My name is Jonah and I work on Capitol Hill despite my previous best efforts to do nearly everything I can to rebel against the establishment in place there. I know my name is Jonah in NYC and I just told you I live in DC, I did that just to mess with your perception of reality. In all seriousness I am a 27 year old graphic designer who was living in New York City, actively involved in progressive political circles and loving life only to give that all up to take on what to me is as close to my dream job as I can imagine at the moment. I am the lead designer for the DNC and have a guy by the name of Howard Dean as my boss's boss.
During college I did pro-bono design work for several non profits (AIDS Rochester and Big Brother Big Sisters of Greater Rochester) and knew that I needed to devote my passion to socially conscience professional work. That unfortunately would not be so easy later in life once I moved to NYC and doing good conflicted with being able to pay rent. My job and my political activity consumed two very different parts of my life and rarely did the two ever cross.
Fast forward to 2003 and I had the chance encounter to hear someone unknown to me, Gov. Howard Dean during his Sleepless Summer Tour. His message spoke to me that being socially conscience and being politically active can be the same thing. Fast forward to YearlyKos Chicago, Sunday morning, bleary eyed, we are all making our way to O'Hare airport after a surreal weekend. In an airport shuttle our group starts talking and trading business cards, apparently I am sitting in front of the DNC internet team and yada yada yada I am relocating to DC two months later. (note: thanks to Gina and many others for putting together something so compelling to make me decide to go)
One of the interesting story lines for me is that I never thought I would be able to mix politics and my career in a sustainable way. Sure I often offered to do design work for candidates I volunteered with instead of canvassing, since I was much better at the prior but it seemed that my ability to knock on doors and donate money was all I would be able to give. I imagine many of you have thought you can create a better advertisement, write a better speech or build a better website for a campaign. I know I am critical of layout on palm cards and campaign sites that are not very intuitive.
Now I am doing more than I was ever able to do by volunteering for a campaign. Coming to work everyday is one of the most enjoyable experiences in my some what short career span. This is my sixth full time job post graduation, typical for someone of my age, and for the first time I have yet to wake up and not want to go into work and that is a tremendous feeling. A lot of this has to do with who I am working for but a lot of it is also knowing how you are directly effecting politics. I can canvass a neighborhood and never know if I motivated people to go to the polls and vote for my candidate and those very intangible qualities I believe often caused me frustration. Now I get to build a website that I know will impact GOTV efforts. I even get to design the canvassing materials.
A quick run down of what I do. Some of the more noticeable things I do are creating the graphics in the DNC emails you get, so read them or at least check out my work. I also create the banner images that rotate on the homepage with the latest stories and the web interface for tools like FlipperTV, which made it on CNN prompting me to run and immediately called my parents. So if you are a regular visitor to site you probably see my work all the time. Wow, pressure.
Working not just for Gov. Dean but for a political party is as interesting and amazing as it is surreal. After interviewing I had to spend a lot of time soul searching and wondering if I could really give up all that is NYC to become someone living and working inside the dreaded beltway. Even though I live and work a few blocks from the Capital I have yet to find myself becoming an insider or feeling like I belong here and I am proud of that. Every night I look at the dome and feel optimism and that maybe I have the power to change things a little more than I did before. Days before the big move I was at Drinking Liberally up in NYC and Congress had just condemned the MoveOn "General Betray Us" advertisement, prompting people to say I was going to work for the party of half of those people. That was hard criticism to take but a good lesson in this field. I can't say you leave work after a long day thrilled with every decision that comes out of here, but on the other side I have the opportunity to work here. I am not just taking back my country but my party as well. Sure I don't have a vote on the primary schedule, I would give Guam the first spot, or the platform of the party, but I bring with me the values the Governor showed me I had. I walk the halls and see that many of us are not just under 35 and getting a foot in the door into this political world but we are coming from the change that grew out of 2004. There are a lot of people here who came into politics because of Dean, but also there are many coming from the Clark and Edwards campaigns too. Now we are the inner workings of your party and I am really elated by that thought.
So what is your story? Do you work on the Hill or locally in politics/government? If you had the chance would you make the career move into politics and if so what is your dream job?
Kossacks Under 35 is a weekly diary series designed to create a community within DailyKos that focuses on young people. Our overall goals are to work on increasing young voters' Democratic majority, and to raise awareness about issues that particularly affect young people, with a potential eye to policy solutions. Kossacks of all ages are welcome to participate (and do!), but the overall framework of each diary will likely be on or from a younger person's perspective. If you would like more information or want to contribute a diary, please email kath25 at kossacksunder35 (at) gmail dot com