He did it. Hell, we did it.
Even though I’ve been an Obama fan since the 2004 Democratic National Convention , I admit that I had my doubts about the rest of the country. I spent a bit of time at Obama HQ in Chicago while I was home phone banking and generally catching Obama fever and I feel like it absolutely paid off to see this victory.
I’m shocked (and elated, of course) to see Hillary do so dismally in the polls. To tell the truth, I like both Obama and Edwards, so the fact that they both took more precincts than Clinton really says a lot about the climate of this nation, namely that people are thirsty for an end to corporate greed and the old Democratic Machine. Hopefully this also means that there will be an end to the Clinton/Bush Dynasty that threatened to plague this country for upwards of twenty years if Hillary took the White House.
The thing that excites me most about the Obama campaign is that he reminds me so much of Howard Dean back in 2004. Since I went to college in Iowa, I had the chance to caucus for Dean in my first act of civic duty. He was a starry eyed candidate, fairly new to the game of Big Politics, who built his entire campaign on a grassroots platform. College students ate Dean up with a spoon. Ten dollar donations from people who could barely afford to buy ramen fueled a large chunk of his efforts. Somehow, though, his efforts to mobilize got lost in the translation, between John Kerry and a primal scream that for some reason rubbed the rest of the country the wrong way.
Obama’s victory speaks mainly to the way that American voters have changed during the Bush Administration. Eight years ago, this green politician wouldn’t have stood a chance against the venerable Clinton Institution. Hillary’s last place debacle shows that voters are looking for something besides Politics as Usual.
That’s where the Obama Plan comes in. It’s common for candidates to rally around the idea of change, but rarely do they take the chance of placing it front and center the way the Obama campaign has. This campaign has placed a capital ‘C’ in front of the notion, spun it and placed it at the top of the agenda. Over half of Obama’s caucusgoers were in my generation, 18-29 years old. For a relatively inexperienced candidate, the campaign had the unique opportunity of presenting him as a potential “Outsider President”– unheard of in my generation– appealing to a younger crowd thirsty for someone who reflects the values of a burgeoning America. He takes the Dean Strategy and does it one better: Instead of simply telling the new voters that he’s on their side, Barack Obama actually mobilized college students in the way that Dean couldn’t deliver in 2004. The skinny black kid who did lines of coke when he was an undergrad proves to students that even the best among us are fallible, normal human beings– something Politics as Usual doesn’t seem to cope very well with.
Besides youth, though, Obama has the biggest booster of all: The Oprah Effect. Once Oprah threw in her support and started stumping with Barack on the campaign trail, Hillary’s support among Iowa women dropped by about 10 points– which was a little more than Barack’s margin of victory. Hillary gets a lot of middle-aged female support, but Oprama took that constituency by storm.
I met Obama about a year ago when I worked in Borders in Hyde Park, and after I helped him find The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I shook his hand and said “Thank you, Senator Obama, for restoring my faith in Democracy.” He graciously thanked me and said that he appreciated the support. Everyone says that Bill Clinton has this gift with almost hypnotizing people into thinking that they’re the only person in the room, and if he’s anything like Obama, there’s no wonder he’s such a force to reckon with.
Little did I know that those words I said to Obama would ring so true after this first caucus. The establishment is being upset. A Black man might be President of the United States. Onward and upward. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
