Charlie Anderson’s War
by Ben Branham, News Editor on February 12, 2008 in Features
When Charlie Anderson (MPP2) met Barack Obama for the first time during the candidate’s first trip to New Hampshire in February 2007, his message to the Illinois Senator was simple: “My singular mission this summer is to work for your campaign.”
These are those moments when politicians are trained to refer the job seeker to the advance guy standing nearby.
And that’s exactly how Anderson began a quest that landed him a smack in the middle of the most contested presidential campaign in recent memory, first as policy intern at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago, and more recently as a 16-hour-a-day volunteer coordinator in the battleground states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“It was a combination of persistence and luck,” Anderson says with the slightest of grins, referring to his dogged pursuit of contact after contact, constantly sending out follow-up emails, until one morning he awoke to a call from Obama senior policy advisor Lisa Ellman.
“Are you willing to do ANYTHING? Even if it means filling out spreadsheets all day?” Ellman asked. Anderson, the polar opposite of a prima donna, gladly answered in the affirmative. Those spreadsheets turned out to be code for the extensive research and policy analysis that helped the campaign roll out its health care and government reform plans.
Upon returning to Cambridge this fall, Anderson routinely recruited classmates to join him in more than a half-dozen trips to knock on doors and chat up undecided voters in New Hampshire. Anderson then headed up to New Hampshire full-time during his winter break, helping to recruit thousands of out-of-state volunteers, assign them to a field office, and place them in housing in the days leading up to the January 8 primary.
A native North Carolinian, Anderson then got the chance to go a little closer to home, setting up shop in Columbia, South Carolina, where he again helped coordinate thousands of out-of-state volunteers in what proved to be a decisive Obama victory.
Though exhausted following a winter break that lacked any form of respite, Anderson continued to put in hours of phonebanking and canvassing in Massachusetts prior to last week’s Super Tuesday primaries. As for what happens “when” Obama wins the nomination, Anderson says, his determination remains just as singular as it was a year ago: “I’ll find a way to contribute.”
Written by Ben Branham, News Editor · Filed Under Features
Ben Branham (MPP2) is News Editor of the Citizen. Prior to his time at the Harvard Kennedy School, Branham worked as a press secretary in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He spent last summer creating “One Vote Under God” (www.onevoteundergod.org), a web matrix documenting the role of faith and religion in the 2008 presidential campaign as part of the national News21 initiative (newsinitiative.org). He attended college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in English. Other past jobs include waiting tables, mowing lawns, giving tours, and selling pies to raise money for people with HIV/AIDS. Originally from Chicago, Branham now lives in Cambridge, MA with no pets. He's a Scorpio.
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