Why Obama Won
Two weeks ago, Americans made a very important decision. As we watch the post-mortem of the McCain campaign unfold, as reasoning for their collapse, we’re hearing things like “Sarah Palin’s ineptness”, “the economy”, “the Republican brand”, and the most overused, “Bush’s approval rating”.
I for one am tired of the “Obama only won because of Bush” rhetoric. It’s disingenuous to imply that Bush was so major a factor. I was ‘anti-Bush’ in 2004, but I would have never done the things for John Kerry that I have for Barack Obama. Not that I didn’t respect John Kerry or support John Kerry, but I wasn’t inspired by John Kerry.
That’s what McCain and Palin (and the media, really) never understood. It was never about a bad economy. It was never about ‘Bush 44′. It was never about ‘the lesser of two evils’. It was never about Sarah Palin’s complete failure of a candidacy. It was never about how poorly John McCain’s campaign was run. It was never about Ayers or ‘lipstick on a pig’. It was never about black turnout, youth turnout, Hispanic turnout, white women between the ages of 18 and 56 turnout. It was never about race or the desire to be a part of something historic. Those things played a part, but it was never really about that. It was never even really about Barack Obama.
It was about me, like millions of others, wanting to provide a better world for my daughter and believing I had the power to make that happen. The man who made me believe in that power was Barack Obama. Barack Obama inspired me, a white 28 year old, raised in the reddest parts of North Mississippi and living in one of the reddest parts of North Texas that I could go out and make a difference in this campaign and, by extension, the world, and that nothing I did was ever an act of futility.
You see, Obama won because he gave ownership of this campaign to the people making calls from home, writing letters to the editor, donating $5 or $10 when they could spare it, organizing voter registration drives, and hitting the streets on foot. Sarah Palin mocked Obama’s ability to make “dramatic speeches before devoted followers”, but it was this ability to inspire and mobilize millions of us ‘devoted followers’ that lead firmly to a victory on November 5. Think about this for a minute: Obama’s supporters in Texas were responsible for over 1 million phone calls to swing states on Election Day alone. McCain and Palin could never inspire that sort of devotion.
It was this belief that any individual can achieve great things along with Obama’s desire to find common ground with everyone no matter your personal politics or beliefs (How many times did you hear him malign people into groups or use labels or even say “the conservatives” or “the Republicans”? You’ll be hard pressed) that lead to our success last Tuesday. I do say ‘our’ success because I take a certain amount of pride in the idea that it might have been one of my recruits down in Florida that got out the vote in a crucial neighborhood or one of my phone calls to an undecided in Virginia that helped put that state into the blue column for the first time in 44 years. I take greater pride still in the idea that when my daughter, now 2, is old enough to understand what the President is and what the President does, that President will be President Barack Obama.
Now the campaign is (finally) over and I can use a broader collective ‘us’ to describe our victory because last Tuesday, America won. Not a Blue America. Not a Democratic America. The United States of America won last Tuesday. I believe in time, we will all see that.
To the McCain supporters, though our rhetoric got heated and ugly at various points throughout the past year, and it is with great lamentation that I myself sometimes embraced this ugliness, I always believed that for the great many of you, our goal was always congruent and it was only in the way to achieve that goal that we truly disagreed. I say to you now, we must work together to move this country forward and I look forward to working with you. We are all Americans first, partisans last. The times are too critical to continue in the divisive exchanges of the past.
Now, let’s go fix our country.
Rodney A Hopper II
