SPARKS, Nev.-After Super Tuesday, I figured I'd be flying high or broken-hearted. Oddly enough, even after Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) carried more votes in California, the race is still neck-and-neck. In an article by the Associated Press, the latest estimation of delegates in favor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) puts him in the lead by only two delegates, the numbers breaking down to 796 delegates for Obama and 794 for Clinton.
While I still wonder at the mathematics of it all, I am not puzzled by why the vote is evenly split, especially after my involvement with the Obama for America campaign here in Reno-Sparks over the last three months.
I don't consider myself a veteran of campaigning, but I do consider myself a veteran of election nights. Every November, since I can remember, when the Rosebud Sioux Tribe would hold its elections, my mother would take me down to the tribal office building to watch the votes come in and be tallied. As I got restless, she'd whisper into my ear, "This is your future being decided."
The people I've worked with on the Obama for America campaign understood that from the get-go and never faltered in their belief that Obama was the future of America and not its past. I was a late-comer to the active campaign here in Reno-Sparks. When I decided, officially, to back a primary candidate, I gave the front-runners, Senators Clinton and Obama, an equal chance by signing myself up for both their campaigns on the popular social-networking Web site, MySpace. The Obama camp was the first to respond with a call.
I still remember the day when my field organizer David called me up and introduced himself and asked if I was free for a meeting. I gladly agreed, waited for the Clinton campaign to do the same, but they never did. And that stood out to me. A campaign that was willing to spend time with me, as a caucusgoer and as person. For the record, even since the caucus results from Jan. 19 have been tallied, I have yet to hear from the Clinton campaign here in Reno-Sparks.
David sat down with me and addressed my concerns with information on both the First Americans and LGBT Americans platforms and I decided that my vote, time and energy would go to Obama. The results were that we won Washoe County, along with 10 other out of the 17 counties in Nevada, which have historically been troublesome spots with Democratic voters. But our door-knocking and phone-banking paid off in our county. I even proudly displayed, on the other social networking Web site, Facebook, "The Shoes of The Canvasser." A dirty and worn pair of Starters lay in my apartment, a testament to the devotion I had to my candidate.
Over the few weeks we had, I interacted with a myriad of people who believed in this new future that Obama promised. My field organizer, David, is an Asian-American Iraq War veteran who spent a tour of duty in Iraq and lived, bodily intact, to tell the tale. My second mother, Mary, is a self-described "Yellow Dog Democrat" who, as the title assumes, would rather vote for a yellow dog before she votes for a Republican. And my bestie from the campaign remains Stephane, who threatens--at every released exit poll--to go running and screaming to the Green Party if Obama is not the Democratic presidential nominee. And of course there are Charlene and Joy, a senior in high school and nursing major at the University of Nevada-Reno, respectively, who brightened my day with their ongoing energy and enthusiasm for the candidate we all know who bears the mantle of leadership proudly.
While I had my core group of people I interacted with daily, a shocking thing happened. I realized that Obama is truly a galvanizing force in modern American politics. Over the course of the campaign, I encountered not just caucusgoers, but supporters from the Republican Party and independents who said they believed in Obama and his message of healing the wounds of this country. These are people who've lived through the Bush presidency, the first and second Iraq wars, Whitewater, Iran-Contra Affair, Watergate, the Vietnam Conflict, the Korean police action, the Civil Rights Movement, the Depression and even the assassination of President John Kennedy and found it within themselves to muster up the courage and action to engage their fellow voters to caucus for Obama.
While I still wait for the voters and caucusgoers of places like Washington state, Maryland and American Samoa to make up their minds over who'll they choose for president, I can rest assured knowing that I and my fellow Americans of all cultures heard and embraced the message of Obama and, to an extent, the message of the new political way in America: the dare-to-hope way. We dare to hope in a better future not just for us, but for the next seven generations and their grandchildren, the next wave of voters who know that politics is not just a Washington game of who-caught-whom, but where we can believe in our leaders and not just, resignedly, vote for the "lesser of two evils."
In my estimation of this early race, it is all about one thing: business as usual or, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
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