After the writers’ strike ended on February 12, 2008, I split my time between filming in Los Angeles and organizing anywhere the ever-expanding Obama campaign sent me. In the ten months following the Iowa caucuses, I traveled to twenty-six glorious states. My work as a youth vote surrogate expanded to include other tasks like meeting with superdelegates and working with state conventions on electoral vote tallies. I also joined Obama’s Arts Policy Committee. During the week leading up to November 4, 2008, the day of the general election, the production team on House had managed to schedule me a few days off so I could put in some extra campaign work. I traveled to the swing states of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire to help with Get Out the Vote (GOTV) operations. If Obama lost, I could imagine no crappier feeling than an eleventh-hour realization that—after all this—I hadn’t done everything I could have.
Election Day was exciting. I chose to be in Florida, helping students find their polling places and answering last-minute questions from undecided first-time voters on college campuses from Gainesville to Orlando to Tallahassee. The University of Florida was especially lively. On the one hand, their Students for Obama team had built a festive robot to help with GOTV.
On the other hand, the robot and I got rocks thrown at us by some college Republicans. (This was not a first for the campaign; my friend Stephen Brokaw previously had rocks thrown at him outside a campaign office in Ohio.)
From: Kal Penn
Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 4:37 PM
To: Stephen Brokaw
You’re now not the only one who’s had rocks thrown at him
Obama ’08
From: Stephen Brokaw
Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 4:38 PM
To: Kal Penn
WHAT?!
Where?
And welcome to the club!
From: Kal Penn
Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 4:46 PM
To: Stephen Brokaw
University of Florida. Gotta love the Students for McCain.
How’s it looking?
Obama ’08
By 5 p.m., I and other national surrogates were dialing into radio interviews in Virginia and North Carolina to counter voter suppression tactics in those states. By 7 p.m., we knew that the Hillsborough County, Florida, supervisor of elections hadn’t delivered enough ballots to polling locations at the University of South Florida, which was experiencing massive voter turnout. At 9 p.m., I was deployed with a team of youth vote staff and volunteers to remind students to stay in line, that ballots were coming. When we got there, we saw long queues of young people who had already been waiting three hours. They were passing the time by singing and dancing, determined to stay put until those additional ballots arrived so they could cast their vote in this historic election.
An hour later, I was settled into the Florida election night watch party in a hotel ballroom in Tampa, beer in hand. We had definitely done everything we could do. As results from the last states trickled in on the televisions—blue for the ones Obama and Biden won, red for John McCain and Sarah Palin—I received an email from my friend Konrad Ng. As Obama’s brother-in-law, Konrad would hold campaign surrogate events with his wife, Obama’s sister Maya. We had gotten to know each other over the course of the long campaign, and often traded stories from our time on the road. The email from Konrad simply read:
Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 10:41 PM
I just talked to BO… I think we have won this election.
I stood in quiet reflection, drinking my beer and feeling all the feels, waiting for the networks to announce it. Twenty minutes later, the flashing TV screens in the hotel ballroom confirmed what Konrad had told me—Obama was the president-elect. The room erupted in tears and hugs and sighs of relief. I felt a quiet sense of pride, a feeling of endless possibility. America had elected its first Black president. I felt hopeful that it might mean I’d fit in more than I had before, that to some small degree the days of people of color being othered might be behind us. As fellow staffers and I refilled our drinks, ready for Obama’s victory speech and a hard night of partying ahead, a mass email written by the new president-elect quickly went out to every supporter nationwide:
Kalpen –
I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.
We just made history.
And I don’t want you to forget how we did it.
You made history every single day during this campaign—every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change.
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.
But I want to be very clear about one thing…
All of this happened because of you.
Thank you,
Barack
* * *
The days that followed were kind of wonky. My campaign friends were in withdrawal mode. They started sleeping properly, eating better, reconnecting with people whose calls they missed, and thinking about what they wanted to do next. Staffers—myself included—received an email from the presidential transition team with a link to a website called change.gov, a portal for people to submit applications for jobs with the incoming administration.
Now that our boss was the president-elect, the stakes had gotten much higher overnight. Staring at the change.gov email, I thought, Is this really possible? Could I actually take my public service interests a step further than what I’d imagined and work for the next president of the United States? The idea seemed so big, so untouchable, that I held it close to my chest.
The concept of taking a short sabbatical from acting to work in public service had been in the back of my mind since sometime after Iowa, when I realized how much I had in common with the campaign friends I was spending so much time with. It was then that I had started to ponder the mechanics of how it might work, reasoning that I could finally finish that International Security graduate certificate I was sporadically working toward at Stanford. Once that was complete, maybe I’d take a year off to work for a nonprofit or think tank. With that often-repeated saying, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for” ringing through my head, I’d intended to look into it. At some point.