans. It doesn’t hurt, either, that he’s a gun owner who likes to fish and hunt deer in his spare time.
Embodying an entire voting bloc as a convention speaker is a shock to Fisher.
He learned of the invitation late Sunday, when two people from Obama’s campaign called.
“They said, ‘We want you and your wife to come to the convention, and we want you to speak,’ ” he said. “And I went, ‘Speak where?’ ”
When they told him he’d “be right in front of 20,000 people, I went, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
Fisher was more stunned than nervous, he said, until he received the e-mailed official invitation, signed by Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
“I went, ‘Oh, my God.’ I’m getting very, very nervous now,” he said.
His wife, he said, is worried about what they’ll wear. And besides scrambling to find a suit that fits before their plane leaves Sunday, Fisher is worried about his instructions:
To speak no more than 140 words per minute for a total of three minutes, including time for applause.
“So,” Fisher said, “I’m hoping people applaud for 21/2 minutes.”