i woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing outside the window. no shit — birds. i’m trying hard not to find undue significance in every little thing i see today, but it’s seven degrees. nothing should be alive out there, much less creatures capable of making music.
has it only been a year since we sat in that booth at the brewpub, waiting for obama’s iowa caucus victory speech to begin?
it had been a day like this one, bright and clear and cold as hell. night had fallen hard, and early, as it does this time of year. amy and i were still warming our fingers and toes after the trek across town from our caucus location. it was amy’s first iowa caucus, and she still wore the sticker numbered “1,” proof she was first in the door out of the hundreds who at our precinct, and a mark of pride for a newly registered Democrat. as we learned over the next few days, she was one of thousands statewide who’d attended their first party caucus, pushing turnout numbers to all-time record heights. this was no surprise, based on what we’d seen in our neighborhood: a veritable riot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, absolutely on fire for barack obama. i had seen enough caucuses to know something was up.
charlie arrived shortly and settled into a beer. he gave a similar account of his precinct across town. rubbing our hands together and sipping pints of OCBW honey hemp ale, the three of us sat there watching the results and pondering the meaning of it all.
this time last year, i wasn’t an obamaphile. i had generally favorable impressions of the guy, sure, but i was still holding fast to that skeptical-pessimist posture we’d all learned to adopt, like whipped puppies, over the past seven years of bitter experience. who the hell was this dude, anyway? i wanted to believe that the smart antiwar candidate whose buttons adorned the backpacks of my favorite students was viable. but this wasn’t 2000 or 2004, and i was in no mood to dick around with another pyhrric victory of a doomed-liberal campaign. even with the tentative victories of ’06, the wounds were still too fresh.
that uncertainty was echoed by a friend we ran into at the caucus, a long-suffering lefty of our parents’ generation who’d “been burned too many times” by charismatic and impressive Democratic leaders who tended either to become corrupt and ineffective over time, or to be assassinated before ever getting the chance. her perspective lent a sad poignancy to the spectacle of the political neophytes who surrounded us that night, too hopped up on optimism and adrenaline to even fathom the outcome that seemed most likely to us at the time — another humiliation for progressives, and a white house ultimately occupied by, if not a republican, then another weasely self-serving empty suit of a democrat who would continue carrying out bush’s disastrous policies from sheer inertia. still, it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by all that energy, unexpected as it was, not to wonder in the back of the mind: what if?
i wish i could say i allowed myself to get swept up in the obama movement then and there, but it took a couple more months. the only outcome i had hoped for on caucus night was a decisive defeat of hillary clinton, who struck me as exactly the kind of pro-war, corporatist political parasite who would guarantee another four years of the odious status quo. (i needn’t have worried; at our precinct, at least, hillary didn’t even reach viability, her supporters all but laughed out of the auditorium with zero delegates to show for their troubles.) throughout 2007 i’d been more or less equally impressed by obama, edwards, richardson and biden, and was prepared to caucus for obama if it came down to a close contest between him and clinton. but i also liked john edwards’ message and wanted to see him stay in the primary race a while longer, so when the register poll that week showed obama with a strong lead it seemed safe to caucus for edwards. (i’ve since come to regret that support, not because i give a shit about his pissant marital infidelities, but because of his monstrous act of political malpractice — when i think about the fact that he would’ve allowed himself to be the democratic nominee in 2008 knowing that bombshell could drop at any time and blow the whole election, i could kick the bastard’s teeth in.)
back at the brewpub, watching the coverage and comparing notes with friends reporting in from other precincts, a picture was emerging: the obama thing was bigger than we’d thought. he wasn’t just winning decisively among the same old caucus stalwarts who dutifully pull on heavy coats and boots every four januaries and trudge out into the night to pick a candidate. obama was driving huge turnout among new, never-followed-politics-before voters. lots of them. that was my first inkling that in some ways maybe it didn’t matter who barack obama was or what he stood for; the important thing, the interesting thing, was the movement he represented. the people who’d been primed for politicization by a decade of republican farce and atrocity and were just waiting to be mobilized.
more precincts reports rolled in, interspersed with bemused commentary on the evening’s proceedings on the GOP side — miserable attendance, and a surge of support for mike huckabee, of all people. you could almost feel the collective shrug as the room’s attention drifted back to what was obviously the Real Story. we ordered another pitcher. charlie fiddled with his iPod, trying to pull down county-by-county numbers from the pitiful wifi signal that would waft into the pub from time to time. edwards and clinton, in turn, each marched out and delivered chipper concessions, eagerly looking forward to new hampshire.
by the time obama took the stage, there was silence throughout the bar. people on their way out stopped and stood there in their winter coats, listening. i don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he said it and the way his crowd responded was like nothing i’d ever seen before. the word “alchemy” comes to mind. i’d heard he was good, even seen him work a crowd in iowa city the year before, but this was something altogether singular to behold. and it hit me like a frying pan to the head.
“he’s going to win,” i said, twisting around in the booth to see amy and charlie. “he’s going to be president.” it wasn’t a prediction. it was a sudden jolt of crystal-clear perception, spoken with the slack-jawed guilelessness of one who has just processed the punchline to a joke told five minutes earlier. a simple extrapolation of facts and processes already in motion: right time, right place, right guy. and he was simply too smart and competent to fuck it up.
there followed several weeks of campaign sturm and drang, during which my impressions of obama as a political supergenius grew stronger, though i still withheld judgment as to whether this was necessarily a good thing. for a while there i suppose i rooted for him more out of animosity toward hillary clinton, who had morphed before our eyes from an unreliable, underprincipled and entitled but otherwise more-or-less capable leader, into nothing short of a political horror show.
but that’s water under the bridge. obama made a believer of me in march, when i heard the “a more perfect union” speech — an epiphany already well documented here. a few other moments from the campaign stand out… the feeling i had, watching the speech in berlin, that it might soon be possible once again to venture out into the world with a U.S. passport and my head held high. the calm and reason he exuded amidst the abject panic of september’s bank implosions. the people i met while out door-knocking in godforsaken flooded-out little post-farm-economy towns and shitty section-8 apartment buildings along the highway, or humping voter registration forms up and down the ped mall. and the eyeball-popping euphoria of election night, after ohio was called… all indelible memories. but this morning, watching the inaugural festivities on TV, wishing i was there in the capitol freezing my ass off with ben and the gajillions of others who are witnessing this moment firsthand, it’s last january that’s on my mind. it’s cold — ungodly, unmercifully cold — but spring is coming.
happy new year, america! i love you all.
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