Before the diary crush of the big day gets underway, I wanted to say something to all of you here on dKos and across the left blogosphere that I can't say in public:
THANK YOU.
You see, as readers of my too-occasional diaries know by now, I work in the news media.
So there are a lot of things I wanted to do over the last couple of years that I simply couldn't...
I'd love to have spent the last 48 hours wearing out my sneakers canvassing for Obama, and for my splendid Democratic downticket here in upstate New York. But the rules of my workplace, and of the journalistic fraternity in general, say that I can't publicly show my support for any specific candidate or party. So no LTEs, either, which has left a big gash in my tongue from biting it so hard when I've read some of the garbage that shows up on the local paper's LTE page.
I'd love to have wiped out what little is left in my bank account to add to the tidal wave of money that's helping to lift Barack Obama to victory - but the best I can do is the just under $200 that won't be publicly reported, and I'm not even really supposed to do that. Ditto for my wonderful Congressional candidate, Eric Massa, and his other Orange-to-Blue counterparts across the country. (Fortunately, there's nothing in the rules that said I couldn't give to out-of-state issue campaigns like No on 8, so I did so, gladly.)
I'd love to be out on street corners waving signs - hell, even though signs don't vote, I'd love to have a forest of 'em on my lawn anyway. (I cheated a bit, anyway - the way I see it, nobody can tell my daughter that she can't have an Obama sign in her window, or that Daddy can't carve her a Barack-o-Lantern and a matching Biden-o-Lantern for Halloween...)
I probably shouldn't even really be as moderately active here on dKos as I am. The outing of droogie6655321 gave me a big scare. I think I've managed to cloak my real identity here enough to avoid a similar fate. You won't find me using "ipsos" as a screen name anywhere else aside from a few other political blogs. Sadly, I'll probably never be able to show my face at a Netroots Nation...and I'd really, really like to go some year.
And tomorrow night, when most of you are (I sincerely hope!) screaming with glee as state after state checks in in beautiful sky blue, I'll be stationed, heaven help me, at the headquarters of a certain candidate for whom I will not have voted, where part of my job will entail being as fair and as non-partisan as I can possibly be in reporting the results as they come in, and the reaction to them.
The tears and the joy will have to wait a bit longer, and I do fully expect to be a wreck (a very, very happy wreck, mind you!) once I get in my car and get away from that place when the night is over.
Most years, this is a tradeoff that's easy to make. I take a great deal of pride in the work that I and my colleagues do. We serve an important function in the campaign ecosphere, after all, and without us, a lot of important information would never make it to the public. I wouldn't be working for the news organization that employs me if I didn't think I could be truly "fair and balanced," in the non-ironic, non-Fox News sense.
(And there's a payoff, too: every once in a while, I get a super-close-up view of the downfall of a politican I truly dislike, complete with the "you don't know how happy I was to vote against you" handshake at the end. I sincerely hope tomorrow night is one of those nights.)
This has been a difficult year to maintain that shell of non-partisanship. Many is the night I've sat and done the math, trying to figure out if I could afford to leave the job, toss off the "journalist" shell and go out and campaign like hell for the first presidential candidate in my lifetime who's truly inspired me in this way. I've even tried to find a way to take a week or two off and head south to Pennsylvania or Virginia to do some field work in places where my face and voice and name probably won't be recognized...but the risks are too great.
Alas, I have a family to support - and I want to be there wearing my journalist hat to report on America's revitalization in the Obama era.
So in these final hours, I don't know that I can honestly say I've left it all on the road in the way so many of you have.
The best I can do now is to say a sincere, humble "thank you" to all of you who've done what I could not. I will be thinking of all of you when I take my five-year-old daughter into the booth with me and hold her up as she helps me pull the lever next to "Barack Obama."
I hope someday, when she's very old and I'm long gone, that she'll remember that as the moment when America began to change again for the better. And I hope she knows by then how much Kossacks, and their fellow denizens of the left blogosphere, did to make it possible.
Yes, we can - even those of us who sometimes can't!