Braeden Caley, one of the co-founders for Canadians for Obama and volunteered in more than 8 states, recounts his involvement in the Obama campaign from February 2008 to January 2009.
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For me, a remarkable string of campaign trips started because of a casual conversation - a conversation between good friends about how a certain aspiring American leader was offering and in many ways exemplifying so much of what we sought from our own politics. I never thought I’d meet that man, talk to him, and certainly not travel tens of thousands of miles to campaign for him, repeatedly(!) - but in 2008, I did - and the experiences I had along the way, and the cherished memories I hold from them, will stay with me forever.
Years before he would eventually become President of the United States, Barack Obama began to fascinate us. He inspired many in 2004, with his call for an end to the steep divisions that have - for far, far too long - defined politics not only in the United States, but throughout much of the world. He demanded unity, and he demanded better from his fellow citizens and leaders.
As a candidate for President, his demands began to resonate more strongly with my friends and I. His story was so compelling, his promise so exciting, and his courage so necessary for a troubled and violent world that we quite simply decided we had to be a part of ensuring Barack Obama and his ideals could win.
In a spur of the moment decision, we packed three carloads full of enthusiastic Canadians and campaigned for the final push in the Washington Caucuses, way back in February of 2008. We phoned relentlessly, that first night. We made posters, we folded pamphlets, prepared walk packs, set up caucus station leaders’ packs and had an absolute blast. We were in Snohomish County, on the edge of Everett. I thought, going down to work on this brief campaign, that it would be a first and last quick foray into the inner machinations of a one-of-a-kind Presidential campaign, but what we discovered when we won that on Saturday Caucus in February - the day Barack won his first state after ‘Super Tuesday,’ - was that this was not so much a campaign as a movement. Excited, inspired, and motivated by how easy it could be to help bring about such important change, we then became some of that’s movement’s most active footsoldiers.
I campaigned in Washington, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia. We took some big groups and some small ones - all inspired young Canadians (with the exception of Kaila Ann from Snohomish!!!) from across the full spectrum of Canadian political affiliations - and some who had never been involved in any sort of politics ever before.
Texas was bittersweet: The Obama campaign had found itself again after a string of small victories. It had field offices speckled everywhere throughout key counties, and the magic that I had heard so many stories about from the small state openers of Iowa and New Hampshire had transplanted itself into the State where "everything is bigger." We had loads of fun campaigning over vast rural territory. I was chased on numerous occasions by dogs of all sizes while on our targeted walk routes, and even once got ran out of a farmyard by a young goat! Must have been a Republican goat…
It was in Texas that I first met Barack Obama, in Carrollton, and took the brief moments in which I held his laser-like eye contact to encourage him to remain firm in his opposition to the War in Iraq. In Texas I also met Dean Fluker, the Obama staffer-extraordinaire from Iowa who until that point I had only worked with over the phone. He led us in many of the states we went to, and no one went to greater lengths to empower, include, and involve us in this historic campaign. He always inspired the greatest possible level of drive, effort, and commitment. But for all that was special about it and the people we met there, Texas was a challenge.
Every state was a challenge, but some more than others. When it comes to voting problems, everything was indeed, again, "bigger in Texas!" The now-mythic Obama machine was not yet so mighty everywhere, and around Mansfield for instance, our voters were easily pushed around and their votes suppressed by those with vested interests in their voices not being heard. The caucuses that Glyn and I were responsible for, in largely rural Mansfield, Texas, were planned to start at 7:15pm that critical Tuesday night, but they were delayed until past midnight, an occurrence that repeated itself throughout that whole county, where our other volunteers were stationed. Thousands of voters in those predominantly African-American communities were turned away that night, or forced to return home to care for their young families before having the chance to caucus. Not all inspiration is arrived at through positive experiences, and many of us were even more motivated to realize Barack’s vision and goals by this negative twist than we had been ever before - and so onward we went.
Pennsylvania for some of us was a chance to work and lead within the famed Obama youth movement. I was assigned to campaign at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy-League institution in the heart of Philadelphia, the cradle of American Independence and the place where Barack had freshly given his historic speech on race. It was here that I think I might have learned the most - about how to campaign effectively on a campus, and how to use every tool imaginable to engage and connect politically with fellow youth on our own terms and in our own ways.
There were a number of people there, at UPenn, who exemplified how well Americans in all of these different states welcomed us bright-eyed eager Canadians into their everyday lives for this critical campaign. Troy Stevenson got us all set up; Cori Allen, Harrison Kreisberg, Cameron Monagle, and Jordan Harp showed us the ropes of how things worked in the Philly office; Ash Bhumbla got us oriented on a campus he loved; and Michael Feliu, Nathan Miller, and Michael Stratton campus-campaigned the hell out of us in that final weekend!
I’ll never forget the angry mob of seniors we had to contend with at the CNN Rick Sanchez event, all the energy drinks I consumed dorm-knocking in the "Quad," or, for example, when we met at midnight for a flyer-drop blitz (a task later repeated on a much smaller scale in Virginia)! The crew at UPenn demonstrated how keeping a campaign fun, edgy, well-organized and creative can pay dividends even against great adversity: Barack won at UPenn with more than 70% of the vote despite a rally with Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton held on campus the night before Primary day - mere hours before voting began.
North Carolina was a return to familiar campaign faces and a hybrid of both campus-campaigning (at UNCC) and the neighbourhood-to-neighbour
After that exciting start, it was mostly a matter of doing campus campaigning early in the morning, then heading out into key neighbourhoods in the afternoon and most of the evening, and finally back to the office long into the wee hours as we prepared our activities for the next day and helped other districts’ teams do the same.
Glyn and Robin had arrived there when I was still in Pennsylvania, and had got us set up with campaign vans to use. And boy did we ever use them, culminating in a 14 hour marathon Primary Day on May 6th in which we must have criss-crossed the country 3 or 4 times!
To kick off the morning though, we had facility managers at UNCC steal all of our election day materials and "chum" (Obama memorabilia used to keep voters from leaving their lines) and run off in a golf cart as the sun rose over the leafy southern campus. It was quite the scene, to put it nicely! We gave chase for about 20 minutes snaking in and around the brick buildings before finally losing track of them, but the police were able to track down both the offending facility staff and our materials only about ten minutes after that. Another bizarre story from a campaign full of unexpected twists and turns.
In North Carolina, finally, Barack Obama won again - and did so rather impressively. It was a turning point - a milestone at which point Obama went from being a shaky, challenged frontrunner for the nomination to a clear leader in the race. Everyone knew it would be hard to stop him then, but our little crew wasn’t going to take any chances!
Robin was on to Kentucky, and I was on to Oregon with a crew second in size only to our first foray into nearby Washington. Oregon was a whole different style - ten hour days instead of twenty, a decent enough amount of time to explore Portland, and a record-setting 70,000 person rally around which so many of the week’s activities were focused. Oregon had a mail-in ballot, so instead of just one election day, every day counted, but the intensity was taken down a notch. Interestingly, we were even allowed to collect citizens’ mail-in ballots on behalf of the campaign who would then deposit them - a procedure that allowed us to pretend to cast a few ballots of our own back at the central Obama Campaign Office’s collection station. And Hannah in Portland was another tremendously awesome Field Organizer to work with!
The change of pace in Oregon was a welcome one. We had a chance to talk a lot more with citizens throughout Portland, learn more about what was driving their voting decisions, and hear more of their stories, histories, ideas, and ideals. We also had the chance to meet Barack (again, in my case!), acting on a last minute tip from one of his staff of when to be at his hotel one morning, the Portland Benson.
Like North Carolina, Oregon was a clear and decisive win for Barack, and then the nomination was all but his - On June 3rd, less than two weeks later, Barack Obama was indeed the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
The end of the primaries meant a four month hiatus from the Obama campaign. Within that time period, an entire Canadian general election campaign started and concluded, and not with the result that progressive Canadians had been hoping for.
It was refreshing therefore to get back in the Obama campaign’s saddle shortly after Canadian election day. First on Glyn’s advice and then after seeing how truly close the polls were in this definitive battleground state, we chose Virginia to campaign in for the final week of the General election campaign.
The state had not gone "Democratic blue" since 1968 - so the effort was certainly a long shot - but Barack’s movement and its unprecedented engagement of new and youthful volunteers was redrawing the American electoral map. However, John McCain and the Republicans had their old Bush coalition and a number of skeptical independents to rely on, and only a few points separated Obama and McCain for the vast majority of the campaign’s final thirty days.
Virginia, in the end, was one of just a handful of states that would decide the election, and we wanted to do everything we could to help Virginia decide in favour of Barack.
For Virginia we had a 6-person crew that packed into a 5-person Dodge SUV crossover throughout the hotly contested battleground of west Fairfax Country. It was Glyn Lewis, Katie Skinner, Wei Li, Oz Jungic, Ben Lee and myself - working out of Oakton and Centreville, towns largely consisting of Republican holdouts in an area of Virginia that was otherwise trending Democratic for the first time in decades.
Located just half an hour and across the Potomac River from the White House and the Lincoln Memorial (which we visited twice), this battleground campaign was set amongst geography, landmarks and history which once again demonstrated to us the enormity of what Barack Obama was seeking to achieve, and how far this nation had come. We had only a few days to do whatever more we could to turn his campaign into a Presidency, and in Virginia’s case, this meant doors, doors, and more doors!
It was a particularly interesting place. There was a higher level of ethnic diversity here (not overwhelmingly African-American or overwhelmingly Caucasian, as had been the case in different parts of previous states), and more voters seemed to remain undecided very close to election day. But as in every other state, the engagement of citizens was astoundingly high, and many voters had hearts and minds open to persuasion in what were increasingly tough times for themselves and their families. The generational divide seemed more pronounced, as well. It was common to have voters on our lists who were our age, and supporting Barack Obama, but whose parents would not let us remind them to vote because they were supporting John McCain!
I will never, ever forget speaking to a young Asian American family in a cul-de-sac south of Centreville. I spent about five minutes having a discussion with the father, who had always voted Republican and was until then planning to do so once again. The whole time we were speaking, his son stood leaning against his leg listening attentively but silently - he could not have been more than five or six years old. As soon as I had said goodbye and began to walk away, the son stomped his foot firmly and said "DAD! How could you NOT vote for Barack Obama!?!?"
There were tons of inspiring moments from our few days on Virginia’s doorsteps, but we also had the opportunity to take a break for one of the campaign’s most historically-important events. As if after all this traveling the candidate himself had somehow decided to catch up with us, Barack Obama chose to hold his final rally of the historic election campaign in Manassas Virginia, just about a 15 minute drive south of some of the precincts we were working in. There we joined almost 100,000 fellow Obama supporters for his final address of the campaign, and got ‘fired up and ready to go’ for the election day that would come just hours later - for us, with a midnight flier drop that would keep us occupied until nearly 4:00am.
Then at 7:00pm on Tuesday, after another crazy day of getting out the vote - my sixth Obama election day - there was nothing left we could do. It was all in CNN’s hands now, I joked at the time. As we drove to Alexandria to watch the results with some of the volunteers and organizers we had worked with, we (I) once again got ourselves lost driving in the heavy rain, and so we stopped at a roadside Chili’s restaurant to watch the returns together. We anxiously made each other shut off our phones so we would all get the news together and all at once.
Virginia was tight, and at first Barack was behind rather badly, but then the results from Fairfax County - our home for that last ditch effort - began to roll in strongly. With just 45 seconds to go before Barack Obama was declared the President Elect of the United States of America, he was declared the winner of the race in battleground Virginia. We hugged, we cried, we phoned our families, and then we… raced back to the car to get to Alexandria in time for Barack’s victory speech!
Once that was also concluded, it was off to the spontaneous festivities outside the White House and in the streets of Washington DC. An unbelievable end to a remarkable adventure, and an enormously new beginning at hand. The streets of DC that night were alive with cheers of "hope" and "change," and our decked-out Obama rental car ended the night by leading a crowd of two hundred revelers down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building, with people on the hood, the trunk, and hanging out the windows as horns sounded relentlessly throughout the city in celebration.
The next day, our first stop was the Lincoln Memorial. We were all so incredibly exhausted, but it is hard to find the words necessary to express just how uplifting and inspiring it was to stand where Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream speech," and to stand there the morning after the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.
So much of the dream had then been realized, and it had been accomplished by volunteers and organizers willing to sacrifice their time and energy to bring about a new era of hope, equality, and meaningful change. Many said it, but in that spot, at that time, we *felt* it: "Yes, We Did!"
And what a journey it was. As we set about trying to elect Barack Obama as President, Americans of all ages and backgrounds opened up their hearts, their homes, and their doors to us, and in doing so showed us the true meaning of what it means to be good neighbours.
Thank you - We won’t ever forget it.
After a year spent living through some of his campaign’s greatest trials and triumphs, I will be ecstatic and thrilled to see Barack Obama inaugurated today as the 44th President of the United States.
I may not be a citizen, but now I am prouder than ever to call myself a friend.
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