Why Obama Can Win

I feel like I’ve already written this post a million times over in my head since volunteering, and again and again in the heated conversations I keep having with so many people today. Add to that my one-sided, cursing salvos with the talking heads on the TV, who are still talking about absolutely nothing at all, as I watch shocky over their callous treatment of Obama’s results.

But being out to experience the city’s reception of the Democratic candidates (I never once saw sign of a Republican, or a shred of their brochures) taught me more about the dynamics of the election than the news has yet projected.

This is how Obama will do it:

What was absolutely the most remarkable thing about standing on a streetcorner reminding — telling, asking, cajoling, debating, urging people to vote for Barack Obama — was that you never knew, you could never, ever guess who would be the most receptive to his name. It was impossible to profile Obama’s audience from afar. It was impossible to tell from the number of years a person had or their sex or their shoes who would stop and say that they had voted for him already.

Those who did seemed to share the flurry of the moment with me. They took the big bright rectangle signs, took them so fast after one train I had to make a third trip uptown for more materials. We fielded endless requests for stickers and buttons: supplies had run out near us long ago by the evening. I turned down countless disappointed faces keen on having their very own blue Vote Obama sticker. It’s hard to explain how much that sticker served as an identifier and a signifier and a badge of honor that day.

My sister’s worked on and helped run her fair share of campaigns, and she said the stickers are inevitably the first to go, and that nevermind the campaign, no one’s ever figured to order enough of them beforehand.

I had people in every age group take the fliers, with every race represented. I wasn’t being shy about what I was representing. For every person who took the flier on reflex, there were ten more who took it with interest. Some shared eager talk with me; others still wanted stickers. Some had voted and some were planning to. I caught a surprising amount of excitement from the senior citizen community, but I shouldn’t have doubted them: our well-seasoned elders know by comparison when we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle, which has been our only surety for a long time.

They also often have earned the comfort to be progressive, the room to think. Like me in a strange inverse, these people who could be my grandparents said that no one had moved them so profoundly to political action in years. Spend their twilight days in a sinking America, wallowing in the fearful suggestion that their retirement home’s a terrorist draw? Sometimes I worry the media doesn’t know my hypothetical grandparents at all.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses out there. The Upper West Side is traditionally Hillary Country, though I’m happy to point out that Obama gave her a real run for her money in our district, as well as for New York and the City. No mean feat, there at the heart of the Clinton machine. We were positioned in the thick of pedestrian rush-hour traffic at the polling station and the subways. That morning when I’d passed through Hillary had been represented by a shouting, cheerful girl around my age, who gamely offered the Vice Presidency when she spotted my Obama badge.

To which I’d shown teeth and returned a rather spirited “Hooray, Democrats.” We smiled at each other, but I didn’t offer Hillary the Office of Cheney in roundabout. We don’t need her settling into string-pulling and plotting in the black hole they’ve made of the Vice Presidency, either. Have you heard about how they say it’s not really regulated by any particular branch of government? At all? And so it can do what it wants? OK?

After work Hillary’s man at the subway is a Ken Doll Barbieman, blandly and properly attractive. His dark black suit is so pressed and so incongruous I suspect he thinks he’s kinda important in the campaign and he’s doing this intern-level shouting out for Clinton just for right now because they’re low on people in this not-high-risk-neighborhood but he has to come through again of course and he’s getting to go straight from doing this to the party if he can catch a cab before the rain starts again and man is he going to get drunk while they watch the numbers pour in.

Some girls on the far side had a huge Obama picture and had been singing “Yes we can!” off and on in gutsy bursts for hours, edging onto Hillary Ken(tm)’s turf. It had been raining randomly all day, but still warm for February, so we couldn’t really complain. If Bush had been better about climate change, I have no doubt we would have seen many politically motivated snowball fights. When a couple people on the street told me they didn’t feel like voting at all, I had to not drag them through the mud to the polling station, muttering about the early British borough suffrage system. I had to not do that and smile at them and then I would tell them about Barack Obama.

I did have several people offer that they were voting, but voting for Hillary. In the morning, on 137th Street, it had been quite evident to me that her campaign had done some excellent work in securing the Latino vote — busy middle-aged ladies told me “Clinton!,” almost offended, when they saw that I’d given them Obama. But at 96th Street & Broadway, with its apex of subway and launching buses, it was impossible to tell who were his. Obama’s supporters turned out to be as varied as the occupants of this city.

There’s no way to fit Obama’s voters into the media’s pie charts. This is one of the most exciting things about him, and this is one of the most important. Obama’s voters are a group never seen before, disparate but all restless and glad to be united.

Super Tuesday proved that, and it proved a lot more too about the power of momentum and the eagerness for something new and different and entirely untainted by this terrible history we’ve made for ourselves. My own street sample was just a slice of how many people across America, forgoing superfluous categories, are not begrudgingly casting their ballot along party lines but lining up to vote to Barack Obama. They come out from polling, and want to wear his name in a blue circle on their coat.

He’s helped make voting something to be priviledged and pursued again. Something you don’t just do but are glad to do, certain about after doing it. He’s brought so many different kinds and types together that we shouldn’t be talking about divisions at all, but rather the quite awesome evolution of America that’s showing itself right now.

Super Tuesday demonstrated that no one knows less about this nation’s electoral wants and needs than its mainstream media. I don’t blame them now, though, when they’re surprised by who’s going for Obama. I was surprised, too, when I first started meeting them, but they were always quick to explain: they had stopped by for the stickers.