I arrived in rural, Southwest Colorado in 2008. Straight away, I was thrown into intensive campaign field organizer training. Storytelling was central to training as an organizer.
I held upwards of 200 conversations with people living in my “turf.” A central part of my job was to set up one-on-one conversations with as many people as I could.
The campaign created the conditions for meaningful, and often oppositional, conversation. I met with a 75-year-old rancher who was angry with the Bureau of Land Management’s federal land management policy and he wanted the Obama campaign to know of his outrage. I had breakfast with a Native American tribal chief who was upset about Obama’s weak position on Native policy. I went for a walk with a woman in her 50s who was poisoned while working on a gas line and was distressed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations. I stood in the kitchen of an 86-year-old Ute woman and registered her to vote – for the first time in her life.
The presidential campaign led me into the living rooms of diehard Republican voters who were open enough, because of the relationships we’d created, to at least hear me out when it came to my support of the candidate. These people rarely changed their minds, or their votes, but, for the most part, they listened.
Personal contact wasn’t an ancillary component of the campaign, it was the campaign.
Organizers were instructed by the campaign to “live off the land.” We had to be resourceful and never too bashful to ask for what we needed.
“Respect. Empower. Include.” was a command printed on posters that hung in Obama campaign offices around the country. I was paid a salary by a political campaign to listen to diehard supporters of the opposition candidate and to respond with overtures of respect and invitation. It is unfathomable in the context of the 2016 presidential race, but it happened. I joined the Obama campaign soon after the primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The directive from my supervisors was to “build community” with the Clinton voters and to never, ever say or do anything that would denigrate Clinton or alienate her supporters. Sure, this was politically expedient because we needed Clinton’s voters to come around. But, it was also authentic. I sat on couches in a dozen living rooms listening to members of Women for Hillary groups express their disappointment and the myriad ways they thought Obama might let them down.
Across the country, millions of people signed on to help Obama win.
I recruited and trained scores of campaign volunteers. The campaign’s leaders reminded field organizers that, “titles are free.”
I was encouraged to give volunteers both the title and the responsibilities of campaign leadership. There was a job for everyone, no matter how young or old. If you couldn’t make calls or knock on doors, you could be a “comfort captain” and bring food for other volunteers. As election day got closer, the casseroles in my offices became increasingly plentiful.
In the Odyssey, Homer writes that nostalgia is the “rust of memory.” As the 2008 campaign recedes in my memory and I’ve long since gone back to my normal life, I am sure I’ve become nostalgic. I know I’m increasingly holding on to just the good bits. I am selectively forgetting the silly, petty and ineffectual parts of the campaign.
But, the good bits are worth holding onto. The good bits serve as a reminder that politics isn’t always and only synonymous with hypocrisy.
Every now and then, things are what they seem in American politics. In 2008, we won some counties and we lost some. But all along the way, we ran a campaign imbued with respect, empowerment and inclusion, and I’m forever grateful to have witnessed this alternate side of American politics. It is my inoculation to cynicism and mistrust during a far less civil presidential race.
Mary Finn was the 2008 field organizer for the Obama campaign in Durango. She is currently employed as a supervisor with the San Francisco Unified School District’s Department of College and Career Readiness. Reach her at maryelizabethfinn@gmail.com.
