Closing Down the Offices

Editor’s note: This post is from Nov. 10, 2008, written after helping close down the county Democratic party campaign offices. It captures the hope of that time. Hope remains, but is a mere ember these days. Electing Barack Obama president changed my life and those of many others. We must keep hope alive.

Even I got teary eyed after the election this year, only it did not hit me until I was southbound on Highway One heading to help the county party clean out the offices. And there I was, passing the recently harvested bean and corn fields, large round bales of corn stalks resting in the fields and tears started.

A political life that had been stolen from us and was regained on Nov. 4. The theft began in 1968 with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then Nixon took the 1972 election from George McGovern using underhanded tricks that ultimately led to his resignation from office. Carter, he was better than the alternative, but his one term presidency was more a staging ground for the rest of his life as something else. The Reagan years were darkness with a veneer of pleasantry on it: good for Republicans, but not for the country as well being never trickled down to where we lived. When Clinton was elected, a new kind of politics came into being led by James Carville, Karl Rove, Mary Matalin and their ilk. It purloined our best hopes for unity as a nation and pitted red states against blue states, Republicans against Democrats, liberals against conservatives. It is difficult to forgive Clinton and Bush as their presidencies were cast in this same mold that led us to our current life in society. If we thought life was better under Bill Clinton, it was because we had become used to settling for less than what was possible. On election night something changed.

I went to bed shortly after the speeches. Obama already appeared weighted down by the impending responsibilities. At work the next day, I heard the backlash and denial of co-workers with nothing good to say about the outcome of the election. But now, with some rest and clarity, I am beginning to believe that we can change the course of our society and its place in the world.

What brought me here was the trip to Colorado where the support for Senator Obama was evident everywhere. It was reading the nightly posts from political friends on Twitter and Facebook, the messages indicating that we were registering a record number of voters and winning in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Nevada. It was the web site FiveThirtyEight.com which told the story that I was hearing, that we would have a big win in the electoral college. Above all, what caused me to believe in the possibility of change again, was the abundant evidence that I had become part of something bigger than myself that sought to serve the greater good. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” This realization caused the tears to come.

And as we began the work of putting the artifacts of the election away, some to storage, some back to the candidates, some to recycling and to charity and some to the landfill, Ed and I shared the remainder of a bottle of whiskey we found in the office. We drank from the same cup. Ed pointed out that veterans get a free breakfast at HyVee on Tuesday as recognition for their service on veterans day. And so the campaign is put up, and the volunteers and staff continue with their lives and the real work of changing the world begins. We can all be a part of this.