On the day of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, I couldn't hold back any longer - for so long, I had been free riding on the generosity of others, and as a financially challenged student living thousands of miles from the action, there was only so much I could do. Eventually, I just had to pony up, and here's what I wrote at the time:
I wish I could phone bank. I wish I could canvass. I promised myself back in 2004 that if Barack Obama ran in 2008, that I'd drop everything - school, work, a life - to work for him, even if I didn't get paid a dime. Well, my mother wouldn't hear of it, naturally, and my time spent in London has put me at far too much of a distance to the campaign.
I was incredibly envious of friends who were able to pound the pavement in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, while I was left to cast my vote for Obama as a Democrat Abroad. He won Democrats Abroad, much to my delight, but having worked on a campaign before, I knew it just wasn't quite the same as being there.
I feel a bit better now, having kicked in a twenty. That said, I always felt right about supporting Obama - I knew that I was part of something bigger, not just politically, but personally.
It felt even better as three otherkindand generous Kossacks matched my donation - but with recent revelations of high dollar Clinton donors essentially blackmailing the Obama campaign, I've learned the real value of those contributions.
The real value of those contributions was not in a dollar amount, but rested in the fact that four people - who don't know each other, have never so much as met - share those common values, those common passions, were able to unite in support of a candidate we believe shares those values and passions. We're not mailing in the $4600 checks, or spending a day less in St. Bart's to kick in $25,000 to the DNC (and only if our candidate gets nominated).
The fundamental power of an inspired supporter, matched by other inspired supporters, is incalculable. For every Hassan Nemazee, for everyone able to contribute $400,000 over ten years, and almost $100,000 in one cycle, there are one hundred thousand of us giving forty dollars each, and so much more importantly, giving the kind of commitment that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
If I had any doubts before, about being a part of something larger than myself - something that just might truly change this country, I don't anymore. With the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, the party I love with all my heart and all my mind, is one step closer to being a tribe with no chiefs.
Are we perfect? No, we are not. This is a journey that has just begun, and it will require both walkers and baby carriages, both wallets and words, and Lord knows the troubles we have encountered on the way, and those that lie ahead. But today I hope, and indeed I know, that we are stronger because of the tiny donations I have made and that hundreds of thousands of others have made, because this is the truth:
We will not be threatened. We will not be blackmailed. But more importantly, we cannot be threatened, and we cannot be blackmailed. Therein lies the real value of $20, multiplied hundreds over - knowing that the power of this campaign, the power of change, resides with you and I. As Barack himself said after Iowa, of the message of the campaign, a message we live and will carry with us, against those who will try to divide us:
Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
That is what we started here in Iowa, and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond; the same message we had when we were up and when we were down; the one that can change this country brick by brick, block by block, calloused hand by calloused hand - that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things...