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Edited on Sat Feb-23-08 11:27 PM by democrattotheend
I posted this as a response to another thread, but I thought it was kind of long for a response, and maybe I should make it a separate thread. I know you've probably had a zillion posts with people telling their story about why they support Obama, but here's mine:
I'm 23, working in Washington, DC, and struggling to hold onto my idealism.
When I got started in politics, I was all about the grassroots, volunteering with my local Dean meetup group and believing that if we just got enough people excited about a candidate and got more people registered to vote, we could win.
After 2004, I became a little disillusioned with grassroots politics. Kerry's triumph over Dean made me feel like all the hard work we had done in the field for Dean was useless, because the establishment would always win out in the end. When Kerry lost, it seemed clear that it wasn't because people didn't turn out, but because he didn't win enough swing voters.
I lost a lot of faith in grassroots politics and the power of ordinary people, and I went through a phase where all I wanted to do was entrench myself in professional politics, because I thought that was the only way to make a difference.
After I graduated from college, I interviewed with a bunch of polling and consulting firms, as well as a few non-profits. I ended up taking a job in the labor movement, where the political program is kind of top-down but at least it's people-driven and focuses on member-to-member contact. I didn't think much about it at the time, since I was pretty disillusioned with grassroots activism at that point.
Last month, however, Obama's victory in Iowa and later contests made me realize that on-the-ground organizing and hard work by ordinary citizens can make a difference. I began to believe once again that a motivated supporter base can take on the Democratic establishment that has long been wary of candidates who attract a lot of grassroots support. I found myself wanting to get back out into the field and talk to ordinary voters again, something I had started to think I was above since I got a nice desk job in Washington.
In the past couple years, I have struggled to hang on to my idealism. I have a coworker who is a few years older than me and has worked on the labor political program for several years, and this year he was an Edwards supporter. I asked him how he was doing after Edwards dropped out, and he said "eh, they're all just politicians anyway." I told him that I didn't want to believe that, that despite everything I've witnessed over the past few years I am not quite ready to believe that politicians who give passionate speeches don't care about anything they're claiming to be fighting for. He said he doesn't want to either, and he's not ready to say for sure that Obama is just another politician.
Obama's certainly not perfect, and he's made his share of deals and compromises in his time as a state legislator and as a senator. But I think unlike most politicians, he has remained somewhat idealistic, and maybe he, like me, is fighting to hold onto that idealism. I don't expect politicians to be successful in everything they promise, but I do expect them to at least be genuinely dedicated to achieving their goals, and I think Obama genuinely believes he can change the way the game is played so that ordinary citizens have a voice in government. Maybe he is naive, maybe he is unrealistic, but I'd rather have a president who will try to change the rules of the game than a president who just accepts the status quo and says we have to work within it.
I don't know that Obama is the real deal, but I'm not so sure he isn't, and I'd rather fight for the possibility of meaningful change to the system than accept the notion that the status quo can't be changed.
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