Fired Up and Ready to GO(TV)

It's early, yet.  Still dark out.  The polls open out here in California in a couple of hours.  I'm waiting for my ride down to the campaign office.  Somehow Election Day doesn't feel right unless it starts before dawn.

It is almost a year to the day.  In early February, 2007, I watched Barack Obama's formal announcement that he would seek the Democratic Presidential nomination.  I had already decided then that I wanted to support his run.

Back then, I had no idea that I would be sitting here on the edge of my seat.  I could never have forseen this year.  I had no idea I was about to embark on this wild ride that has been the California campaign.  Right now, I am beyond fired up.  This is the most important thing I have ever done in my life.  I am right in the middle of the most exciting and significant Presidential contest in California in more than a generation.  And my experience gives me hope.

On Sunday, I wrote a bit about how I am feeling right now, a complicated almost completely strung out but completely devoted to the cause moment:

I really don't have time for this, you know.  I have all kinds of responsibilities I've been shirking.  I've barely seen my kids this week.  I'm living on coffee, chocolate, bad pizza and adrenaline.  I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.  

Being part of the Obama campaign feels like the most important thing I've ever done in my life.  The stakes couldn't be higher.  And we've gone from nowhere to serious contenders after months of tough, almost invisible work.  Finally, we are seeing the results, we are gaining.  Will it be enough?

In less than 72 hours, the polls close in California.  I've got hope.

When you have worked so hard for something, when you have been more than 30 points down and not given up, the payoff is incredible.  California is within reach.  To be here, today, and realize that, is just astonishing.   To know that we need to go all out today, from now until the polls close at 8 p.m., because it just might - might - make the difference, is the best feeling in the world.

I am so proud of the people I have been working with here in the Oakland office.  Hundred of volunteers have come in - seniors and students, people on their lunch hour or dashing in after work, families with their kids in tow.  We have made countless phone calls, knocked thousands of doors, worked precincts, organized events and house meetings.  It hasn't been easy - in fact it's been incredibly hard.  But now, at the end of it all, I know we get at least some credit for Obama's rise in California.

Our team has also gotten creative.  Two volunteers have pulled together a visibility plan that would do a field marshall proud.  Last night I wandered into the visibility "war room." They had plastered the walls with maps and huge sheets of paper with notes about times and locations.  I heard about how they were going to blitz the major Oakland and Berkeley arteries with signs right after dawn.  One volunteer had an enormous sign made at her own expense - on a teacher's salary - so she could hit a nearby highway overpass at rush hour.  The student organizers have been chalking the campuses.  We took a very general campaign directive to do visibility and ran with it.  It is thrilling to watch.

Volunteers have taken the initiative out here in other ways.  Some leaders on our team managed to design and execute a massive canvass on Saturday that was one of the best organized political events I have ever seen.  We came up with a way to meet the 100,000 phone calls statewide in a single day challenge, and more than double the campaign's phone goal.  Not all our successes are on such a grand scale.  This past Sunday a couple of us cooked up the "Family Canvass" idea - have families bring their kids and do some door knocks.  Apparently one of our canvass teams hit kid oakland (who has also been seen at Oakland HQ on the phones, making signs, and going out to do GOTV canvass himself) -- (h/t to copithorne, a regular on the Oakland phone bank, for his first-hand account of the day.) It's a small thing in the grand scale of getting votes in California, but we created a visible presence in our neighborhood.  And I got to actually reconnect with my kids and my valiant spouse, who have seen little of us lately.

But mostly, I've been dedicated this past month to the phone bank.  On an early January Saturday, two days after Iowa, three of us went off with notepads and coffee and sketched out an organizational plan to boost the efficiency of our phoning.  Last night, walking around and hearing the place literally humming with activity, hearing the bell ring every time we found an Obama voter, I was excited about what our team put together.  I felt even better about the personal relationship I've now forged with all the people on our team, and about how I much I enjoy seeing our "regulars" on the phonebank when they come in.  I wonder if I will feel withdrawl tomorrow when it is over - when we aren't spending 18 hours a day together, or on the phone with each other.

At the end of the day, that's what this is all about.  Those links build to networks, to a community and to a movement.  We feel direct personal ownership of the campaign and its success or failure.  This is a very old model of politics, reimagined for a generation alientated from the possibilities of grassroots organizing.  We have virtually erased a more than 30 point deficit in California, and trained thousands of new activists.  No matter what the final delegate score is tonight, we will win.  We have already made change.

Last night, we took a break from making phone calls, and watched the beautiful "Yes We Can" video that we volunteers have all now watched multiple times.  

Listening to the words, and thinking about how much this campaign means for us and our future, what ultimately succeeding could mean for the nation, I began weeping.  I wasn't alone in that.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Then we got a rousing pep talk from Rep. Barbara Lee.  She talked about Shirley Chisholm's path-breaking run for the Presidency.  She talked about how this, too, is an historic campaign, and how much our broken nation needs a way to heal and become stronger.  She then took a call list and whipped through it like a pro.  The experience of working on this campaign will stay with me for a lifetime.  

Soon the polls open.  Door hangers are already going out - the signs are making their way around the city.   I need to go in and print the final phonebanking script and set up the room for these last, critical GOTV calls.  Some time tonight, we will shut it down, and retire to an Oakland venue to see the results, whatever they will be.  Except that the results we will see on the television can never capture the full results of this campaign and how it has touched so many people.

You see, now we want change.  And we won't be satisfied because we know something we didn't know a year ago.  We know that "hope" is not an empty slogan, but a powerful force that moves people to act:

Hope is the ability to imagine a better future.   Hope sustains us in the fight to realize that vision.  Without hope, change is impossible.  

It turns out hope really is audacious.

Come Tuesday, win or lose, I will know we have already done the unthinkable.  We have brought people from apathy to action on a scale that hasn't been seen in more than a generation.  That isn't going away on February 6  - not by a long shot.  I've got hope.

And we know what the answer is when someone tells us we don't have the power to make change.

Yes we can.

Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign in California, but when I post here I speak for myself and not for the campaign in any way.  The campaign has had no input on this diary.  The ideas, and all the words in it, are my own.