“Remember,” said Steph Speirs, one of our trainers in Columbus. “They come for Barack. But they stay for you.”
I knew Steph from college. She graduated only a year before I did. But I soon learned that her youth was par for the course. Field organizers live in a state of unbridled meritocracy. There isn’t time to defer blindly to elders or treat an org chart as sacred text. If your numbers are good—if you recruit lots of volunteers and contact lots of voters—you move up in the world. If not, you don’t. Steph had hit the campaign trail only twelve months earlier. Now, she was in charge of Ohio’s entire southwest quadrant. At our statewide training, she shared the mottos that helped her get ahead.
Don’t try to win every vote. Just get to fifty plus one.
Your phone is your most powerful weapon.
Think with your head, be driven by your heart.
That last one sounds all kumbaya, but really wasn’t. Meeting my weekly goals required a willingness—perhaps a slightly-too-willingness—to think of voters as numbers instead of humans. “There’s a line of unregistereds outside the plasma bank!” I’d announce to my colleagues. “The best part is, they’re just standing around!”
But I also discovered an unexpected warmth. One of my first one-on-ones was with Brenda, a middle-aged woman in a flowing blouse. As we parted ways, she looked at me nervously.
“Do you really think we can win?”
Ordinarily, I caveat almost everything. But in that campaign office, some long-dormant part of me stepped forward.
“Of course we can win! We’ve got Brenda on the team!”
Where the hell did that come from?
After a less-than-illustrious performance as a student—my four years of college were defined primarily by off-brand vodka and grade inflation—I worried my mediocre streak might continue. But in the field, something clicked. Before long I was collecting piles of voter registration cards. I was eating lasagna three meals a day. After a few weeks of indentured servitude, the campaign took notice, promoting me from unpaid fellow to underpaid organizer. Then they assigned me to open an office in Wooster, a small town in the heart of Northeast Ohio’s dairy country.
Wayne County was what organizers called “tough turf,” and not just because Janice Maier despised me. In 2004, Bush won the area with 60 percent of the vote. The remaining 40 percent was concentrated on the local college campus and in the poorer parts of town. Everywhere else, Democrats were political closet cases, afraid to openly declare their love for universal health care or a higher minimum wage.
This made our campaign a kind of coming-out party. Inspired by one of Obama’s speeches, walkins would shyly open the door to our office, only to find friends and neighbors already there. Our little headquarters lay just off the town square, and it soon buzzed with the men and women I referred to, in campaign shorthand, as “vols.” Ellen the silver-haired chain smoker. Sylvia the town busybody. Ross the unrepentant socialist. Beth the owner of a thriving mushroom farm. “You should be a used car salesman,” they told me. Apparently, they meant this as a compliment.
I understood their point. Recruiting new vols required a certain lack of shame. But our organization was built on more than persistent begging and well-timed guilt trips. My greatest strength as an organizer was a monklike devotion to my cause. Between June and November, I drank exactly two beers. I was almost entirely celibate, almost entirely by choice. To avoid the distraction of national news, I downloaded porn-blocking software and reconfigured it to bar me from CNN.
If I had been selling cars instead of a candidate, I never could have been so single-minded. But each day in Ohio reminded me I was part of something big. Lisa had been laid off from three different manufacturing jobs in four years. When she stopped by in June, looking for a yard sign, she told me she was too scared to volunteer. By November she was a neighborhood team leader, with an entire ward of Wooster at her command.
Then there was Wendy. A slipped disk in her spine made both standing and sitting extraordinarily painful, so she called voters while pacing in agonizing laps around the town square. I took pride in pushing vols to the limit, but this time, even I begged her to stop.
“You don’t have to keep doing this.”
“Yes, I do. If I don’t make these calls, I won’t be able to get the health insurance I need to get better.”
With so much on the line, who wouldn’t work 120 hours a week?
Thanks to my porn-slash-news blocker, I didn’t fully appreciate that as our organization was growing, the economy was falling apart. On September 15, Lehman Brothers collapsed, but I was too busy planning a Joe Biden rally to care. My vols were less lucky. With lives outside the campaign, they couldn’t afford my blissful ignorance. In between phone calls, they had once complained about Bush. Now they discussed their 401(k)s. Back in Canton, coworkers canvased a street only to find that every house had been foreclosed on.
With the looming threat of a second Great Depression, I feared our supporters would be too busy worrying about their own futures to spend time with the campaign. Instead, the opposite occurred. More than ever, volunteers could see the connection between the national life and their own. They began acting with what Obama called “the fierce urgency of now.” As they picked up the pace, so did I. By October, I had discarded Steph’s mottos in favor of a new, more personal one.
Tiredness is just a feeling.
And then came Election Day, which was oddly, almost eerily calm. Hours before polls opened, I plopped onto a couch in a volunteer’s living room and waited for a crisis. When none came, I found an empty two-liter bottle of juice and an old Nerf football. I spent one of the most important days in American history seeing how many bullseyes I could hit.
Thwap. Thwap. Thud-crash-profanity-sound-of-feet-across-carpet-to-check-if-lamp-is-broken-sigh-of-relief. Thwap.
Outside my boiler room, the Wayne County ground game was in high gear. But it was no longer run by paid operatives. Teams of trained local volunteers directed it themselves. They were students, professors, stay-at-home moms, karate teachers, agricultural researchers, retirees. And now, they were organizers, too.
That night, when the networks called Ohio and then the country for Obama, we couldn’t believe what he had accomplished. More than that, we couldn’t believe what we had accomplished. True, the economy was still in crisis. True, the Iraq War still raged. True, Janice Maier would soon steal the laser printer I had purchased at OfficeMax, refusing to release it until I scoured her folding table with a sponge.
“You can’t just hold people’s stuff hostage!” I would say. For the first time in months, her lip would curl into a smile.