Thanks, Obama Page 2

  It can be hard, at times, to distinguish between the absence of talent and the presence of destiny. When I began my dream job, I imagined buying a wholesale tub of maxipads and following in my boss’s footsteps, or, if his skates were deployed, his tracks. But when August rolled around, my fellow intern Mariana had landed about six jokes in the paper. I had landed about none.

  You know, I thought, maybe this job isn’t so meaningful after all.

  For the first time in my life, I was seeking a higher purpose, but after my experience with the Kerry campaign, politics never crossed my mind. Instead, I applied to join the CIA. With my major in history and leadership experience directing my comedy troupe, I figured I was the perfect person to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

  I don’t remember where I was when the CIA called, although since it was my senior year of college, I was probably either recovering from a hangover or acquiring one. I also don’t remember my interviewer’s name. I do, however, recall that it was something all-American, like Chip or Jimmy. I also remember that he sounded surprisingly sunny, as though he were selling time-shares or cutlery door-to-door.

  “Alrighty now,” said Buddy, or maybe even Tex. “Just to kick things off, have you used any prohibited substances in the past year?”

  If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before.

  The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over.

  I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand.

  Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate.

  I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory.

  It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

  And then I saw him speak.

  Years later, after writing dozens upon dozens of presidential speeches, it would become impossible to listen to rhetoric without editing it in my head. On that historic Iowa evening, Obama began with a proclamation: “They said this day would never come.” Rereading those words today, I have questions. Who were “they,” exactly? Did they really say “never”? Because if they thought an antiwar candidate with a robust fund-raising operation could never win a divided three-way Democratic caucus, particularly with John Edwards eating into Hillary Clinton’s natural base of support among working-class whites, then they didn’t know what they were talking about.

  All this analysis would come later, though, along with stress-induced insomnia and an account at the Navy Mess. At the time, I was spellbound. The senator continued:

  “At this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said you couldn’t do.” He spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed.

  Barack Obama spoke for the next twelve minutes, and except for a brief moment when the landing gear popped out and I thought we were going to die, I was riveted. He told us we were one people. I nodded knowingly at the gentleman in the middle seat. He told us he would expand health care by bringing Democrats and Republicans together. I was certain it would happen as he described. He looked out at a sea of organizers and volunteers.

  “You did this,” he told them, “because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

  Like most twenty-one-year-olds, I was no stranger to the sudden, all-consuming crush. “There’s this girl,” I would gush to friends who tolerated that sort of thing. “She’s from California, and I once spent a week in Washington State! Can you believe how much we have in common?” Watching Obama speak, my attraction was electoral rather than physical. But in politics, as in other things, the heart wants what it wants.

  I do love this country! I thought. I can change it! It’s like he’s known me my whole life!

  As we neared the runway, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I was born in the tail end of the Reagan years, when government was not the solution but the problem. I cast my first vote during the Bush years, when “You are either with us or with the terrorists” was applied to foreign and domestic opponents alike. Now, a few thousand feet over New York City, a candidate for president had told me we were not a collection of red states and blue states, but the United States. Together, we could build something far greater than we could on our own.

  By the time we emerged from the Jetway, I was one of those people who would not shut up about Barack Obama. I wasn’t alone. Across campus, across America, an army of idealists had arisen, a zombie horde craving hope and change.

  Our critics would later mock the depths of our devotion. Obamabots, they’d call us. And really, weren’t they right? Becoming obsessed with Barack Obama wasn’t a choice I made. Rather, it was like starring in one of those sleeper-agent-killer-robot movies that comes out every few years. A switch is flipped, long-dormant code is activated, and suddenly the mild-mannered main character can disembowel adversaries with a spoon. I’ve never disemboweled anybody, not even people who actually use the phrase, “Find me on LinkedIn.” Still, I identify with that killer robot. I had been preprogrammed with the ability to ask friends for donations or to call people at random to tell them how to vote. Now, my switch had been flipped.

  When I got back to campus, I joined our chapter of Obama for America. Organizers handed out call sheets, pieces of paper covered in strangers’ numbers and names, and each night I dialed until my fingers were sore. These days I’m more likely to receive these calls than make them. I hang up so quickly, you’d think someone was trying to poison me over the phone. But in 2008, that unicorn of political seasons, Democrats were happy to take unsolicited advice from a stranger who had been legally drinking for all of four months.

  I came to think of men and women I cold-called as “my voters.” If they didn’t pick up, I’d leave a helpful, minute-long voice mail. If they did pick up, I’d deliver the exact same message, only with room for questions at the end. I tailored my pitch in small ways. Tiffany might hear about Obama’s ability to bring people together. Tucker might hear about his midwestern roots. Treshawn might hear the word historic mentioned three or four times in a single sentence.

  Mostly, though, I talked about Iraq.
On the eve of the war, Hillary Clinton voted to give George W. Bush authority to invade. Was she motivated by principle? By her desire to seem tough? No one could tell. Contrast that with Obama. In 2002, when opposing Bush was political suicide, he called Iraq a “dumb war.” Being president took two things, I told my voters: judgment and courage. With just one speech, my candidate had demonstrated both.

  “What about experience? Hasn’t he only been in the Senate for, like, two years?”

  “I don’t think that matters,” I assured them. I would have set myself on fire before allowing a sophomore to direct my improv comedy group. When it came to running the country, however, I was pretty sure a freshman senator could figure it out.

  I graded my voters on a one-to-five scale. Fives supported Hillary. Threes were undecided. Ones supported us. In a week or two of phone calls I covered almost every imaginable issue: electability, education, infrastructure, GMOs. The secret to these conversations, I learned, was to substitute personal detail for genuine expertise.

  “Of course I support America’s farmers. I eat salad all the time!”

  “As someone with four grandparents, I can’t afford not to worry about social security!”

  That sort of thing.

  There was one issue my fellow Democrats and I rarely discussed but was always on our minds. Race. I was calling on behalf of an African American candidate who had won in Iowa, where the electorate was more than 90 percent white. This was impossible. Yet it had been done. And that was at the heart of my candidate’s appeal. Obama wasn’t just fighting for change. He was change. He was the messenger and message all at once. It’s one thing to follow a prophet who speaks glowingly of a promised land. It’s another thing entirely to join him once he parts the sea.

  Given the circumstances, it seemed selfish not to spread the good news. Overnight, my friends found themselves living with an evangelist in their midst, an Obama’s Witness who could take or leave your soul but was desperate for your vote. When it came to tactics, I took my inspiration from the heroes who came before me. Mahatma Gandhi went on a hunger strike. Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat. I pasted my entire address book into a “bcc” field and wrote my take on that week’s news.

  “Obama’s big wins in the last few days are largely thanks to the number of supporters he has getting out the vote for him, and every landslide victory gets him even more momentum!”

  No one replied to my bulletin, but that didn’t bother me. I loved my country. I was changing it. Besides, things had probably been just as difficult for Martin Luther King.

  FOUR WEEKS AFTER MAKING MY FIRST CALL FOR BARACK OBAMA, I got the chance to vote for him: Connecticut held its primary on February 5. We were a small state, but our position next to Hillary Clinton’s adopted home of New York gave us outsize importance. About a week before the election, the campaign announced that Obama himself would come to deliver a speech.

  Like most Jews, I haven’t spent much time waiting for the rapture. But after the nights I lay awake, counting down the minutes until that rally, I think I get the appeal. On February 4, when the anointed hour arrived, I gathered a crew of fellow supporters and borrowed my roommate’s car without her permission. Then we made the pilgrimage to Hartford, Connecticut, our temporarily sacred ground.

  A few years later, when I traveled to rallies in the motorcade, I would sometimes wonder why anyone in the audience would want to go. Hours before the speaker says a word, you wait for the doors to open. You wait to go through metal detectors. You wait for the program to begin. You wait for the speaker to speak. After at least two hours of waiting and at most one hour of speaking, you wait for the speaker to exit. Then you wait for everyone ahead of you to exit. Then, after all that, you wait for your bus or train or car. Presidential speeches are decathlons of standing around.

  Why not just watch online? I think, forgetting about that day in Hartford when I went myself, and waited for hours, and would not have traded a single second away. On the floor of a basketball arena, surrounded by sixteen thousand fellow pilgrims, we hoisted homemade signs. We did the wave. A few of us tried to spark a cheer.

  “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we . . . not yet? Okay, never mind.”

  Finally, long after we lost track of time, the program began. Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama were wrapping up a week of joint appearances, a political odd couple on the road trip of their lives. It was like watching Julie Andrews and Lady Gaga team up for a Christmas album. The veteran had lost a step, but got by on decades of accumulated wisdom. The newcomer was raw at times, but possessed a talent that could not be denied. Together, they covered all the Democratic standards. Ending the Iraq War. Affordable health care. Fighting for the middle class.

  Yet here’s the remarkable thing: I don’t remember a word. On that plane into JFK, I was captivated by the candidate. In Hartford, I was captivated by the crowd. I had seen diversity before, of course, on the front pages of college admissions brochures. But looking up at thousands of screaming Democrats, I realized I was part of a truly diverse group of people for the first time in my life.

  It’s always risky to reduce American society to “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” but there was no tokenism in the arena that afternoon. Young people, old people. Gay people, straight people. Black people, white people. Men and women. Rich and poor. So often in America, these differences were dividing lines, but here in Hartford lay the promise of something better, personified not by our candidate, but by us. We were proud of who we were and where we came from. Most of all, though, we were proud to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

  “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

  I heard the cheer billowing behind me. To my surprise, I joined in. This kind of raw patriotism had been co-opted during the Bush years, when we were told the only way to love your country was to support invading another one. The Right had claimed words like freedom and liberty, words the Left was all too willing to abandon. Now here we were, pumping our fists without irony.

  Nor were we cheering only for our fellow Obamabots. When we chanted, “Yes we can,” we meant all of us, Obama supporters, Hillary supporters, Republicans, independents. We had no doubt that everyone would soon see the light.

  But first, we had to win. When we got back to campus, we turned a dorm room into a headquarters and traded call sheets for walk packets. Then we went from house to house, reminding supporters to vote. After finishing my packet, I cast my ballot, letting my eyes linger for just a moment on the filled-in bubble by Obama’s name. Then I borrowed my roommate’s car without permission and drove voters to the polls.

  At the bar where we gathered to watch the returns, the mood at first was grim. Hillary was racing to an early lead. But then numbers rolled in from big cities—Hartford, Bristol, New Haven—and it became clear which way the night was headed. In the end, just fourteen thousand votes separated the two candidates. Still, that slim margin was enough. We had won. Whooping and hollering back to campus headquarters, our crew of college students passed a pair of panhandlers in the street. They looked at us. We looked at them.

  “Barack Obama?”

  “Barack Obama!”

  Suddenly we were locked in a group hug, squealing as we leapt up and down. In an instant, our candidate’s victory had bridged whatever gulf lay between us. I had every reason to believe the entire world had been no less fundamentally transformed.

  It was Erika, a junior I was sort-of-kind-of dating, who brought me back to earth. I knew she was undecided on the morning of Election Day, but I wrote this off as a side effect of her major in philosophy. I was confident that, when the time came, she would make the right choice.

  Instead, she voted for Hillary. She liked Obama, she explained, she just wanted to support a woman. In theory I was fine with her decision. In practice, it was as if we were at dinner and she had casually ordered human flesh. I tried to help Erika realize just how terribly she had chosen. For some reason, this didn’t cause her to reexamine her life in the way I hop
ed. We sort-of-kind-of broke up a few days later.

  By that time, though, Obama was on a roll. Nebraska. Maine. Maryland. Wisconsin. There were eleven contests between the Connecticut primary and February 19. We won them all. By the end of the month, Obama’s lead in delegates was undeniable. His coalition of African Americans, well-to-do whites, and young people—an alliance so unlikely just a few months earlier—was now poised to make him the Democratic nominee. With victory in the air, there was no time to mourn the end of a relationship.

  Instead, I doubled down on hope. “There’s this girl,” I gushed. “I’ve never had the guts to ask her out, and she’s never indicated she wants me to! Can you believe how much we have in common?”

  Her name was Amy. She was spontaneous, rebellious, into both Batman and computer science. Clearly out of my league. But in moments of doubt, my candidate’s words rang through my head. “When we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.” The phrase had lodged itself in my head like a mantra, or a tumor.

  Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.

  Throughout February, however, Amy politely hinted I could not. I tried every offer in my arsenal: home-cooked quesadillas, the final third of a bottle of Yellowtail, The Sopranos on DVD. She declined.

  Then, just when it seemed hopeless, a window opened. Amy had caught the Obama bug. On March 4, the day of the Rhode Island primary, I asked her if she wanted to drop everything and go to Providence to knock on doors. To my surprise, she said yes. Before she could reconsider, I borrowed my roommate’s car without permission and we took off down I-95.

  From the moment we arrived, it was obvious that my candidate was not destined for victory. Rhode Island voters treated my suggestion to vote for Obama the same way Amy had treated my suggestion to meet up for a study break at 1 A.M. Yet even the most ardent fives had the sense something historic was happening. They disagreed with us, often strongly. Even so, they were happy to see young people on their front porches, working to change the country we all loved. One Hillary supporter offered lemon squares. Another asked me to come inside, worried I might freeze. Opening his door, a bearded man asked me a question I had yet to hear on the campaign trail.