Thanks, Obama Read online

  “Are you Jewish?”

  I told him I was, and he invited me into his modest white home to say Sabbath prayers with his family. I got the impression they would have consumed a heaping tray of bacon cheeseburgers before voting for my candidate. Still, they welcomed me with kindness in their eyes. This was the way politics was supposed to work. This was the way life was supposed to work.

  Returning to the street to meet Amy, I felt more confident than ever that the universe was about to change. Who cared if we lost Rhode Island? America was on the brink of a new and shining chapter. We would be the ones to usher it in. I didn’t feel disappointed. I felt elated. I felt powerful and giddy and unprecedented.

  As Amy and I got back in the car, I knew she felt the same way, and I thought about leaning in to kiss her. But that seemed too ordinary. Too politics-as-usual. Too status quo. Before I had time for a second thought, or even a first one, I heard myself speak.

  “Want to drive back to New Haven naked?”

  My offer was totally unimaginable, and yet somehow within the realm of possibility. The Barack Obama of propositions. It took her just a moment to reply.

  I don’t remember how we got our clothes off while driving. All I know is that if they gave out merit badges for this sort of thing, we would have earned them. The city proved challenging, especially at speed bumps and red lights, but then we hit the highway and were free. I pulled into the left lane, zooming past drivers who gaped when they glimpsed the passenger side.

  Was this a date? Was it a misdemeanor? Whatever it was, we didn’t want it to end. We glanced at each other and laughed uncontrollably. We tensed nervously with every cop car we saw. We decided to break into an aquarium—trust me, it made sense at the time—and when that failed we pulled back onto the highway and continued our naked ride.

  They said this day would never come, I thought.

  I wish I could say my defining moment in politics was the caucus-night address that introduced me to Barack Obama, or the February rally when I first saw him in person. Or maybe the historic “race speech” six weeks later, long after whatever existed between Amy and me had sparked, sputtered, and flamed out.

  But that would be a lie. The moment that changed my life came on a busy interstate, my bare cheeks pressed into the seat of my roommate’s borrowed Nissan. Just a few months earlier, cynicism had flourished. But now? Now we were building a better world, a world where strangers invited you into their homes to break bread, and girls you had a crush on took their clothes off for no reason. We weren’t just fighting for change. We were change. My foot was on the gas. My skin tingled with anticipation.

  I was twenty-one years old, in Barack Obama’s America. Anything was possible.

  2

  HOW TO NOT LAND A WHITE HOUSE JOB

  * * *

  DO NOT CLEAN THE OFFICE.

  OBAMA BOYS ARE THE JANITORS!!

  * * *

  Janice Maier, the chair of the Wayne County Democratic Party, didn’t like me. In fairness, she didn’t like Obama either. At more than eighty years old, a proud Hillary supporter, she viewed her candidate’s young rival as an upstart. By extension I was a fetus, and an annoying fetus at that. It didn’t matter that the primary campaign had ended a month ago. Janice still viewed my arrival with the frosty disdain of a Roman forced to welcome a Visigoth to the baths.

  She couldn’t bully me physically. At approximately four foot ten, she possessed both the stoop and jowls of a cartoon witch. But what she lacked in size she made up for in fiery, persistent hate. Hence the all-caps sign about janitors. Late one night I left our one-room campaign headquarters, and when I returned the next morning I found the note pasted against a wall. Only two people had an office key. I was one of them. The other was Janice Maier.

  This was not the kind of challenge I had anticipated upon moving to Ohio. In May, the Democratic primary and my academic career ended with simultaneous whimpers. Two weeks later, I pointed my car toward a swing state. Obama for America had offered me something called an “organizing fellowship,” a polite term for “indentured servitude.” I worked unpaid, sixteen-hour days. In exchange, someone in headquarters found me a spare room in a stranger’s house that smelled overwhelmingly of wet dog. I couldn’t believe my luck. Each morning I popped out of bed, brushed dog hair from my button-down shirt, and happily harassed the good people of Canton, Ohio.

  “Excuse me, are you registered?” I would ask.

  “Nah, I don’t vote.”

  “Terrific! Let’s sign you up!”

  When I wasn’t registering voters, I was calling Obama supporters and inviting myself to their homes. The campaign dubbed the ensuing meetings “one-on-ones.” If a one-on-one went well, the new volunteer would host a house party and play a motivational DVD for their friends. If it went really well, the volunteer might make an extravagant, heartfelt gesture, like bringing lasagna to the office for the staff.

  “Remember,” said Steph Speirs, one of our trainers in Columbus. “They come for Barack. But they stay for you.”

  I knew Steph from college. She graduated only a year before I did. But I soon learned that her youth was par for the course. Field organizers live in a state of unbridled meritocracy. There isn’t time to defer blindly to elders or treat an org chart as sacred text. If your numbers are good—if you recruit lots of volunteers and contact lots of voters—you move up in the world. If not, you don’t. Steph had hit the campaign trail only twelve months earlier. Now, she was in charge of Ohio’s entire southwest quadrant. At our statewide training, she shared the mottos that helped her get ahead.

  Don’t try to win every vote. Just get to fifty plus one.

  Your phone is your most powerful weapon.

  Think with your head, be driven by your heart.

  That last one sounds all kumbaya, but really wasn’t. Meeting my weekly goals required a willingness—perhaps a slightly-too-willingness—to think of voters as numbers instead of humans. “There’s a line of unregistereds outside the plasma bank!” I’d announce to my colleagues. “The best part is, they’re just standing around!”

  But I also discovered an unexpected warmth. One of my first one-on-ones was with Brenda, a middle-aged woman in a flowing blouse. As we parted ways, she looked at me nervously.

  “Do you really think we can win?”

  Ordinarily, I caveat almost everything. But in that campaign office, some long-dormant part of me stepped forward.

  “Of course we can win! We’ve got Brenda on the team!”

  Where the hell did that come from?

  After a less-than-illustrious performance as a student—my four years of college were defined primarily by off-brand vodka and grade inflation—I worried my mediocre streak might continue. But in the field, something clicked. Before long I was collecting piles of voter registration cards. I was eating lasagna three meals a day. After a few weeks of indentured servitude, the campaign took notice, promoting me from unpaid fellow to underpaid organizer. Then they assigned me to open an office in Wooster, a small town in the heart of Northeast Ohio’s dairy country.

  Wayne County was what organizers called “tough turf,” and not just because Janice Maier despised me. In 2004, Bush won the area with 60 percent of the vote. The remaining 40 percent was concentrated on the local college campus and in the poorer parts of town. Everywhere else, Democrats were political closet cases, afraid to openly declare their love for universal health care or a higher minimum wage.

  This made our campaign a kind of coming-out party. Inspired by one of Obama’s speeches, walk-ins would shyly open the door to our office, only to find friends and neighbors already there. Our little headquarters lay just off the town square, and it soon buzzed with the men and women I referred to, in campaign shorthand, as “vols.” Ellen the silver-haired chain smoker. Sylvia the town busybody. Ross the unrepentant socialist. Beth the owner of a thriving mushroom farm. “You should be a used car salesman,” they told me. Apparently, they meant this as a complimen
t.

  I understood their point. Recruiting new vols required a certain lack of shame. But our organization was built on more than persistent begging and well-timed guilt trips. My greatest strength as an organizer was a monklike devotion to my cause. Between June and November, I drank exactly two beers. I was almost entirely celibate, almost entirely by choice. To avoid the distraction of national news, I downloaded porn-blocking software and reconfigured it to bar me from CNN.

  If I had been selling cars instead of a candidate, I never could have been so single-minded. But each day in Ohio reminded me I was part of something big. Lisa had been laid off from three different manufacturing jobs in four years. When she stopped by in June, looking for a yard sign, she told me she was too scared to volunteer. By November she was a neighborhood team leader, with an entire ward of Wooster at her command.

  Then there was Wendy. A slipped disk in her spine made both standing and sitting extraordinarily painful, so she called voters while pacing in agonizing laps around the town square. I took pride in pushing vols to the limit, but this time, even I begged her to stop.

  “You don’t have to keep doing this.”

  “Yes, I do. If I don’t make these calls, I won’t be able to get the health insurance I need to get better.”

  With so much on the line, who wouldn’t work 120 hours a week?

  Thanks to my porn-slash-news blocker, I didn’t fully appreciate that as our organization was growing, the economy was falling apart. On September 15, Lehman Brothers collapsed, but I was too busy planning a Joe Biden rally to care. My vols were less lucky. With lives outside the campaign, they couldn’t afford my blissful ignorance. In between phone calls, they had once complained about Bush. Now they discussed their 401(k)s. Back in Canton, coworkers canvased a street only to find that every house had been foreclosed on.

  With the looming threat of a second Great Depression, I feared our supporters would be too busy worrying about their own futures to spend time with the campaign. Instead, the opposite occurred. More than ever, volunteers could see the connection between the national life and their own. They began acting with what Obama called “the fierce urgency of now.” As they picked up the pace, so did I. By October, I had discarded Steph’s mottos in favor of a new, more personal one.

  Tiredness is just a feeling.

  And then came Election Day, which was oddly, almost eerily calm. Hours before polls opened, I plopped onto a couch in a volunteer’s living room and waited for a crisis. When none came, I found an empty two-liter bottle of juice and an old Nerf football. I spent one of the most important days in American history seeing how many bullseyes I could hit.

  Thwap. Thwap. Thud-crash-profanity-sound-of-feet-across-carpet-to-check-if-lamp-is-broken-sigh-of-relief. Thwap.

  Outside my boiler room, the Wayne County ground game was in high gear. But it was no longer run by paid operatives. Teams of trained local volunteers directed it themselves. They were students, professors, stay-at-home moms, karate teachers, agricultural researchers, retirees. And now, they were organizers, too.

  That night, when the networks called Ohio and then the country for Obama, we couldn’t believe what he had accomplished. More than that, we couldn’t believe what we had accomplished. True, the economy was still in crisis. True, the Iraq War still raged. True, Janice Maier would soon steal the laser printer I had purchased at OfficeMax, refusing to release it until I scoured her folding table with a sponge.

  “You can’t just hold people’s stuff hostage!” I would say. For the first time in months, her lip would curl into a smile.

  “That’s the way we do things in Wayne County, buster.”

  Relegated at last to janitor, I would have no choice but to scrub. But that was in the future. Right now, our new president-elect was addressing the country. My vols were weeping with joy. The arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice at last.

  THERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE ELECTING A PRESIDENT AND THEN moving back in with your parents. I can’t say I recommend it. On the campaign trail, I was treated like an all-star. In my childhood bedroom, I spent my nights staring at faded summer camp certificates declaring me Most Improved.

  It wasn’t just inside my mom and dad’s apartment that I felt demoted. New York City’s stream of small humiliations reminded me that I had become a kind of human plankton. Brooklyn lumbersexuals cut in front of me at food trucks. Briefcase-wielding bankers sideswiped me on their way to work. I had no job. I had no career path.

  All I had, really, was an envelope. It arrived in early January, oozing exclusivity and class.

  The Presidential Inaugural Committee requests the honor of your presence.

  Thick, expensive card stock. Letters embellished with loops and tails. The year written out in full: two thousand and nine. I had never possessed anything so fancy.

  Along with the finely printed note came a pair of invitations, one to the official ceremony at the Capitol, the other for an inaugural ball. I guarded my tickets as fiercely as Charlie before his chocolate-factory tour. And for good reason: with the swearing-in just a few weeks away, scalpers were charging up to twenty thousand dollars for an inauguration package like mine. I could have made a fortune on Craigslist. Yet I would sooner have sold a kidney. While the rich and well connected scrounged for access, a twenty-two-year-old with a Koosh basketball hoop on his door had the most coveted tickets in town. What better proof that a brighter future was at hand?

  I didn’t go to D.C. hoping to land a job with Obama, any more than a Phish fan goes to a Phish concert hoping to land a job with Phish. Still, not long after receiving my envelope, I decided it was time to move. With five days left in George W. Bush’s second term, I zipped my precious tickets into my suitcase. Then I added five button-down shirts, two pairs of khakis, and the tuxedo I wore to prom. I still had no career path. I still had no plan. But hope and change were on their way to the nation’s capital. In that case, so was I.

  HOURS BEFORE INAUGURATION DAY DAWNED, I MADE MY WAY TO downtown D.C. It was brutally, freakishly cold. As I followed the instructions on my purple ticket, walking toward a designated meeting area near the Capitol, I shivered despite my puffy coat.

  To make matters worse, when I reached the rendezvous point, it became obvious police hadn’t reserved enough space. Thousands of freezing former organizers were being crowded into an enclosure no larger than a basketball court. By 7 A.M., chemically speaking, we had become a solid.

  Yet penned in with my fellow campaign veterans, I didn’t feel self-pity. I felt pride. While so-called VIPs might demand special treatment, the new Washington had no room for outsize egos. We were all created equal. Now we stood an equal chance of being crushed to death. How much more egalitarian can you get?

  I was laying track on this high-minded train of thought when a whisper began to ripple through the crowd.

  Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson? It’s Jesse Jackson!

  I didn’t think there was space for a squirrel to move among us, much less a broad-shouldered mountain of a man. But here he was, a giant of the Civil Rights era, all six foot three of him, coming toward me in an enormous black greatcoat. To my amazement the crowd parted, creating a kind of human corridor, and Jesse Jackson did not walk through it. He strode. His expression was less imperious than magnanimous, as though he were posing for a portrait he planned to give away. Expensive wool swished against the nylon shell of my jacket. I stood awestruck, too stunned to speak.

  That’s when I realized something: the living legend wasn’t the only one making progress. A sneaky little man had inserted himself into the reverend’s wake. He was middle aged, with a white, bushy mustache, a hat he appeared to have borrowed from Indiana Jones, and a firm grip on the back of Jesse Jackson’s overcoat. While the rest of us pressed against each other, he zipped along like one of those fish that clean the bellies of sharks. Our eyes met as he passed me. With his free hand, he gave me a wave.

  “Hey hey!” he cried. Before I could stammer a reply, t
he corridor of humanity closed behind him. The sneaky little man disappeared.

  The rest of us resumed waiting. A half hour later, we were told to line up in a tunnel beneath the National Mall. If we had been at the post office, this is the point when someone would have thrown a chair through a window. But on Inauguration Day there were no complaints. We formed a queue of shivering purple-ticket holders several blocks long. It was only after another hour passed, and we still hadn’t budged, that a new whisper began worming down the line.

  They closed the gate. They closed the gate? They closed the gate!

  It was true. Not long after Reverend Jackson passed us, a mishap occurred at the purple entrance. Secret Service shut it down. My only hope of seeing the inauguration now was to find a TV, and fast. I ducked out of line, chose a direction, and ran until I reached a bar.

  In the tunnel, my neighbors were intoxicated by the historic nature of the moment. In the bar, my neighbors were intoxicated because they’d been drinking since 6 A.M. The place combined the macho chaos of a frat house with the undersexed intensity of a debate team. Each time a female legislator appeared on C-SPAN, catcalls filled the room.

  “Nancy Pelosi’s hot!”

  “Dianne Feinstein’s hot!”

  For some of my fellow ticket holders, this was the precise moment when hope calcified into cynicism. By the next morning they even had a name for the tragedy: The Purple Tunnel of Doom. And while I didn’t share their sense of full-blown catastrophe, even I had to admit that something had changed. A few nights later, I was waiting to enter the Staff Inaugural Ball when someone blatantly cut in line. It was Miranda, a fellow Ohio organizer.