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 hoped. 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.