The Story of "Fired up! Ready to go!" - Obama for America 2012

Squeaker in the House

My hat's off to Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ) for displaying the political courage necessary to help put the Affordable Health Care Act over the top in the House of Representatives last Saturday night.

Rep. Mitchell is that rarest of figures in the Washington political establishment: a man who stands for what is right and what is needed by our nation — not what is politically safe in his district and seems most expedient to his own reelection chances.

I realize that you didn't cast your vote in the health care reform debate to make me happy, Rep. Mitchell, but you did that and achieved something else, besides: You made me proud of one of my elected representatives in Congress.

Now, if we could only get Senators Kyl and McCain to rise to the same standards.

Foxes in the Henhouse: Time for Change

Okay, maybe it's just my opinion. But, to me, expanding healthcare to all Americans by increasing the influence of the same insurance monoliths and pharmaceutical giants responsible for our current broken system is like entrusting a henhouse to a pack of even fatter foxes.

That's why I hope you'll check out the link below and connect with the single-most sensible, telling "truth-to-power" voice in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Please take a moment to sign his petition to enact real comprehensive health care reform and provide a single-payer, not-for-profit Medicare model for all Americans.

And please do it now. Because Bernie Sanders is right (and the only thing about him that's B.S. is his initials): The time for real, fundamental change is now.

But it won't happen if we don't make sure that all our voices are heard.

Soldiers of Good Fortune

In retrospect (and from a distance), Barack Obama's election as president may have seemed foreordained, even predestined, as inevitable as a sunrise after a long, dark spiritual night.

But, in reality, the prize had to be won, wrested from a behemoth that, even if battered and bloodied from a thousand self-inflicted wounds, still refused to concede either the failure of its policies of governance or the impoverishment of its own self-serving vision of what government can and should represent to its own people.

Barack provided the vision and raised the rhetorical bar of eloquence higher than it had been raised in most Americans' lifetimes.

But even so, he also knew that the real victories in this election cycle -- the ones that matter, the ones that would put the points on the board, separating the victor and vanquished -- would be won in the field: on street corners and in public-transit terminals and on the front porches of homes and the hallways of housing projects, one hopeful conversation and one new voter-registration card at a time.


That's why the campaign assembled the biggest field operation in American political history: It had to -- simply to overcome the despair and disillusionment it recognized was our only real enemy in the 2008 campaign.

These are the faces of the Charlotte, NC field operation in action, staff and volunteers, alongside some of the places we visited and faces we were inspired by.

We knew then (and remember now) how lucky we felt ourselves to be, simply to have been chosen to serve as soldiers of amazingly good fortune and, perhaps most amazingly -- especially under the psychic stress of 100-hour workweeks fueled by candy bars and convenience-store coffee, barely punctuated by naps in cars and hurried showers in borrowed bathrooms -- amazing good humor and grace.


We knew we were in the fight of our lives for the fate of our people: winning a battle for the hearts and minds of fellow citizens in order to secure a chance at redeeming the soul of a nation.

And so dedicated, we applied every fiber of awareness and filament of energy we could focus and flare, every single day of the campaign, simply to prove a single incantation of our singular visionary leader: Yes we can.

So, yes, we did. We had to.

I Love You, God Loves You, and Barack Obama Loves You

I look forward to voting for Barack Obama for President of the United States with a greater sense of anticipation than I've ever looked forward to anything, with the possible exception of every Christmas Eve before I turned 11 or so, and started getting more clothes than toys.


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.

I’m Not Bitter: I’m Mad As Hell (And I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore!)

Okay, maybe making reference to the film “Network” (and the trademark catchphrase-rant of its apocalyptic news anchor Howard Beale) isn’t the most ingenuous (or original) lead-in to today’s blog entry, but it fits so well that I’ll stay with it.

In case you missed it, “Network” was a dark evocation of mass media’s effects on our culture: The triumph of entertainment over information, image over imagination, fear over freedom.

The film ostensibly focuses on Howard Beale’s dismissal from his anchor position with a hypothetical fourth broadcast news network, UBS (Are you listening Katie Couric?), due to plummeting ratings.

As Beale contemplates his own jobless future, he begins a journey into madness—not necessarily insanity (although the clarity of the revelations he experiences and bespeaks are certainly tinged with delusion), but definitely into angriness, and that of an extremely bitter nature.

After an interrupted newcast, during which he announces his firing and declares to viewers his intention to commit suicide on-air as a ratings-boosting swan song, Beale is eventually allowed a second chance to say goodbye on his own terms and explain his earlier meltdown.

Take a look at what the fictional Howard Beale said in 1976 and see if it doesn't seem every bit as apt today:

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression.

Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad—worse than bad: They're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.”

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've got to say: “I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell:

“I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

That’s what came to my mind earlier, as I checked the morning cable news shows and watched the anchors and correspondents tut-tut over Barack Obama’s comments last week that Pennsylvanians (like voters elsewhere) are “bitter” at the state of America’s political debate and looming economic collapse: The word “bitter” is too mild a term to convey what I, myself (and millions of other Americans) feel as we see the campaign distracted from life-and-death issues of war and peace abroad and prosperity and peril at home by the slice-and-dice tactics of the Clinton campaign.

That’s when I logged onto www.BarackObama.com, clicked a link to a video of a speech that Barack delivered in Indiana over the weekend where he described the frustrations of folks in Pennsylvania and everywhere else—even my hometown of Decatur, Illinois—at the erosion of virtually everything, in recent decades, that we hold dear: education and environment, investment in our common future via a fair, shared tax code, and economic opportunity and prosperity for all Americans.

After viewing the video, I was invited—as every other viewer is—to share my feelings about the hysterical, ridiculous turn the campaign has taken since Mrs. Clinton’s advisors have latched onto Barack’s use of the word “bitter” (ironically, in a campaign she has pledged to wage to the bitter end), as evidence that Senator Obama is somehow more “elitist” and “out of touch” with blue-collar voters than her megamillionaire self.

Here’s what I wrote then:

I’ve been frustrated and, yes, embittered by Hillary Clinton’s “scorched-earth,” politics-as-usual, “kitchen-sink” campaign style. She has failed to recognize the transformational mood of the electorate during this election cycle and has thus attempted to mis-characterize and otherwise call into question every aspect of Barack Obama's appeal to voters throughout the primary season.

I’m also embittered by the continuing failure of leadership in Washington to address the critical issues that confront our nation: The ongoing, economically-ruinous war in Iraq, catastrophic national debt and trade imbalances, tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our society, a health-care system that leaves far too many children (and their parents) behind, soaring costs for everything from food to fuel (but not the products made in China by virtual slaves), and our crumbling, obsolescent infrastructure and educational system.

In fact, “bitter” may be too kind a characterization for my feelings on the state of the American political system; “disgusted” and “repelled” seem closer to the truth.

That’s why I'm flying to Pittsburgh tomorrow—and to Indianapolis, after that: To do everything in my power to ensure the success of the most transformational, empowering political candidacy since Robert F. Kennedy.

That way, perhaps, my daughter—and her children and grandchildren, after her—might live in an America that represents, and redeems, its promise and potential: What Abraham Lincoln recognized so long ago, when he declared a truly united (and rededicated) United States to be “the last best hope of earth.”

That’s why I’m posting this entry now: To encourage us all to remember the words of Howard Beale and take them one giant, effective step further.

Go ahead: Get mad. But don’t run to your window and start screaming like a madman. (That’s Hillary’s turf, anyway.)

Instead, get busy. Do all you can, whenever you can. Go to Pennsylvania to help get out the vote. Make calls. Mobilize. Donate. Speak out. Act.

Recognize the moral imperative that Martin Luther King described as “the fierce urgency of now.”

Then consider how well labor organizer Joe Hill’s last words still apply today, and can inform and inspire us all during a month when we commemorate the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination: “Don’t mourn me. Organize.”

Hillary Huckabee & the Writing on the Wall

If you read my earlier entry, The Politics of Hope and the Politics of Fear (and Loathing), you know that I’ve already stated my revulsion to the divisive, total-war strategy the Clinton campaign employed to carve out narrow popular-vote “victories” in the Texas and Ohio primaries.

In case you’re wondering, that revulsion has only deepened in the days since, as I’ve continued my phonebank work in Pennsylvania and contemplated the damage that HRC’s desperate race-, gender-, and fear-based tactics may inflict on Senator Obama’s candidacy—at least, until she eventually (one can only hope) reads the writing on the wall and ends her doomed candidacy.

Want to add some writing on the wall of your own to express the disdain you may also feel for the Clinton campaign and its vicious, attack-dog politics of fear, loathing, spin, and manipulation?

I just discovered a way to do just that—one that may even serve to give Senator Obama the time and focus it’s going to take for our candidate and party to prepare a coordinated reponse to the onslaught we can expect from Hillary’s “kinder, gentler” GOP counterpart, John McCain (and his party) until election day.

So if you feel, as I do, that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the embodiment of the top-down, ego-driven, business-as-usual approach to politics that we can no longer support, make your feelings known.

In fact, here's a link to a petition that I just signed that you may want to sign, too:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/obama725/petition.html

The petition, addressed to the Democatic National Committee, states its signers’ willingness to vote for Barack Obama, but not Hillary Rodham Clinton, in November. It also provides a space for signers to include their own rationales for that stand. Here's what I wrote:

“Hillary Clinton is a divisive, polarizing figure who has consistently placed her own political ambitions above her obligations to the nation and to the party. The desperate “scorched earth” campaign she has unleashed against Sen. Obama is deeply offensive to me and amounts to a political hatchet-job undermining a truly transformation and generational realignment of the American political system to the benefit of no one, except Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

That’s the truth, from my point of view, at least. I used to respect Senator Clinton. But I don’t any more.

To me, her campaign, most notably and regrettably since Iowa, has operated from the exact epicenter of all that’s wrong with our country and its politics, and serves mostly as a blatant example of what Barack Obama has committed himself to ending, via his candidacy: the endless gamesmanship, cynicism, hypocrisy, distortion, ad hominem attacks, and the bankrupt, short-sighted “us-versus-them” mentality that’s defined our politics and divided us all for too long already.

I simply cannot imagine a scenario that would permit me to allow myself to vote for Hillary Clinton, under any circumstances, should she be able to mudsling and character-assassinate her way to the nomination.

And while I don’t believe that we’re going to lose a single contest from here on out, and I’m committed to do everything in my power to prevent that from happening (Back to the phonebank lists, Jim!), I hope you’ll join with me (and, at last count, 2,652 other Obama supporters) and add your own digital signature to the writing on the wall addressed to our very own “Huckabee,” Hillary Clinton, and members of the Democratic National Committee.

As Robert Kennedy often pointed out, during a remarkably similar campaign in a remarkably similar time: “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

Let’s do what we can to help Hillary Clinton see the light.