Dear President Obama: Thank you for teaching me what politics really means

By Zack Davis

In the fall of 2006 I picked up a copy of “The Audacity of Hope” in a classmate’s dorm room and over the next few days I read the entire book multiple times. I had never heard or read so clearly articulated what I wanted to see from government, from politicians, and what my role could be. It was at that point I decided I would do anything that I could to help you get elected if you ever ran for President. In the dead of winter, I showed up at my caucus location in Iowa City, and voted for the first Democrat I had ever supported for elected office.

After I graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Biochemistry, I was accepted as a summer fellow on the 2008 campaign, where I was welcomed as a member of a new family, introduced to community organizing and eventually dispatched to rural north central Iowa. The experience as a summer fellow and then Field Organizer showed me the power of organizing. Organizing taught me that by listening twice as much as I talked, building true relationships with volunteers and empowering others to take ownership of their communities, a group of highly motivated individuals could change the world and bend that long arc of history towards justice a little faster.

After joining the campaign in 2008, I was fortunate to continue working for Organizing for America, the 2012 re-election campaign in Iowa, and eventually Organizing for Action. Attending both Inaugurations are moments that will stick with me for the rest of my life. More importantly, through this journey that started for me in that dorm room in Iowa City, I’ve built life-long friendships that have lasted well beyond election cycles. A fellow organizer married my wife and I, and the birth of both of my daughters have come during campaigns and been welcomed by an ever-growing family of organizers.

Learning and now teaching others the tools, tactics and resources that they can use to make change in their lives and giving them the support to make that change is at the core of what I will take away from this experience. The knowledge that we are never alone, that no challenge is too great and that the easy road is to give in to cynicism and doubt, but that we must always look to the horizon and continue to fight for tomorrow. I must continue to be an arc bender and empower all those that I meet to join that effort in their own way.

Thank you for building an organization that thrived off a culture of Respect. Empower. Include. Thank you for fighting when the fight was not popular or easy. Thank you for showing me that politics is not the spectacle that occurs on television and in ads every two to four years. That instead it is conversations at gas-station diners, around kitchen tables and in the aisles of grocery stores. It is knowing that we are borrowing the future from our children, and need to work hard to leave them a better planet than we inherited. It is daily through actions and words demonstrating that I truly am my brother’s keeper, I now know what politics means. Thank you, Mr. President.