DENVER—A day after learning she’ll be among 50 “ordinary Americans” on a pre-inauguration train ride with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Patricia Stiles of Parker was figuring out what to say to them.
“I’m hoping that I’ll have the right words,” she told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I want them to know how average American families have been impacted by the former administration and I want him to know that we support him and believe in him.”
Stiles and her husband, Tedd, will join the president- and vice president-elect in Philadelphia on Jan. 17 for the train ride to Washington, where Obama and Biden will be sworn in three days later.
If she gets a chance to talk to Obama, the issues she wants to raise include corporate greed, education, and health care.
“I can’t wait to have an opportunity to talk to him as human beings,” she said.
Stiles said she and her husband are longtime Republicans who became disillusioned with their party and volunteered for Obama.
Tedd Stiles went door-to-door looking for votes. She volunteered to work the phones and computers at a campaign office despite recent surgery for breast cancer and introduced Biden at a campaign rally on Oct. 22 at Sierra High School in Colorado Springs.
She said she spent three days exchanging e-mails with the campaign to prepare her Biden introduction.
“I never had any public speaking experience,” said Stiles, a dental hygienist.
“Just my poor little patients getting the dental hygiene speech,” she jokingly said of her usually captive audience.
Stiles said she voted for Bush in 2000, and she and her husband had supported retired Rep. Tom Tancredo, a lighting-rod Colorado conservative. But she says they became disenchanted when the party abandoned conservative fiscal policies and the impacts hit home.
She said Tedd Stiles, a United Airlines pilot, has been working without a raise since the 2001 terrorist attacks and that United no longer contributes to a defined-benefit pension for him. She said she had to return to work years earlier to help pay for her children’s college. The children, now 22 and 25, have graduated.
In 2004, she voted for Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, and shortly after Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver last August, she switched her voter registration from Republican to independent.
She said Tedd Stiles remains a registered Republican but she wants nothing to do with the party.
“I lost all faith with them with a recession, a war,” she said. “My husband and I are blessed that this administration has cost us only money. We don’t have a child in Iraq. Praise God.”
The couple’s involvement in the Obama campaign sprang from an encounter in September, three days before Patricia Stiles had surgery for breast cancer. She was buying snacks for a get-together to watch a Broncos game on television when she saw an Obama campaign office.
“I glanced over and thought, ‘Obama? Well, I’ll be. I wonder if they understand that this is a very Republican district.'”
She went in and talked to a campaign worker about her disenchantment with the GOP. Three weeks after her surgery, the couple began volunteering.
Colorado Republican Chairman Dick Wadhams said Republicans are working to restore the fiscal responsibility mantle they squandered when they had a majority in Congress.
He said he honors anybody’s decision to support Obama and his policies.
“I believe that if they decided to leave the Republican Party and support Barack Obama because they think he will be more fiscally conservative, I think they will be sorely disappointed,” Wadhams said. “It will play itself out in the long run.”
