working on the obama campaign, november 2007 to april 2008
In late 2007, my parents desperately wanted me to get out of the house. I had just graduated from Denver East High School, wasn’t going to college, and my position got eliminated where I worked (I wasn’t fired, unlike future jobs). I needed to either work or volunteer full-time somewhere, so because it was the easiest option available, I started volunteering for the Obama campaign.
I can only speculate about my 18 year-old self’s reasons for preferring Obama. People on Something Awful liked him, I think? He was definitely the “young people’s candidate,” even if he was thought of as a longshot compared to Hillary at the time. A lot of things in this story continually come back to “well, I was 18,” and preferring unpaid volunteering to school or work is definitely one of those seemingly-inexplicable things.
The second day I showed up, they asked if I wanted to be an intern. So I was an intern. There wasn’t really any difference between volunteer and intern, but hey, internship. In December, they asked me if I wanted to go down to Iowa for a weekend. I said sure. I got a ride down with a staffer on the campaign, and we had a long, icy drive, where the car completely spun out once and took us into a snowbank. The car’s radio was broken, and the small iPod speaker kept playing.
As soon as we got there in Council Bluffs, someone already working in the office asked if I actually wanted to stay for the remaining three weeks through the caucus. I only packed three days of clothes, but sure.
(Bit of explanation for my non-American readers or anyone who isn’t a huge political nerd: the series of state-by-state party elections that select a nominee are divided into primaries and caucuses. Primaries are pretty traditional voting: you show up and cast a ballot. Caucuses are different and weirder and not, technically, voting. You show up in person at a specific time, and someone counts, sometimes via raised hands, how many people support a certain candidate. They’re cheap to run, encourage people to meet people involved in local politics face-to-face, and by their nature exclude a huge number of people that would have voted in a primary. There’s no such thing as absentee voting, and if you’re working that night at 7pm, well, sucks for your candidate. Because they require people to show up in person and hang out, sometimes for hours, they heavily favor candidates with highly passionate followers and enthusiastic on-the-ground organizers. So, Obama and Sanders easily clobbered Clinton in caucuses.)
In all the media coverage about the scheming of various political campaigns, it makes it seem like these are tightly-run organizations with House of Cards-style intrigue. There’s some of that, especially at higher levels, but on the ground of the Obama campaign in 2007–2008, it was fresh college graduates on their first political campaigns absolutely winging it. Someone who was 23 and had worked on a midterm campaign was a veteran, someone who was 27 and had worked for Kerry was an elder statesman, and anyone who had gotten a real full-time job in anything political was a powerful boss with a good chance of advising Obama in person.
How high up in the organization you were on a state level often came down to how early in the campaign you’d shown up. The head of the Colorado campaign had opened the office by himself. A woman showed up soon after to be the first volunteer. She became the director of communications for the state. (Those two are now married with two kids.)
A day in the Council Bluffs office went like this: arrive at 9am and get hit with a wall of stench. The septic tank in the building was broken, and for the first minute or so each time one entered the building, it was impossible to ignore. Fortunately, olfactory fatigue meant that it wasn’t noticeable pretty quickly, thank god.
For unpaid people like myself, the bulk of the day was for canvassing, or getting ready to. The main weapon was the “walk packet,” multi-hundred-page printouts of likely Democratic primary voters. Next to each name were the numbers 1–5, for the canvasser to circle indicating how likely they were to caucus for us. Then, the evenings were for making phone calls, and all the data we had collected that day (all hand-written, including for phone calls) had to be entered before we left the office. That usually took us until about 1am.
It was simultaneously the most exhausting and energy-providing environment possible. 16-hour days didn’t leave room for anything other than the campaign. Even if we had had an evening off to go hang out together, we hadn’t done anything other than the campaign for weeks, so what else is there to talk about? But it’s not like we were working in a factory; it was an exciting environment, and we all really felt like we were part of something. Everyone was there because they wanted to be.
Iowa is politically a unique place, specifically because of this every-four-year process of the caucus. The system rewards active engagement so much, and there’s so much focus on relatively few people, that an individual voter has exponentially more power than they do anywhere else. There were people that, every four years, had every candidate in a certain party over to their house for dinner. Sure, there are plenty of Iowans sick of politicians constantly trying to get their attention, but it’s also pretty flattering. Most of them seemed like they had just accepted it as an aspect of being Iowan.
The fun days were the events (or rallies, whatever you want to call them). Local field offices didn’t have to do any of the tough logistical work; that was what the candidate’s advance team did. We helped out with some of the grunt work of setting up chairs or whatever, then served as ushers, etc. As an 18 year-old who’d never had a girlfriend, I mostly used it as an opportunity to talk to girls, to mixed results.
At one of these days events, all the volunteers got a picture with Obama, as a group. He walked in, said “hey, guys,” gave that big young Obama grin, everyone crowded around, someone took a picture, and he left. I’m in it. But because I was an intern, not a volunteer, they never sent it to me. So someone (or probably 20–30 someones) have a picture of me with him, but I don’t.
The night three days before the caucus had my favorite moment of the whole experience. The whole office was on full alert late at night, waiting for the Des Moines Register poll to drop at midnight; the final, and by far the most important, poll of the entire process. The head of the office had us on conference call with the entire state. I was, as usual, reading Laissez’s Fair (a jokey political subforum, the precursor to leftist Twitter) on Something Awful, and about ten minutes before midnight, someone had URL hacked their way the newspaper’s web site to get the story about the poll before it officially went live. It was (accurately) very good for us. I ran into the boss’s office, shouting the poll numbers as he held up to the phone, and the statewide cheers across the landline are probably the height of validation I’ll receive in my entire life.
“Polls don’t mean shit, okay? Polls don’t mean shit,” was the response from the state director.
(I googled who that was, and found this tweet from Jon Favreau, which tells me it was Paul Tewes who said it, and corrected my timeline of the event. We have different memories of the quote. Maybe he said both, maybe Favreau is right and I’m wrong.)
In one less good memory of myself, someone had taken a quick video of… something. I forget what. I think it was for a documentary project about the campaign. It contained a clip of me saying something (to a volunteer I had an enormous crush on), and hearing myself… did I really say that? I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember how smug I sounded, so arrogant. I had no idea I was that big of an asshole. That’s something I started learning then.
I remember absolutely nothing about the day of the caucus.
My next memory is back on my home turf in Denver, in the campaign’s brand-new, much bigger office. I went up to the state director (now a much more important person than he had been when I worked with him pre-Iowa) and said that I could come to the office full-time now, instead of just intermittently like I did in November.
“Great. New staff meeting is tomorrow.”
So that was my hiring.
The people I worked with the closest in Iowa, including the person who drove me there, were now the Youth Vote team, so I became the (paid) intern working with them. I never got an official title. The closest I got is when we went through the drive through at Burger King and he couldn’t reach the food, so he pulled up a little further so I could reach out the window, and I declared my title was now “Youth Vote Outreach.”
The hours got even longer. We usually left after 1am, with the declaration of “let’s get the fuck out of here.” Some campaign workers were sharing Adderall for the late nights of data entry. I worked those hours for about the last two weeks before the caucus, where we absolutely crushed Clinton. I wasn’t as hard of a worker as everyone else, I’m sure; I remember a specific callout from the state director that I’d do my data entry the day after the caucus.
I didn’t have an actual job offer or anything, but pretty much everyone from the Denver office was headed to Texas. And I had an important reason to go along: I had a long-distance friendship with a girl I had met on Something Awful, and she lived in San Antonio. So I decided that I had to go to Texas for that reason. For some reason, everyone else was okay with this. I hitched a ride down to Austin, stayed in one of the campaign-bought hotel rooms with someone else, and pretty much just spent a week asking around if anyone needed help with anything.
Being a huge nerd, I fell in with the IT guy. As the person in charge of an important aspect of the campaign’s logistics for the state, he was… a 21 year-old. Unlike me, he had actual training. My knowledge consisted of building my own computer so I could play Guild Wars. But, as should be clear right now, the most important thing on a campaign is energy and showing up. He and the other IT guy taught me how to crimp CAT5 cable, and we popped out the ceiling tiles in the Austin office to run it through, in ways that I’m sure are wildly against all sorts of building code.
I had also met a field organizer who wanted me to go with him to be, essentially, his office assistant in Red Rock. From my understanding, the IT guy went over his head and told his superiors that they instead needed me to be the IT person for the city of San Antonio.
This is the part that still baffles me. I was wildly out of my depth. I could barely set up a home WiFi network. Somehow, between knowing how to Google stuff and pretty frequently calling up the real IT people for help, I made it through three weeks as IT for the city without completely losing the campaign single-handedly. But questions like, “how the hell am I going to fake my way through this” were less important than whether I’d be able to meet that girl from Something Awful.
We walked down the River Walk and kissed in what’s basically a glorified mall. That’s still the only time I’ve met her in person.
After we lost the Texas primary, I was moved up again, this time to be the assistant IT person for the state of Pennsylvania. This was for six weeks, not just a short burst of activity like the previous ones. Someone else told me that the IT person had basically become my biggest fan, and would count down the days to his coworkers until I got there.
This was the closest I’ve been, physically and relationship-wise, to real political power. The back office where I worked, slightly isolated from the large main volunteer space, housed the state director and others. One day, after a small but funny blunder where Obama went bowling and did absolutely atrocious, the man who had planned the bowling event was waving his hands yelling “bowling! What a great idea! Genius! No way it could go wrong!” (That did lead to Obama’s pledge to rip up the bowling alley in the White House and replace it with a basketball court. Yet another unkept promise from the OBAMAILURE, I guess.)
Pennsylvania is where I would finally let people down in a way that was fatal to my future political prospects. Everything seemed okay through the end of the primary (which, again, we lost): I took care of in-office troubleshooting and pretty much everything that wasn’t important enough for the main guy to deal with. This was the most relaxed atmosphere, where I only had to be there 12–13 hours a day; on many days, my task was the euphemistic “availability” (sit there and help anyone who needs tech troubleshooting).
It was also tasked to me to take care of campaign tech assets. One fairly important (for our scale) donor to the campaign lent her laptop for us to use. I handed it off to one of our supervolunteers (basically, a volunteer reliable enough to manage other volunteers; practically low-level staff) to delegate out to other people. After the primary, she wanted her laptop back. It was like… a $1500 computer, or something.
It was gone. The supervolunteer who I had passed it off to was now in France or something. The donor wasn’t mad at me- to the contrary, she was completely understanding that these things happen, she just wanted a replacement. The campaign, though, only had insurance on campaign property, not stuff lent to it. My boss the IT guy, previously the guy who had in multiple states boosted me into roles which were really above my skillset, told me that I’d get my contract for the next state as soon as the situation with the woman’s laptop was “squared away.”
So I was stuck. I didn’t have $1500 to buy a replacement laptop. My stipend pay was only $500 every two weeks, and that was all gone from buying food and etc. Instead of finding another solution, I just… didn’t. So I didn’t work on the campaign any more.
This is probably the single biggest fuckup and regret of my life. Other people who had joined the campaign after I did ended up with White House jobs. I volunteered some on the general election, but my work ethic wasn’t the same. I’m spent a lot of time dicking around on my laptop pretending to work, and I never got another stipend check.
It was a learning experience. How I feel about the whole thing really depends on the day. Sometimes I feel like the entire Obama administration ended up as basically a failure, so what I did was worthless; other times, I feel like I was on the precipice of really doing something important with my life until I fucked it up.
The best summary is really that I was a kid. I didn’t know anything, and even my ten-years-later memory of it includes a bunch of times where I do or say something dumb, or arrogant, or just immature. I hope there’s some people out there with fond memories of me, but I’m sure there are others with less-than-good ones. My prized possession, for a time, was the Iowa caucus button with the Obama logo. It was on a jacket I lost somewhere.
A lot of stuff from the campaign came flooding back to me as soon as Hillary lost to Trump. “Oh, right,” I suddenly remembered, “her team sucks at this.”
Because I only worked on the campaign during the time we were against Hillary, I followed the day-to-day stories about what the campaigns were doing really closely. People often forget how ridiculous she acted during parts of that campaign (eg fake southern accent), and how her campaign was very obviously behind the Jeremiah Wright story and other blatant race baiting. It wasn’t originally Republicans voting against Obama because they thought he was a Muslim, it was Democrats in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Her campaign in 2008 was amazing at manipulating the day-to-day media narrative, because they knew all those establishment news types. But they were either terrible at on-the-ground organizing or dismissive of it entirely. You pretty much have to be, to come in to the first race in primary season as the establishment candidate and come in third behind John Edwards (remember him?) and a guy named Barack Hussein Obama in a state that’s around 90% white.
It should go without saying, but all of this (other than the one correction via the Favreau tweet) is my personal memory, which has never been the most functional thing. I’m sure other people remember aspects of this very differently than me.
