I know that Senator Obama’s campaign has been a beacon of hope for lots of other ordinary Americans, too, because I’ve been honored to serve it on the ground as a volunteer in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Oregon, and South Dakota, and I’ve seen reflections of the hope Barack Obama has sparked in, literally, thousands of pairs of eyes as I’ve walked—again, literally—hundreds of miles, canvassing, door to door.
And even though it isn’t easy to convey a sense of all the wonders I’ve witnessed and lessons I’ve learned working on the campaign—walking one precinct after another, talking with voters about what our nation can and will be again—one conversation still stands out in my memory. Maybe it symbolizes the shiny, new gift under the tree (or beside the menorah) that Barack Obama’s “improbable” candidacy represents to us all. Or maybe it was just a special moment for me. You decide.
It began on April 23rd, around five o’clock, a warm spring afternoon in south-suburban Indianapolis. I’d just arrived in Indy from Pittsburgh earlier that day and I was excited to be on the ground again, knocking on doors and ringing doorbells, making the case for Senator Obama as best I could. As I started my walk, I crossed paths with two women—mother and daughter, Jane and Christina—walking in the opposite direction. After introducing myself, I asked if they planned on supporting Senator Obama in the May 5 Indiana primary.
They both scrunched up their faces and Jane shrugged. “We still haven’t made up our minds,” she replied. “We lean toward Hillary one day and the next day we lean toward Obama.”
I smiled and replied as I often did, “We do have two good candidates this time around.”
It was my basic stock reply to a response I’d gotten from voters almost every day I’d spent canvassing since the primary in my home state of Arizona on February 5. Except this time, I pushed my observations a step further and added: “But we only have one great candidate.”
Jane asked why I felt that way, and I replied that Obama had the courage to oppose, and speak out against, the war in Iraq when it was potentially a form of political suicide to do so. I remarked that, despite all the campaign hoopla and hype about 3 a.m. phone calls, sometimes the “call” a prospective commander-in-chief gets doesn’t come at three in the morning, at all, but at three in the afternoon, and it doesn’t take the form of a phone call, but a roll call vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
I told Jane and Christina that—from my perspective, at least—Senator Clinton had already failed her own “commander-in-chief test” in October 2002, when she voted to authorize an unnecessary war—one that’s resulted in the deaths of 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars—money which could have been more wisely and profitably spent in this country, to eradicate poverty and provide health care and an improved quality of life for our own citizens.
It was Barack’s early and continued opposition to the war that seemed to rivet all of Jane’s attention. She told me that both she and her daughter, and the rest of her family, are members of the Church of the Brethren, a Christian group so solemnly anti-war that its members had even refused to fight in World War Two.
As we talked on, the three of us still standing at the side of that street in suburban Indianapolis, Jane and Christina seemed impressed, and only a little incredulous, that I’d come so far, at my own expense—taking an unpaid leave of absence from my “real” career—to walk unfamiliar streets in places I’d never been before, simply to promote the candidacy of Barack Obama.
“But I’m not doing it for Barack Obama,” I told Jane as I nodded at her daughter. “I’m doing it for Christina, here, and my daughter, Sara, and for their kids, someday.”
Then I paused, trying to find words to explain the improbable transformation that had begun to occur in my own life, after Sara and I listened to Senator Obama speak at a Phoenix rally in January, which led me to read—and my commitment to be ignited by—the simple truths in The Audacity of Hope.
I told them that, for me, this campaign isn’t about Barack Obama, at all. It’s about the grassroots movement that he started building when he returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School and resumed his community organizing work with Project Vote.
“Barack Obama made me remember something that I let myself forget, 40 years ago, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated: that this is our country and we’re responsible for what our leaders do in our name. And changing things isn’t just about getting people to vote. It’s about participation — participating in the process yourself, and inviting other people to participate until everyone remembers that we are the process.”
Jane and Christina both nodded in agreement, and as we began our goodbyes, I finally found the words I’d been searching for earlier to express the depth of my gratitude and the extent of the honor I felt even to be representing Senator Obama as an unpaid volunteer on the streets of Indianapolis.
But the words weren’t mine; they were Barack Obama's. So, as a preamble, I just skipped all the way down to my own personal bottom line: “Besides, think of how great it will be again to have a president who’s a poet and a philosopher.”
As proof, I cited Barack’s “Yes We Can” speech, the one that the Black-Eyed Peas’ will.i.am turned into such a moving music video. Neither Jane nor Christina were familiar with the speech or the video, so I began to recite it from memory, there on that quiet suburban street of Indianapolis:
“It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes we can.
“It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom: Yes we can.”
Then, my eyes misted, my voice quavered, and I broke off the recitation, just considering the awful weight of that last stanza: That, fewer than 150 years ago, citizens of our nation believed themselves capable of owning other human beings, to do with as they pleased. It reminded me that we’ve come so far, in so many ways, and yet have so much further to go, to answer the call that Abraham Lincoln issued in his Gettysburg Address, to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
I brushed my hand across my eyes, to erase the trace of tears that had started to form, and was surprised when I looked at Jane, and noticed that tears were spilling out of her eyes, too.
I decided that it wouldn’t do to part company, on so somber a note, with so elegant and sensitive a small assembly—a 50-something-year-old woman from Indianapolis, standing with her 18-year-old daughter (who would cast her first ballot in less than two weeks), alongside a 50-something-year-old man from Arizona, who had just invoked the memories of long-dead, but unforgotten, human beings who had repealed the horrors of slavery from our land a century and a half ago.
So I smiled again and told Jane and Christina about the radiant faith and hope and joy I’d seen on the faces of hundreds of African-American kids I’d met the week before, canvassing the bleak, ex-urban ghettos of McKeesport, Pennsylvania for their candidate, my candidate, our candidate: Senator Barack Obama.
I remembered a parting phrase that had seemed to form itself spontaneously—and managed to escape my lips without conscious thought, at all—that first or second day in McKeesport.
And since it suddenly seemed to fit again, I told Jane and Christina how I’d ended so many conversations with voters—black and white, young and old—in Pennsylvania: “I love you, God loves you, and Barack Obama loves you.”
The words always seemed to bring a smile when I delivered them in McKeesport, and they worked just as well to brighten things up that April day on the streets of Indianapolis.
Then, as we said our goodbyes and resumed our separate walks—Jane and Christina heading for home, me off to knock on more doors and ring more bells for the next President of the United States of America—I couldn’t resist turning and calling out: “It’s true, you know. No matter who you vote for: I love you, God loves you, and Barack Obama loves you.”
I only hope that you believe it as much as I do. Because it is true, you know.
