In a frigid early December of 2007, I drove into Charles City, IA from my home in Maryland, to spend a month there volunteering for Barack Obama. As I watched his speech from Des Moines this evening, I remembered the signs that greeted me as I drove into Charles City. For those of you who are of a certain age, they resembled the old Burma Shave signs, and I still remember what they said:
"Together We Stand
In Caucus Formation
On A Cold Night In January
We Change A Nation"
Purely by chance, the Obama campaign had asked me to go to Charles City, which happened to be where my late father-in-law had grown up. I'd never been there before, although I grew up in Illinois and have relatives in the Waterloo, IA area, but I learned to love and respect the people of small-town Iowa. And they learned to love and respect Barack and Michelle Obama, despite the fact that there are so few African-Americans in the rural portions of Iowa that many of the people living there have never actually known an African-American. Barack Obama began his campaign in Iowa, because he was convinced that the people of Iowa would give him a fair chance. And they did. In a month of making what must have been thousands of calls and knocking on hundreds of doors, I didn't personally encounter a single racist comment. (Another volunteer in our office did encounter one -- but that was it.)
It was fitting that the President made the final campaign speech that he will ever give on his own behalf in the place where it all began, and my fervent prayer is that the decency of the people of Iowa in 2008 will spread across this country tomorrow.
We DID change a nation on that frigid January night in Iowa in 2008. We elected a President who gave every American the right to purchase health insurance at a reasonable price -- a goal that eluded Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. We elected a President who ended an utterly needless war in Iraq. We elected a President who gave the order to kill the man who gave the order to kill nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens. We elected a President who took office during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when we could easily have slipped into the abyss, and who put the economy on the path to recovery (albeit a slower recovery than we would have liked -- due in large part to Republican intransigence). We elected a President who gave women who are denied equal pay a meaningful right to sue the employers who denied them their rights. We elected a President who appointed Supreme Court Justices who have, at least thus far, managed to protect a woman's right to choose to control her own body. We elected a President who saved the American automobile industry. And last, but not least, we elected a President who by his very existence tells EVERY child in America that there is nothing in America that they can't accomplish because of the color of their skin. And that only scratches the surface of what this President has accomplished.
Unfortunately, because of a combination of health problems and other obligations, I've been unable to give the personal work to the campaign to re-elect President Obama that I would have liked to have done. (In 2007-2008, I campaigned for President Obama not only in Iowa, but in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.) I had hoped to at least go to VA tomorrow to help in GOTV, but will unfortunately be attending the visitation for a friend who died last week. But those of you who are doing the GOTV work tomorrow have my profound thanks. I've contributed as much as I can to make up for my lack of personal participation. If we are able to bring this home, we will change our nation again -- and for the better.