The events of a year ago today are remarkable and yet, I can’t get over the feeling I “missed” some part of campaign euphoria in the process.
I remember: waking up from my hour’s sleep; showering; driving; depositing lists; watching the sunrise through my dashboard; ending up in Kathy’s kitchen; my phone losing battery; contacting Colonel Beef; exchanging batteries; Making more coffee; Beef joining kitchen; getting news of Hillside voter disputes; electing to sit on feet for entire conversation with Lawyer Squad; discovering additional canvassing issues; attempting to print new packets; printer breaking; nausea vs. sweat vs. sanity; stomaching, grumpily, Beef’s cheese sandwich; leaving kitchen for Amanda’s boiler room; sitting in nauseous circle; getting phone call; taking circle outside; getting in car with bottle of wine; staring at strangers dancing in room at “victory party”; many drunk “youth”; laughing, sort of, at gregarious victory speech; moving to a bar; going to bed.
I think at one point I drank some scotch, but I can’t be sure.
November 5th, 2008, I slept in for half an hour and lollygagged. It felt great, the lollygagging. And then I went back to 218 Limit and discussed where we would eat burritos. Again, I think that was the 5th, but can’t be sure. There was a conference call at some point with the President himself, I remember. And a trip to Denver or two.
I guess what I’m getting at is that on election night, after all the months of build up, all the conference calls parading the 4th as the evening we would rediscover our inner selves through pure joy or real devastation, after all that, I was left dazed, self-focused and unable to feel or understand the situation. My fellow staffers, the same people I now feel closer to than nearly anyone else, seemed distant; I wanted to reconnect with my home, the family and friends I’d put ‘on hold’, but didn’t think it was possible; I couldn’t shake the panicked sense of simultaneously wanting to transport months forward and also backwards, to be anywhere else or forever in that instant. I was confused, acutely lonely, and frustrated: where was the victory blush?
Last night I watched the new documentary, “By the People” which was, admittedly, clearly designed to inflate the ole Obamanation ego. I watched this standing shoulder to shoulder with the featured staffers, in a four story staff party, on an election night 364 days after our own. I felt the requisite pangs for not joining the effort earlier; the nostalgia at the routine, the chants, motifs and speeches; the overbearing energy of a room of young adults, all looking to find or be the Next One. And there was, of course, a shared sense of accomplishment, tempered only by the standard discrepancies in campaign “worth” or longevity, the classic hierarchy at these events.
But watching it, especially after reading, hearing and digesting the constant dialogue on His Failure to Govern, Your Failure to Predict, brought me back to some of the intangible lessons of the 2006, 2007 and 2008 campaign trail. The lessons that we knew, then, and yet forget today—forget in the individual, day to day interactions and conversations on the state of our union, though perhaps not in the collective, we-shared-in- victory sense.
Even I have doubted the Organizing For America mission and capacity, mostly due to the difficulty of creating an equal energy without an obvious and digestible deadline, but also due to the obvious funding and media challenges of a grassroots campaign. I was exhausted after the campaign, albeit wanting partially to return to the month-out benchmark and the idea of never-ending persuasion calls seemed, quite honestly, hellish. In my mind, the only folks who really thought the campaign could morph easily into a permanent field operation were the same folks who didn’t actually knock on doors or make persuasion calls all day, every day: the folks at headquarters, with spreadsheets and carry-out and occasional bar outings.
Of course, most of those people had done field work for months or years before, had experienced the push of great volunteers and the pull of low numbers, the importance of hammering out, day after day, as much contact as humanly possibly. They had “done” field and “paid” their “debt”. But, I surmised, this situation was unique—they hadn’t been part of the ground force now charged with a 365 x 4 year commitment to voter-outreach--miserable, demeaning, tedious voter outreach—and therefore couldn’t possibly think-up the real life demands such a “fourth branch” would entail. Their past experience would miss the beat and thus would fail. Would fail to encourage neighbors to actually show up at their canvassing shift; would fail to persuade Joe Student to give 20 bucks to the effort instead of the Vodka that could fuel his weekend’s fun; would fail to manage or provide the expectations and affectations of the dozen or so field staff that would continue in their states, alone and over-burdened.
What I (we?) tend to forget when considering the Obama campaign is how the movement began. There was very little glamour in the early months of 2007. To favor Barack Obama made one impractical, almost shallow, as caught up in political whimsy as teenage girls are in high-school drama. If I was feeling vindictive, I might collect on the rather-impressive sum of bets won from the ex-boyfriend and his hyper-intellectual-liberal cronies. (The ex, of course, being another campaign casualty, and so to remind him of the glaring “told you so” might seem, how do I say, tasteless.) The majority of campaign dems, the hyper-intellectual-liberal ones, favored Hillary’s inevitability, John Edwards’ southern hospitality, maybe Richardson’s new look and energy spiel. Barack was for a few public servants, the ones who felt noblesse oblige in the form of government paychecks despite Ivy diplomas, and the youth. I imagine a few closer, Midwestern types understood his working-stiff background and had experienced, as the politically-aware types did as well, his “grandeur” as it were. But still, Obama 2008 was a fad, as fad-like as any remotely (and I mean remotely) feasible presidential campaign can be.
Everyone knows the story from that point on, as the snowflake gained speed and became a snowball then a snow-boulder and, eventually, a crushing mid-winter’s victory. I have no interest pandering around those months following, either, in which the tides swooshed back and forth with Hilldog, and as the rest of the opposition, including the Republicans, took a backseat to the Topic At Hand.
Imperative to the election, to Barack Obama’s success, are the snowflakes that joined as he neared January third and afterwards, as the snow melted and, occasionally, flowed away. The staff and volunteers in New Hampshire that ostensibly “failed”, only to become the feisty, roving field organizers insisting on future victories. The South Carolina “story tellers” who helped define Barack Obama as an African American candidate, agitating and engaging a massive voter block and encouraging what may be BO’s most critical achievement-to-date, the breaking of a major, symbolic barrier that meant more to the rest of the world than I knew I could possibly consider. The roaming volunteers who learned to canvass and discovered the soul-food of kind conversation with strangers. Even the college students who found themselves checking The Atlantic before Perez Hilton in their casual internet surfing and, remarkably, even chose to register their friends.
And, of course, the fellowship program—a campaign recruitment process that opened the door to young professionals, adults that would have to quit their jobs in order to join the effort, but could do so if they so desired—the program that destroyed the old tradition of connections from which one entered the scene. Your roommate’s high school friend’s dad wasn’t the key to a field organizer internship in rural PA. Participation, real, sanctioned participation, was available at the click of an “admit”. And thus, Colorado was staffed, Virginia voter’s registered, and campus organizer’s trained.
The fellowship was responsible for the dozen people that greeted me in Colorado Springs when I showed up as a (somehow) paid organizer. The fellowship was responsible for getting the most incredible, diverse group of enthused young adults to congregate in the sweaty, carpeted, alarm-failing office and forgo salary, health insurance and social enterprise just because they cared.
These were the committed, uncomplaining actors that made the campaign such an event, such a god damn historic event. I know the Iowans, the primary folks, might argue that they were the ones who really got him elected, and they were—obviously and absolutely—but I can say from experience that the volunteerism and shared identity experienced as an organizer in the primary was a far, far cry from the army of support in the fall of 2008.
The lesson from this campaign is much more complex than that of a few terse statements or illustrative memories, but there is no way to pursue the lesson without revisiting these “snowflakes”, these people who gave up their worlds, their identities, to be a part of the greater good. In a time when borders have faded to little more than a conversation on identity, when banks are crumbling to the tune of greed without consequence, and all that is beautiful in our country—natural and unmatched diversity in our lands, people and ideas—is subject to pricing, subsidies and legislative-opinion, how can we look at the surge of selfless duty and communion felt in the months leading to November 4th as anything less than a miracle? Why would we want to? Why not preserve that emotion provoked when Barack mentioned an old lady sending a $3.01 check to the campaign; when he demanded that change was possible, that yes we could? These emotions, the awe and concern and deep-seated desire, were pure and untainted regardless of media chatter. I felt connected instinctively to something so much better, so much more important, than the inevitable November 4th victory. Something that will never be described or fulfilled through a government maintained by checks and balances, that can’t be conveyed in the dry conversation of lawmakers, won’t be read in a 2,000 page health care manual.
The campaign was a miracle.
So, Arianna Huffington, et al, as you continue to bludgeon the POTUS and his cabinet, consider truly whether you think the campaign was meant for the government. I don’t think it was. I think it was a revival of duty, of focused passion, of community and conversation. A revival of hope. I felt for eight months the rush of greater purpose, and was left November 5th in a blurred hole, unsure of how to continue but unwilling to forgo the commitment to a Bigger Better Thing. Maybe the details are muddled (I almost certainly didn’t shower on election day), and the stories exaggerated: retrospect is, as always, a poet. But as I reflect on November 4th, 2008, I urge anyone reading this to consider the difference between campaign (concept, past tense) and President Barack Obama (person, present tense): to value the wonder of then to the reality of now. To stop laughing at the idea of “hope” and move, instead, toward considering its worth.The miracle was in the campaign, not the candidate. To imagine it’s the opposite is, simply, a waste.
