11

FINAL SPRINT

September 2008–January 2009

October 8, 2008

National Polling Average: Obama 49, McCain 44

When I started learning about politics, I read somewhere that Labor Day marked the beginning of campaign season, the idea being that only in the final eight weeks leading up to Election Day do the voters you need to reach tune in to the race. By Labor Day, 2008, 569 days had passed since I attended the first Obama rally in Iowa. It was hard to relate to anyone just now starting to pay attention.

There were still plenty of big moments remaining—including three debates between Obama and John McCain—but in my field offices, the final stretch of the election felt like a frenzied sprint of volunteer trainings, voter registration deadlines, midlevel surrogate events, and early voting metrics. I absorbed information about the outside world almost exclusively through two lenses: (1) How does this affect Barack Obama’s election chances? (2) What will volunteers need to say about this to voters?

Throughout the general election, our message to voters about John McCain had been simple: “John McCain equals George W. Bush’s third term.” But shortly after Labor Day, I started to see a subtle shift in the campaign talking points as the economy took center stage. For several months, the United States had been sliding into a recession, one I had not realized was happening in real time. But in September it overwhelmed all other news as multiple banks went bankrupt or required massive federal bailouts to stay open. On the eve of the first presidential debate, John McCain announced he was suspending his campaign to go to Washington so that both parties could “meet until this crisis is resolved.” The resulting negotiations at the Bush White House—where McCain and other Republicans were depicted as disorganized, unengaged, and overly reliant on boilerplate conservative talking points—received wall-to-wall coverage. The week’s events were widely seen as a pivotal moment that demonstrated Obama could handle a crisis as president.

Despite the media attention, this swirl of activity in Washington had little effect on my life. We continued to build neighborhood volunteer teams, call voters, and knock on doors—in the field, that was our entire focus.

Lauren Kidwell, Regional Director: As an organizer in this campaign environment, you’re obsessed with the day-to-day news and the talking points that go with it, because it’s relevant to your job and to what your staff will say at the doors. But you don’t have time to actually follow it.

Nicole Young, Western Michigan Regional Field Director: In Michigan, the economy tipped the scales dramatically for us in the general election. My region was really a bellwether because it was already on the way to recession. I had never seen so many foreclosed houses in my entire life. I didn’t have any kind of understanding of what was coming. There was nothing in my background that would have made me think, “Well, that probably indicates that we’re on the way to recession.” It was just head down. Looking at a foreclosed house, I’d think, “We’re talking about the economy here” and reshuffle my position paper to talk about jobs before knocking on the door.

But I think the states where I heard the most violent language about race were these places that were eventually going to be really hard-hit by the recession. There was a younger organizer I worked with—a very sweet, Jewish white man from a family committed to social justice. He and I went out one day in rural Michigan and did voter registration together. While we were there, someone screamed at him he was a “N-word lover.”

He was shaking, so we had to have a conversation about that. I, a Black woman, had to comfort this young white man more than once about the terrible racist things people were saying to him.

Looking back, I recognize the ways in which those things were tied to job insecurity. At the time, I didn’t realize it in that way. I didn’t know that economic anxiety can further radicalize racial anxiety. I just thought they were hella racist places—which they also may be.

Lauren Kidwell: I distinctly remember the day that McCain erred in saying that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” but I really didn’t realize that our economy was collapsing around us. I wasn’t following the degree to which real people were losing their jobs, which is so crazy to think about when the first thing I did in the morning was read the news clips. I knew what was going on, but in this cocoon of my all-consuming job, it was all through the lens of “What does it mean for my organizers today?”

I did notice how Nevada’s housing crisis affected our ability to organize. Las Vegas is always a fairly transient place, but given the degree to which the housing crisis was already hitting that part of the country, we started noticing that our walk lists were garbage. It was rare to find a person at the door who matched the name on our list, and we were coming up on a lot of abandoned homes.

As the election became more all-consuming, I would tell myself I needed to be at work until midnight, never getting a full night’s rest. The cycle perpetuated itself to the point that I could waste hours each day just staring at my computer screen. Leaving the office one morning, I realized I had left my campaign Blackberry on the roof of my Toyota and backtracked along the highway to find it scuffed on the side of the road. The danger of running between speeding cars did not register in the moment. There was another night I fell asleep driving home and woke up in the middle of a pitch-black, empty highway, the car miraculously having come to a complete stop. Confusing time spent at work for productivity, I took a perverse pride in ignoring the rest of my life.

Howli Ledbetter, Burlington, NC, Field Organizer: There was no outside world. Everything was work: registering voters, cutting turf, canvassing. The campaign isolated you from everyone you knew who wasn’t doing it and bonded you with the people you were doing it with. So your life was split totally in half. There were all these people you knew before the campaign who were very important to you and whom you used to see all the time and cared about.

There wasn’t time for people who weren’t on the campaign. With the people you were working with, it felt like, “We’re in this together. They’re the only people who really understand what it’s like.” I had never had a job like that before, and it happened instantly. It was like a sliding door. I had one life, and then that ended, and the new one was all-consuming. I was in a very serious relationship in New York that ended in flames. There wasn’t one person I knew on the campaign who had a relationship at the beginning and still had that relationship at the end of the campaign.

Chris Wyant, Deputy Field Director, Ohio: It’s all a blur. I gained thirty pounds over the course of nineteen months. I remember debating how long I should leave work to go to my brother’s wedding and struggling with feeling like I needed to stay.

Carrianna Suiter, Regional Field Director: I felt deep personal pressure to spend every moment of every day doing something that would positively impact the election. And every moment I wasn’t working, I felt horrible. The closer we got, the more it terrified me that I wasn’t doing enough. It felt like life-and-death. There was a real emotional and physical toll that work had on me. At the end of it, my physical health was in shambles. I was not taking care of myself, eating bad food, not sleeping, smoking too many cigarettes, and drinking way too much caffeine, which combined with lack of sleep had real implications for my health.

I hit my limit ten days before the election, when I totaled my car on the highway. I’d been ignoring the fact that the brakes were getting harder and harder to engage, and I couldn’t stop in time. A volunteer came and picked me up after my car was towed. She said, “You need to go to the hospital,” because I had all of this neck pain and back pain. And I remember thinking, “No, I’ve got to go to the office. I’ll just take a day off after the election.”

She had kids in college a few years younger than me. At a certain point, she said, “No, you need to go, and I’m going to take you because I would want someone to do this for my child.” She took me to an urgent care ER.

Those moments of self-care that in any other job would’ve been a no-brainer didn’t feel like an option. Not because anyone was telling me it wasn’t an option—it was all internal pressure to work all the time.

Meghan Goldenstein, Field Organizer: Life doesn’t stop while you’re doing stuff like this. My aunt passed away two weeks before the election. While she was in hospice, I went home to see her for two days. I remember sobbing in the office about how I felt like leaving Dubuque was putting the campaign at risk—which, of course, in retrospect, was not true and sounds extremely self-centered. But the campaign made you feel like you were indispensable to your volunteers and your team.

The thing we kept saying was that John Kerry had lost Iowa by five votes per precinct in 2004. That was the mantra. “Five votes per precinct.” And the idea that you might step away just felt like, “Well, what if it’s those five votes?” I haven’t been many places where it feels like everything you do is that momentous.

Cathy Bolkcom, Le Claire, IA, Volunteer: Beth Wehrman, who was one of our Le Claire leaders, got pancreatic cancer in 2007. Obama took a personal interest in her—he called, checked in on her. Beth was a worker bee, and as she got sicker and sicker and less able to work, she was very, very, very, very sad, because she wanted to be out there, knocking on doors and making phone calls.

Sara Sullivan, Beth Wehrman’s Daughter: The day that all of us found out she was sick, she just went right back in to the campaign office. This was one of the big things in her life. The local caucus organizer, Tripp Wellde, was a really close friend of hers.

Cathy Bolkcom: Obama came back during Labor Day weekend in 2008 to do an event at the fairgrounds for undecided voters focused on small business owners. Beth was in the hospital, and she insisted that she was to come to the fairgrounds for the speech, so she was there in a wheelchair. She was not well. It was a very emotional time.

Beth was discharged and told there was nothing more they could do for her, so she went home to die. Her house was on my route to and from work, so I took to stopping by. We were not really tight friends. But I’ve found that when somebody’s dying, sometimes their friends go away because they’re not sure what to do or they don’t want to impose. The four young adult daughters who were all there caring for her at home told me she looked forward to my visits because she wanted to hear about the campaign. So I’d go by every day, and I’d fill her in. She was so bummed out because she couldn’t door knock and she couldn’t make phone calls. She so wanted to live long enough to see this man elected president of the United States.

We organized an event, “Beth’s Day of Action.” And I was able to say to her, “You’ve got to let this go. You can’t knock doors. But we’re going to take one day and we’re going to knock on more doors and make more phone calls than you could possibly have done during that time.” In the end, a hundred people showed up to knock on doors in Beth’s name on a Saturday in October.

I don’t know how many nights I went over and they said, “We don’t expect her to live through the night.” And the next morning, I’d go over, and she was still there. She just wanted to vote. Finally, absentee balloting started, and the ballot came to her house.

Leah White, Precinct Captain and Beth Wehrman’s Daughter: When that ballot showed up, it was symbolic, and it was very meaningful to all of us. I really do think that her passion and her drive about that gave us more time, because she really, really wanted to stick around and see it through.

Sara Sullivan: That was really monumental in her being able to let go. We didn’t know what she was waiting for, quite honestly, and after she voted, she passed away.

Barack called my dad and asked if there was anything that he could do. He said that my mom was one of his best volunteers. I remember my dad being very surprised that Barack had taken the time to call him and realizing what a big impact my mom had.

As Election Day grew closer, all of our efforts turned to early voting. People tend to think of Election Day as one day, but in several states, early and absentee voting allowed you to cast a ballot a month in advance. In states like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina, stressing the convenience of this became a huge part of our pitch to supporters.

Having caucused in Iowa, the first vote I ever cast for Barack Obama was at an early vote site in Raleigh one week before Election Day. I waited in line for an hour outside a suburban branch of a public library. Since so much of my time over the past few months had been spent talking to volunteers or convincing people to register, I had rarely been around ordinary citizens whose only connection to Obama would be visiting a voting booth during the general election. Watching the other people in line, overhearing their conversations, I had a palpable sense that history was unfolding, even if the outcome remained uncertain.

Tony Rediger, North Carolina Early Vote Director: Early vote was a huge priority in several states. North Carolina had what they called “one-stop early voting,” which meant even if you were unregistered, you could show up to the polls, register, and vote at the exact same time. So Election Day wasn’t just one day; it was several weeks.

There was some hesitancy among our supporters about early voting. There was just a lack of trust and the idea that by voting outside Election Day, your vote might not be counted. We had to really work to show that not only was this a safe way to vote but that it was what the Obama campaign wanted you to do.

To encourage early voting, we required every organizer to hold a certain number of early voting events in their turf. Souls to the Polls was a big program in which we encouraged churches to go en masse after worship. In some high-target areas, we had major surrogates hold speaking events right next to early voting sites, and everyone who showed up would be told “go vote right now.” In true North Carolina fashion, one organizer put together an early vote pig pickin’, where they set up a pig pickin’ across from a polling site. There were hundreds of events like these across the state.

So by the end of October, two million people in North Carolina had already voted, the majority of whom we thought were Obama supporters. Every day the Board of Elections released the list of who had voted, which meant every day we could cross all of those people off our list and focus only on those who had yet to turn out.

Ava Hinds-Lawson, Sunrise, FL, First-Time Volunteer: I voted early. It was Florida. I took every possible ID that I had. I remember I took my driver’s license, I took my nurse’s license, I took my work ID, I took my passport, I took everything with me because I was like, “There is no way they’re gonna stop me from voting today.” I took my mom. My mom was in her eighties, and she was ecstatic. Normally she voted by mail, and this time, she wanted to go to the polls. The idea that we might actually see a Black president in our lifetime—we wanted to be in the room where it happened.

I actually fell in love with Michelle first. Listening to her talk. The idea of a Black first lady was very appealing, and she was not just any Black first lady. She was educated, very, very knowledgeable about what she was talking about. I thought she was powerful and would be a powerful image for girls—for young Black girls, as a matter of fact, to see somebody like them in the White House. She was very real, and the fact that she was a working mother—when I would listen to her talk, her struggles sounded like my friends’ struggles.

I thought of girls I know, especially Natalie, my daughter, because I remember when Natalie was younger, she was almost always the only Black girl in her gifted class, and it was a struggle coming up. Coming from Jamaica, we’ve had our struggles—it was something that we felt that we had a duty to make happen.

Carrianna Suiter: The pleasure wasn’t necessarily even having the first Black president. It was being able to even cast that vote. It felt like such an emotional thing for many of the voters that we talked to. Regardless of whether he won or lost, that moment was historic.

Stephanie Speirs, Ohio Deputy Field Director: The historic nature of his candidacy was partially about race. But it was also, it seemed, about the inspiration that he was able to infuse into the election that people hadn’t felt in a really long time.

By that I mean, I had volunteers who had never voted in their entire lives, and yet they were canvassing every day for Barack Obama. These old grandmas would come in from their canvassing shift and ice their knees, because they shouldn’t have been walking. I had a woman who had Parkinson’s and couldn’t go door-to-door, but she would sit in our office for eight hours a day and write postcards to people in her town, trying to convince them to vote for Barack Obama, because it was her way of contributing. I was so lucky to witness stories like that, every single day.

That was my real-world manifestation of the historic nature of this candidacy. And it wasn’t really explicitly discussed on a day-to-day level in terms of race. I know that the media made that the main manifestation of the historic nature of the candidacy—and I believed it to be part of it. But what I thought was really historic was the way he could inspire so many different kinds of people to believe in a common cause. That’s what felt like we were part of a movement.

Megan Simpson, Southwest Montana Regional Field Director: I started Election Day with my family, who were volunteering back in Iowa, calling when they got up to start their staging location. Everyone was yelling, “I-O-W-A, Barack Obama All the Way!” All of them told me they loved me and were excited to talk when polls closed.

Lauren Kidwell: I woke up around 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. On Election Day, if you’ve done your job right, there’s not much for you to do except be stressed and clamor for information. I remember being prepared to deal with long lines, but it wasn’t an issue in Nevada. The day was kind of unremarkable.

Yohannes Abraham, Field Organizer: We were nervous wrecks that day. Every objective criterion pointed to us being in a position to win. But you just never know, particularly given the historic nature of this candidacy.

Tommy Vietor, Press Staff: In the back of your head, you have people telling you about the “Bradley effect,” and you think of the people who said they’d vote for an African American candidate when maybe they really wouldn’t. You’re thinking about all the things that could go wrong and all the ways polls could have been off.

I knew we were up in states. I knew the financial crisis pulled the bottom out from under McCain, because he didn’t know what the fuck to do. And so intellectually I felt really good, but emotionally I was a basket case.

Jason Waskey, Maryland Field Director: In the general election, Maryland shipped as many people as we could into Virginia and Pennsylvania to knock on doors and set up twenty-three call centers across our own state. On Election Day, the very first person I called was an older African American woman in West Philadelphia.

I said, “Ma’am, I’m calling to remind you that today is Election Day. Your polling place is…” and she let me go on.

Then she said, “You sound like a very nice young man. I want you to know that I’ve been ready for this Election Day my entire life. I was the first person to vote in my precinct this morning.”

That was the moment where I really felt the history that we were making. What a good first call to make.

Joe Cupka, Indianapolis, IN, Regional Field Director: On Election Day, Obama did one campaign event, in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I was the regional. I get a phone call: “Joe, the senator’s going to be at the UAW hall in Wayne Township for an unannounced stop.”

I went out to the front of this UAW hall, and Reggie Love, the senator’s traveling aide, got out of the car, came up, and gave me a big hug. I was wearing an Indiana sweatshirt. I had a white stocking cap on. I had a month-long beard. I looked absolutely wrecked after twenty-one months of campaigning.

Slowly getting out of the car after him was Barack Obama. He made eye contact with me and said, “Big Joe.”

He had met so many more people since Iowa, but he remembered who I was. That melted me. I said, “Sir, every minute of this has been worth it.”

And he said, “Let’s go win this thing.”

Ava Hinds-Lawson: Election Day, I was knocking on doors. I had never done this for another candidate before, and I was really passionate. I remember this elderly white man using a cane—I knocked on his door, it was almost five o’clock in the evening, and he was so upset. He was like, “I am not voting. I am not going.”

“Why?”

“The place that I voted for years—I went over there, and they told me that I was supposed to go vote some other place. I am not going back.” Then he saw who I was campaigning for, and he said, “I was going to vote for your guy.”

I said, “You still can!”

He said, “Well, I’m not going to.”

I was not having that. I took him in my car, drove him to the polling station, had him vote, and took him back home.

Meghan Goldenstein: Polls in Iowa were open until 9:00 p.m. Those last days, you had out-of-state people volunteering, and people were leaving early so they could get back in time to be in Grant Park. I cannot tell you how many volunteers asked, “Are you guys coming to Grant Park?” We’d say, “No, we’re staying here until polls close—we don’t get to just sneak out at five o’clock!”

Kal Penn, Surrogate and Out-of-State Volunteer: If you were an early surrogate, you got an invite to come to Grant Park for a victory celebration on election night. I was very appreciative, obviously, to be included in an invitation like that. But the first thing I thought was, “Well, what happens if we don’t win? Am I really going to be cool with myself if I’m in Chicago with everybody getting drunk, watching us lose?”

Florida was still a toss-up. So I went down to Gainesville, to the University of Florida, for three days of GOTV. It was cool to see a bunch of people who shared that belief that, like, hey, we should probably be knocking doors until the last possible second. We got rocks thrown at us by some college Republicans on Election Day, which was very classy.

Ava Hinds-Lawson: On election night, we all went over to my cousin Richard’s house, and we were gonna have a watch party—there were about thirteen of us glued to the TV. It was such a high. We had champagne. We had wine. We had a cake. We made a party out of it.

Stephanie Speirs: We were waiting, and we were waiting, and we were waiting. And someone screamed, “Oh my God, Fox News is calling it.” And someone said, “Turn it to ABC; it might not be real.”

Bess Evans, Field Organizer: Watching results come in, I remember exactly where I was standing when I heard Brian Williams say, “It’s 11:00 p.m. on the East Coast, and we have news…”

BRIAN WILLIAMS [NBC News]: It’s 11:00 p.m. on the East Coast, and we have news… an African American has broken the barrier as old as the republic. An astonishing candidate, an astonishing campaign, a seismic shift in American politics. You are looking at the forty-fourth president of the United States. The celebrations begin at 11:00 p.m. on election night. Let’s listen to Grant Park in Chicago.

Stephanie Speirs: And then the whole room exploded.

Thomas Zimmerman, Field Organizer: You heard cheers coming out of Grant Park, ricocheting off the buildings all around you. The whole city erupted in shouts. Everyone was so excited and emotional; everyone was hugging. You had all these people on the barrier crying and waving flags. On the cityscape they’d written “USA” across the buildings in lights.

Jon Favreau, Speechwriter: You could see this sea of people all the way up Grant Park. This incredibly diverse crowd cheering, crying. Every kind of American you could imagine. It was amazing… it was amazing.

Michael Blake, Political Outreach Staffer: I was running through the halls of the Renaissance Center in Michigan, saying, “We won! We won!” I remember jumping onstage, leading the chant, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

Marygrace Galston, Campaign for Change Director: In Virginia, I went behind the big screen and cried. My sister called me, and I cried. It was emotional and exciting. It was perfect. It was the greatest achievement of my life, other than having my daughter. Barack Obama winning the presidency was a culmination of so much work and money and blood and tears from everybody, and we helped put him in office. We changed the world that night.

Lauren Kidwell: In Vegas, we had our party at a casino. Just after the election had been called, I was walking around wearing my “Let’s go win this fucking thing” T-shirt. You would see one crowd of Obama people run into another crowd of Obama people, and cheers would go up. It was jubilant. In the casino, there were people cheering, hugging, high-fiving, laughing. And gambling.

I watched returns come in at a restaurant down the street from our Chapel Hill office. When Obama crossed 270 electoral votes, Andrew, whom I met at the first Students for Obama meeting in Iowa and later hired as a North Carolina organizer, hugged me. “Thanks for calling me,” he said as we wiped away tears.

The room was packed with celebrating volunteers. We walked outside and heard this roar start to build down the road. Thousands of students had rushed onto Franklin Street, as if UNC had just won the Final Four. We walked to the intersection. Some students recognized Andrew and hoisted him on their shoulders. He crowd-surfed through the street to chants of “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!” Traffic stood still, and a boom box blasted Obama’s victory speech.

Jon Favreau: He came to public life as a community organizer and believed deeply in that, and he wanted to build a movement that was about organizers and activists and ordinary people believing that they could actually change the world. That was a central thesis of his candidacy. So it felt obvious that on election night, as he claimed victory, it would be the victory of all the people who signed up to knock on doors and make phone calls and believed.

BARACK OBAMA [Speech Excerpt]: I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to—it belongs to you. I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign… was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from this earth. This is your victory.

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

Lauren Champagne, Field Organizer: We all just burst into tears, particularly the minorities in the room, because to see that happen was something we couldn’t describe in words, but we all felt it so deeply.

As a dark-skinned Black woman, you’re always told that you’re not attractive, or you’re not valued, or you’re not smart. Every year in school, no matter how well I did, I was told I shouldn’t go into the honors classes. Because you are African American, you are “less than.” You can’t be the Disney princess. You can’t be the president.

And to have this man do it and do it in such a graceful fashion, in a dominating way—that was amazing. The front page of our student newspaper was me and my best friend from law school embracing with tears streaming down our faces.

David Axelrod, Chief Strategist: Election night played out exactly as Obama said. All over the world, people were looking at the United States differently, and there were all these young people of color who were in disbelief and joy over what had happened. He really foresaw what that night would be like.

Marie Ortiz, Marshalltown, IA, Precinct Captain: I never thought it was actually going to happen until that night. I just didn’t think America was ready for that. No matter how far we’d come, we still had a long way to go. When he won, my great-grandma was the first person to call me. That brought tears to my eyes because she said, “I can’t believe it… I never thought it would happen in my lifetime.”

My kids, her great-great-grandchildren—she says she didn’t think it would happen in their lifetime. And I sat down and thought about it, all the stuff that she did. And she lived to see that day. So I thought, “My kids—we helped make history.” No matter what anybody says, we helped in our own little way, in Marshalltown, Iowa, make history.

Dean Fluker, Youth Vote Director, North Carolina: It was a really surreal moment, being surrounded by all that excitement. In Raleigh, I walked down the street late that night and saw all these people I did not know, also celebrating. Because at that point it was all so personal to us. We’d put eighteen months into this. And you think you know everybody, or at least they all know you. But to see these people in the street I’d never seen before, who were also so emotionally invested, that was a really cool moment I’ll never forget. Because we were a part of something that was so much larger than anything I had an inkling of.

Thomas Zimmerman: Day to day, there wasn’t this sense that you were making history. The story felt like this huge national moment, but the work in front of you was so all-consuming you rarely had the space and time to make that connection. It didn’t fully sink in until Grant Park.

Maggie Thompson, St. Paul, MN, Regional Field Director: We went to the watch party in this big hotel in downtown St. Paul. I felt relieved. I was not a screamer and jumper. I felt like every cell in my body sagged, and I was so tired but overjoyed.

I left the party and stopped at my favorite campaign restaurant, Hardee’s. I pulled into the drive-through, paid for my chili cheese fries, and drove into a parking spot. I thought, “I’m going to sit here for just a minute and eat my cheese fries.”

I woke up the next morning at 8:30 a.m. My car was still running, my doors were unlocked, and there was an unopened, congealed tray of chili cheese fries in my passenger seat. I had twenty-two missed calls. I had slept there the whole night.

Vera Kelly, Davenport, IA, Volunteer: I didn’t go to sleep at all. We were up all night long. And then I said, “Well, I’m going to the inauguration.”

Yohannes Abraham: The next day, I woke up, and my parents had gathered every newspaper they could get their hands on. Reading the headlines the next day, seeing the pictures, you felt like you were a part of something really, really special. The other people in your life validated that. There’s a lot of intrinsic satisfaction, a lot of external validation.

Greg Degen, Regional Field Director, Pennsylvania: It wasn’t until I saw the images of people from around the world celebrating that the historic nature of what we had done dawned on me. Being so young, and having had no prior experience in politics, I had no appreciation for how American politics is something that the entire world follows and feels invested in. So to realize that we had lifted the hopes of not only millions of Americans but millions of people around the world felt amazing and made me realize that what we were involved in was much bigger than our country—it was about the direction the entire world felt like it was going in.

Ava Hinds-Lawson, Sunrise, FL, First-Time Volunteer: You felt like a new day was dawning. Like something new was happening. And I knew that he could not have won with just the votes of Black people in America. I knew that a substantial amount of white America voted for him too.

Nicole Young: The next morning, the first thing I did was call my little brother, who was nine years old. I was like, “Matthew, do you know who won the election?”

He was like, “Duh, Barack Obama.” As if there was no question in his mind. Then he told me he had a school election the day before, and somebody had voted for McCain. But he was like, “But I knew that Barack Obama was going to win.”

For me as a Black woman, it was beautiful to know that my nine-year-old brother was never going to doubt that a Black man could win the presidency.

David Plouffe, Campaign Manager: The history of it didn’t dawn on me really until the next day. Then you started to see some of the video from around the world, and some commentary on it. We were just trying to win the presidency. We weren’t trying to make history.

Nearly seventy million people had voted for Obama, more than any candidate for president in American history. He ended up flipping nine states Bush had won in 2004, en route to earning 365 electoral votes. Even Indiana, which I had thought an impossible reach, ended up in our column.

By Wednesday evening, copies of the New York Times were selling for $400 on eBay as images of celebration rolled in from across the world. Kenya declared a national holiday; “Histórico!” read front-page headlines in Peru, Portugal, and Panama. Nelson Mandela published an open letter congratulating the president-elect: “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.” Our office filled with volunteers looking to reminisce and souvenir hunters I had never met.

The week after the election was one long, rolling goodbye. Our Chapel Hill volunteers hosted a party, where I hugged the local retired women who made the operation run and offered vague promises to keep in touch. Durham for Obama, which in less than nine months had grown from an online grassroots group to an eleven-thousand-person volunteer organization, was already planning to pivot to local issues. I printed up farewell presents for each organizer at Kinko’s—a photoshopped map of their turf inside a six-dollar Walmart frame, showing Obama had won North Carolina by 14,177 votes and comparing the turnout from 2004 to that of 2008. At the bottom was the quote from Obama’s victory speech about the volunteers and organizers to whom his victory belonged. When I paid for my copies, the Kinko’s associate, who looked to be in his midforties, said, “First time I voted for president, man,” and smiled.

Soon after, the North Carolina staff had a farewell gathering that brought everyone in from across the state and eventually migrated to our apartment. I ended the night eating cereal out of a box with my hands and softly singing Usher’s “Love in This Club” until I fell asleep midchorus, surrounded by now-former colleagues. Saturday, I cleaned the stacks of unused Obama stickers out of my back seat, threw away the three inches of trash that had accumulated since June, and headed west toward Iowa.

Megan Simpson: My office was packed up, and that’s when it hit me: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing now.” Because for a year and a half, you had goals, and you had places you had to be. And then all of a sudden you didn’t have to do anything.

I decided that I wanted to do a road trip. I drove out of Montana with another staffer, and I went to Arizona for a couple of days. We stopped at the Grand Canyon. We drove through Utah and saw Zion National Park. Drove through Idaho. I felt a little lost, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. “Should I go back to school?” I wondered. I had a lot of decisions that I didn’t want to make.

Meghan Goldenstein: I went back home. I got really sick, because it’s what your body does when you haven’t slept in forever. Somehow you stay healthy through adrenaline and then crash when everything’s over. It feels like the world has stopped around you, because you’re so used to the relentless pace.

There were some people that went straight to Georgia, because there was a special election for the US Senate that was going to happen four weeks later. I remember being so jealous because they were still riding the train. I wanted to be doing that. But it would have felt like running away from people that I had already put on hold for too long.

Nicole Young: I remember watching David Axelrod saying, “It’s like the end of the TV show M.A.S.H., where you’ve been at war this whole time, you loved all these people, you’ve done this thing together, and you’re really glad to be going home, because the number one thing you want to do is go home. But then also you know you’ll never have this moment again. You’ll never be with these people in this way again. And you kind of don’t want to go home, but you have to go home.”

That perfectly explained every feeling I had, which was this deep, deep absence of purpose, of community, of shared passion and vision for the world. I found myself missing so many moments afterward. I missed the thrill of going state to state and being able to be like, “I’m the Obama girl.” Like I’d walk into a local Democratic meeting or a union meeting, and they’d be like, “There’s the Obama girl.” I missed that. I missed my volunteers. I knew we could never re-create that moment, and I felt the loss immediately.

Pete Rouse, Obama Senate Chief of Staff: 2008 was unique, in terms of what it was like to be part of an effort of that magnitude, with those stakes. It’s an amazing example of talented, dedicated individuals—from field organizers to the most senior people in the campaign—sublimating their own egos and their own personal goals and needs to the greater cause. I’d never been part of anything like that before, and I’m sure I won’t be again.

Janice Rottenberg, Hamilton County, OH, Field Organizer: After the campaign was over and I went back to school, I used to call into freeconferencecall.com just to listen to the music because I missed the campaign so much. I was so confused about what I was supposed to do now that I was a college kid again and not an organizer. I was eighteen. For me it was life changing that somebody had said to me, “You seem to be pretty good at this.” And I thought this could be a thing I keep doing.

Lauren Kidwell: There was a conference call with Plouffe and President-Elect Obama, who got on and said something like, “Thank you all. Come to Washington. There will be a spot in my administration for anybody who wants to work for me,” which didn’t turn out to be true. He wasn’t trying to make false promises, but I think we were all naïve to the realities of how few slots there were going to be. We could have done a better job setting expectations.

Howli Ledbetter: I didn’t know what I was going to do. I kept getting sick after the campaign. My personal life was in total shambles. I’d broken up with my boyfriend in New York. I’d started dating somebody else in North Carolina, who was about to deploy to Iraq. There was this feeling when the campaign ended, like, “Of course everybody’s going to the White House. Put your résumé on change.gov; they’ll call you any minute.” I lived on my girlfriend’s couch in San Francisco and started applying for jobs after it became very clear we weren’t all getting jobs at the White House.

Yohannes Abraham: There were multiple moments over the next couple weeks where I’d catch myself getting emotional about what had happened. It was another weird time because it had been eight years since the last Democratic president. It had been sixteen years since the last Democratic inauguration.

There was no road map, like if we win, I wanna do X, or if we win, I wanna do Y. Almost nobody had that clarity of vision because we had been focused on the mission. For the first time in a year and a half, you had to ask, “What do I wanna do with my life?”

Kal Penn: I resumed my job on a TV show, so I had something to go back to. I remember thinking, “I just spent a year going to more than half the country telling young people they should vote for a guy for the following reasons. Shouldn’t I help execute these promises?”

Maggie Thompson: When we started looking for jobs, the economy had just collapsed. It was depressing because we had just gotten off this amazing experience, but a lot of our parents were losing their savings. It was a rough time in addition to the more existential question: “What do I do now?”

Yohannes Abraham: It’s a hard pivot from being a part of something historic and huge to worrying about a paycheck. You had to very quickly figure out how you were gonna pay your bills.

I arrived back home and watched the Obama transition play out over television. The economy was losing eight hundred thousand jobs per month, and Obama’s appointments seemed designed to stress unity and stability in the wake of a divisive predecessor. There were early Obama endorsers named to key posts, but nearly every rival from the primary who had not become engulfed in scandal was given the chance to serve in the cabinet. Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, who had dropped out of the race two weeks after Obama’s announcement and become Hillary Clinton’s top Iowa supporter, was named secretary of agriculture. Bill Richardson was briefly named secretary of commerce before withdrawing due to an ethics investigation. Joe Biden ended up as vice president.

The biggest surprise was Hillary Clinton’s appointment as secretary of state, followed closely by the reappointment of George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. “I am a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions. That’s how the best decisions are made,” Obama said. “I will welcome vigorous debate inside the White House, but understand I will be setting policy as president. The buck will stop with me.”

Slowly, an Obama presidency was starting to take shape. These appointments, Bush’s unpopularity, and the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy turned his inauguration into a bipartisan moment of celebration—counterprogramming to the worst crisis since the Great Depression. When I landed in Washington, DC, three days before his swearing-in, the commercialization of the Obama brand was everywhere: Hennessey cognac released a limited edition “44” label, Pepsi redesigned their logo as an homage to the Obama O (“Yes You Can!”), IKEA had built a replica Oval Office in its Union Station store (“Change Begins at Home”), and street vendors hocked Obama condoms.

Ava Hinds-Lawson: I couldn’t wait to get to DC. I bought my ticket for the inauguration before he even got the nomination—for me, my mom, my husband. I bought tickets for everybody. A lot of people that I knew were going. We were bursting with excitement. The plane was half full with people who were headed to DC for the inauguration, so it was a party atmosphere—there were people on the flight chanting, “Yes, we can! Yes, we did!”

Meghan Goldenstein: On Inauguration Day, I got up at 5:00 a.m. The metro was packed. We layered up in seventeen layers of clothing. Everything felt momentous and exciting again. Like, “This is historic. How lucky are we to be here to be part of this?”

There was a line to get onto the metro at Bethesda. The trains would come, and they were all standing room only. Your platform was full, and you packed on.

Jan Bauer, Story County, IA, Democratic Party Chair: For me, and I think for a lot of people, the fact that he was African American just didn’t matter. Of course, we, the folks that were saying this, were not African American. I was oblivious to it, you know? For me, it was just winning the caucus for a guy I truly believed in.

Well, of course, it’s hugely important. It took the inauguration for me to wake up. I was amazed at just how many people were so energized by the fact that he was the first African American president. The city was alive. It was electric. I was sitting in a section near the Tuskegee Airmen. That was really powerful.

Annie Corine Bennett, Former South Carolina Volunteer: It was a feeling that I cannot describe. It was cold. It was cold, but I was so happy to be there. It was a beautiful day.

Michael Blake: I was on the bus with the King family on our way to the Capitol. I was silent out of respect. I didn’t know what to say. When we pulled up, MLK III turned to us and said, “Thank you.” I just teared up.

You got up to the Capitol, and it was chaos everywhere. We were trying to figure out where to go stand. We stood up on the platform and looked out. I saw this endless sea of people.

David Axelrod: It’s a cliché to say “a sea of humanity,” but there were people as far as the eye could see. It was astonishing. You couldn’t move in the streets of Washington leading up to the inauguration without running into crowds of people who had come from all over.

Lauren Champagne: You had all these people descend on DC from different walks of life. As President Obama was speaking, my friend and I were just outside of the gate and could hear the speakers. We ended up right next to this couple we had never met, and we started crying and hugging each other. That was the joy. Euphoria. There was no fighting. People were happy. They were just randomly hugging each other and chanting and crying and excited. Every race, color, creed, whatever. It was beautiful.

Nicole Young: “We did that.” That was the refrain in my brain the whole day. Even when my feet were going numb and I put hand warmers in my shoes and we were standing in the freezing cold. Being able to be in that crowd and watch that man be sworn in as president was just amazing.

Elizabeth Wilkins, Michigan Field Director: I was in the purple ticket tunnel of doom. But everybody was so happy that I didn’t really care. I just wanted to be a part of it. We got out of the tunnel, but we couldn’t get into the gate, so I ended up too far away to see or hear well.

I was with a friend, and we could have been super disappointed, but there was an older white couple that had an old-school transistor radio. We huddled around this little radio and were a part of the crowd. I loved it. All of these people had traveled from all over the country because they were so excited about this moment, and we were there together.

It was the first time over the course of the campaign I felt like, “I’m just a citizen of this country, and I get to be a part of the public narrative, and there’s something amazing about that.”

I had two purple tickets for the swearing-in, which made my friend and I one of 1.8 million people trying to get through security to the National Mall. Stuck in our assigned tunnel entrance that would become known informally as the “purple ticket tunnel of doom,” we eventually gave up and walked around the parade security perimeter. Thirty minutes before Obama’s swearing-in, we found space to stand just in front of the World War II Memorial, nearly two miles west of the Capitol. I watched Obama’s inaugural address on the jumbotrons surrounding the Washington Monument. When he finished, a man near me turned to a stranger and asked their name. “I want to remember who I was standing next to when I saw this,” he said.

We had planned to line the parade route, but the crowd was too overwhelming. We slowly made our way east along the National Mall, across the highway, past the Capitol, and to the room I had rented for the weekend. When we finally arrived, CNN showed the Obamas in their bulletproof review stand, watching the inaugural parade.

Steve Dunwoody, Former Field Organizer: The parade went on so long there weren’t enough people in the parade box behind the president and they needed to make it look full, so they asked me and a couple others to sit there, acting like we were guests.

When the military came down the street, Barack was turned around talking to someone, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave him a little elbow nudge to say, “Mr. President, military is coming down the street.” Barack turned around to return the salute. That was such a moment for me.

Melvin Shaw, Former Iowa Caucus Precinct Captain: I didn’t go into the office that day. I remember watching the inauguration on CNN and watching President Obama and Michelle walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Watching him walk down the street and seeing the throngs of people and hearing some who didn’t think that he could win now remarking about how historic it was.

I felt ownership because I had participated. I hadn’t just gone into a voting booth and cast a ballot, but I was actually telling folks throughout the campaign why they should make a switch. I had moved from being inactive to being an advocate. So Inauguration Day was euphoria. It was “We made it.” I walked taller. I’m not kidding. I walked taller the next day. Because I felt as though I identified with President Obama. I felt as though he were a common man. Some say it was because he was Black, but that’s not it. I felt taller because I thought the country would be different for my child. I truly did.

Cathy Bolkcom, Former Iowa Volunteer: After the election, we were talking about how we weren’t going to Washington for the balls. We decided we should have an inaugural ball here in the Quad Cities. So I signed contracts for a ballroom at the River Center for dinner for hundreds of people. We had two bands. We had big-screen projector TVs that I got a guy to donate in exchange for a table. It was fifty dollars a ticket for dinner and dancing and the whole nine yards. The night of the ball, we had to turn people away, because we were full at 525 people. It was full-out formal.

Kal Penn: I took my parents to the Southwest State Inaugural Ball. I remember it being such a scene, because it wasn’t just the campaign alumni; it included all these old school DC people who were more interested in taking their picture and networking than celebrating the moment. It was everything about politics that I didn’t like.

Ava Hinds-Lawson: The day after inauguration, we went and drove by the White House and were like, “He’s situated. We’re happy. We’re glad.”

I felt proud that I helped make it happen. I volunteered. I’d never done near anything like that before, but I was proud that I was able to go out despite all my fears and all my trepidation and knock on doors to say, “We gotta do this.” I was not fearful at all doing that. Now I would be. And prior to it, I might have been.

For my little male cousins, the really young boys—there were four of them at the time—I made a binder memorializing the campaign, election, and inauguration and gave it to them. I told them that they could add to it as his presidency went on. I still have all the newspapers. I have every magazine cover that they were on. I can’t afford to forget that era.

The final inauguration event was the one I most looked forward to: the staff ball. Every campaign staffer was invited to the DC Armory hall for a thank-you party. Jay-Z was the headliner. Arcade Fire opened in front of a banner that declared “Renewing America’s Promise.” I screamed along to every song they played.

“This is the funnest party I’ve ever been to for a bunch of people who just lost their jobs,” lead singer Win Butler said.

“Ninety-nine problems, but a Bush ain’t one,” Jay-Z rapped.

“If I’d known how good you guys were, I’d have never gone to Iowa,” Joe Biden said when he took the stage.

For the first and only time, this group of people were together in the same room, celebrating the accomplishment so many had thought impossible. Walking through the hall, I kept recognizing alumni from different primary states. Many friends walked over to meet David Plouffe, connecting a face to the intense, hyper-disciplined, disembodied voice that had directed our lives for nearly two years via conference call.

David Plouffe: By inauguration weekend, the history really had sunk in.

Because I was mostly in the headquarters in Chicago during the general election or on the plane, I didn’t meet most of the staff out in the states. So the night of the staff ball I had hundreds of conversations with people, and they largely would be, “Hey, I’m Chris, and I worked in Pennsylvania.”

I’d say, “Where in Pennsylvania?” They’d say the town and the county. For the most part, I could remember the result and congratulate or say, “You kept it close,” or would ask them to tell me about the volunteers.

“I was in Asheville, North Carolina.” “I was in Fort Myers, Florida.” “I was in Laconia, New Hampshire.”

Walking through that hall for a couple hours and meeting everybody, hearing their stories, was so incredibly powerful. It was one of the more meaningful nights of the whole enterprise for me. There it was. That was the campaign. All these young kids who had gone to different places in the country—a lot of them for the first time—experiencing these communities, making it happen.

Bess Evans: I remember going to the staff ball and thinking, “Who are all these people? This was much bigger than I even thought.” Because you sort of rolled with people that you knew—we never did an all-staff get-together before that staff ball.

So I remember seeing Thomas Zimmerman and that Iowa crew. And there were a lot of tears. Every picture I have of that night has me with mascara running down my face.

Thomas Zimmerman: The staff ball was like a constant parade. You’re walking through this darkened room and keep bumping into people. You bump into people from Iowa, and then you bump into people from Chicago. There was an element of it like when you watch the end sequence of a movie where they run through the text of where everyone went.

Lauren Champagne: It just seemed like a family reunion. People you collected and met during different primaries all gathered together. That was the best thing, being able to celebrate with all the people you met along the way.

Kal Penn: They asked me to introduce Plouffe, who was then going to introduce the president. Backstage in this hallway at the staff ball, there were thirty tactical assault team guys who rolled in heavily armed. There was a little buffer, and then the Secret Service guys in suits show up. Then I saw the boss, and I was like, “Holy shit.”

That was the moment when I realized all of those individual people who thought, “I want to vote because my student loans are too exorbitant” or “I lost my cousin in Afghanistan” or “I don’t have health insurance”—all of those individuals added up to electing this guy. And now he was the president, with everything that comes along with that. It was a really sobering visual.

You work on a campaign early enough, everybody is just a human. You know all the staff. And then you cut to this surreal moment where what you have the opportunity to do and represent for your country is so much bigger. That image, that contrast—I remember feeling simultaneously very proud of the work that we had done and very humbled by what was about to happen over the next four years.

Lauren Kidwell: The last event of the inauguration was President Obama thanking the staff. He’d always identified with us—he’d been a community organizer when he was in his twenties, and you really felt that come through in that speech.

Meghan Goldenstein: Apart from having this three-day trip to DC, some of us were in kind of a dark place. As somebody who was there that night feeling very uncertain about what my next steps were going to be—knowing I was off this train and worried there wasn’t going to be a chance to get back on—it was great to be back among all your people. But it also highlighted the extent to which a lot of them were already doing new things in DC or in their own states. It’s easy to feel like you’re the only one who’s like, “OK. Well, I’m going to go home and go back to living with my mom when this weekend’s done.”

I was in a place where I wondered if this would be the most amazing thing that I did with my whole life… and it was over.

Greg Degen: The day before inauguration, I turned twenty-one. So at the staff ball, I was excited that I could now finally drink with my colleagues after having spent a year and a half watching them drink without me.

It was a very uncertain time for a lot of the staff. I had to go back to college, so I didn’t expect to have a job, but expectations had been a bit mismanaged for how likely it was going to be that people would work for the administration. It’s weird to be twenty and feel like you’ve done the most important thing that you might ever do. I remember thinking a lot about that Bruce Springsteen song “Glory Days,” about middle-aged people who only talk about the time they won a high school baseball championship. I remember thinking, “Is that gonna be us? Because we’re already doing a lot of reminiscing about the Iowa caucus, and it’s only been a year.”

There was this lingering question: “What can we do that would ever be so important again?” And at that staff ball, Barack Obama answered that question by giving a speech about how to think about the next step.

BARACK OBAMA [Speech Excerpt]: So many of you are at the start of your careers… take the spirit, the culture of this campaign, and keep applying it not just to campaigns. That sense of possibility that you guys can do anything. That you can reimagine the world. That you can lead—not by trying to manipulate your way, or push somebody else out of the way, but instead lead through the force of your example… I just hope that you carry that with you everywhere you go. Because that’s what America needs right now. Active citizens like you who are willing to turn toward each other, talk to people you’ve never met, and say, “C’mon, let’s go do this—let’s go change the world.”

For the rest of your lives, cling on to that essential thing about you. What made this campaign special was you. And don’t let anybody forget that. Don’t let anybody take that away from you! Because I promise you if everybody in this hall is willing to keep doing what you guys did over the last two years, then I’m optimistic about America. I may make some mistakes, but you’ll set me right. And after I’m out of office, then you’ll set the next person right.

Meghan Goldenstein: To have him say, “You don’t all have to do this. You’re going to continue this work. Not just in DC, not just if you work for my administration, not just if you run for office.” The nature of that quote was essentially, “I believe in you, and you can continue to carry the same principles to whatever spaces you’re leading in.”

That was really impactful. So much of his campaign was about sharing your stories and finding connections and realizing that your experience is valuable. Your view is unique, and yet you have more in common with people than you think, if you reach out and find connection.

I watched it enough times when I got home that some of those phrases stayed in my head. There were thousands of people there that night, but I would think, “He’s talking about me. I’m going to hold on to this. There are plenty of days where I don’t necessarily believe that this is true. But the president of the United States believes this is true. So I’m going to fake it until I make it.”

Bess Evans: There wasn’t an ounce of cynicism in me. I remember feeling, “We can take this and apply it to the rest of our lives.” And yes, some of that has been broken down in me. But for the most part, I still truly believe that. We had proven all those cynics wrong. “They said this day would never come.” They did. And it did.

Greg Degen: I had always felt like Election Day was the end. But this was the first time I realized it was the beginning. And in some ways, there is no beginning and end.

We’re part of a continuum of Americans who are just trying to make their country better. This need to improve the country, this need to be an active participant in democracy—it never ends. I remember when Trump was elected, I had the exact same realization I had on the day after Obama’s inauguration: “This never ends.”

There is no perfect union. You just keep making it.