Barack Obama: The MOveMENT
by Cody Keenan, Opinions Editor on December 5, 2007 in Features
November 3, 2004, was a tough morning to wake up a Democrat in Washington. Sixteen hours earlier, we rejoiced at exit polls, expecting a change in the White House. At the time, I worked in the Senate, and the accompanying drubbing we received left me slouched at my desk like so many Democrats – hapless, helpless…hopeless.
There was an overwhelming sense that we were in for four more years of a nation and a world becoming a little less safe and a lot less just.
But on that November day, a new senator was elected. Mr. Obama went to Washington.
Now, three years later, in the aftermath of Katrina, wiretapping, worsening war, increasing inequality and global instability, it’s no longer just Democrats looking for change they can believe in. A large majority of Americans now feel that there’s something not quite right. That maybe, as Barack Obama says, “the world as it is…is not the world as it must be.”
The campaign began as a movement. People hungry for something new came out in force and the new candidate drew crowds of 20,000 in Austin and Atlanta, 10,000 in Oakland, Iowa City and Boston – many of whom had never come out to see a politician before.
Something stirred in cynical voters tired of Washington’s poison and paralysis – myself included – and suddenly, we saw a candidate who might be able to drive out the darkness that infects our politics and move beyond the bitter battles of the past 15 years.
Obama took on stale Democratic Party orthodoxies and shook up the Washington foreign policy establishment. His grassroots game shattered fundraising records for either party, both in number of dollars raised and donors rallied, stunning a punditocracy amazed that anyone could surpass the “inevitable” Clinton juggernaut. And as voters started listening, the race tightened.
And suddenly it seems as if Obama just might win the nomination. In Iowa, the first caucus state, he holds a slight edge over Clinton and bests her by 30 percent among voters who consider a new direction most important. It’s a pattern repeating across the early states – the two are now tied in South Carolina, and he’s halved Clinton’s lead in New Hampshire – as voters turn from the candidate who voted for the war in Iraq, who has enabled President Bush on Iran, who shares W’s penchant for secrecy and disdain for the press, and who can’t possibly get us past the partisan battles left over from the 1990s…because she is a part of them.
But the White House, not the nomination, is the ultimate goal. Obama is not only the one candidate who can win next November – he can turn it into a landslide. In the latest head-to-head matchups with the major Republican candidates, he beats every one, while Clinton loses to them all.
More importantly, Obama is the only candidate in either party who shows the transformational ability to change the electoral map and move beyond the bitter 50-49 elections of recent years to heal the nation and not just win – but govern. A recent poll of Iowa Republicans shows him in third place – among Republican candidates.
That’s the reason Matthew Dowd, President Bush’s strategist in 2004, says the only candidate that appeals to him this year – in either party – is Barack Obama. That’s the reason Mark McKinnon, consultant for John McCain and professor at KSG last year, told McCain he won’t work against Obama in the general election. Obama is the one candidate who appeals to all.
The movement has become the moment. Suddenly, those who had been asking why now for Obama – why not four or eight years from now – realize that this is a unique moment for America, at home and abroad, and Barack Obama might just be the man to meet it.
Over the past month, I’ve gotten to spend time talking with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. For the first time, they’re able to visualize Barack Obama in the Oval Office. They know he has the judgment to lead and a fresh, pragmatic approach to our foreign policy challenges. They recognize a man forceful in his vision of where he wants to lead this country, refusing to wake up four years from now to find today’s domestic problems even worse. They know we can’t let this opportunity pass to change our country and our world, and write a new chapter in American history.
America’s moment is now. Today, the leadership we’ve longed for is tantalizingly close. All that’s left is to grab it.
Obama’s come a long way since that frigid morning in February when he stood on the steps of the Illinois State House – where Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech – and announced his candidacy to a divided nation.
And when voters seize this moment, and when, on a January morning, Barack Obama stands with his wife and two daughters on the steps of the United States Capitol and takes the oath of office, it won’t be another morning of no hope.
It will be a morning America and the world wake up - and know hope.
Editor’s note: This piece was one of a series written by HKS students making the final argument for their candidates prior to the New Hampshire primary. Cody Keenan spent last summer working in the Obama campaign’s Chicago headquarters. His views are his own.
Written by Cody Keenan, Opinions Editor · Filed Under Features
Cody Keenan (MPP2) is Opinions Editor of the Citizen. Prior to his time at the Kennedy School of Government, Cody worked in the United States Senate from 2003 to 2006. He spent last summer on a leading presidential campaign.
A Chicagoan and graduate of Northwestern University, he blames his Midwestern roots for his affinity for meat products and perennially losing sports teams. In this space, he hopes to write columns on string theory, metaphysics, and behavioral economics, but will probably just stick to politics and American culture.
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