Dear President Obama: You gave us our language

By Katharine Blake McGowan

Dear President Obama,

The morning after you were elected President in 2008, I was cleaning up the storefront field office I ran for you in Virginia when Joan Baez walked in with her guitar. She put her arms around me and said, “You little sweetie, you must be so tired.” She was right. Then she looked into my eyes and said, “You did good.” She asked if she could sing and we sat on the floor — a few deputy field organizers, volunteers and I — and I cried as she sang “Imagine.”

After that, I turned down a job in your administration to go to law school at Stanford, but I did it with you in mind. During the campaign I’d seen injustice. I’d met black voters in Virginia afraid to vote because police officers told them to stay away from the polls. I’d seen mill towns in Pennsylvania left behind by a country they fought to defend. So I went to law school, which was less fun than the campaign. But I found my way. My favorite class was Constitutional Law, because it made intuitive sense. My favorite place was the Community Law Clinic, where I represented indigent clients who’d been unlawfully evicted, workers who’d been denied their wages, or ex-offenders who were eligible to expunge their criminal records. I also taught young people in juvenile detention centers about their constitutional and statutory rights.

After law school, I worked with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund on dismantling the cradle-to-prison pipeline. We studied nonviolent direct action and convened stakeholders on Capitol Hill. It was hard, at times, to feel we weren’t getting much done. We fought ferociously for gun safety measures after Sandy Hook only to see them fail. For me, these days were the “prose” of progress versus the “poetry” of campaigns. Sometimes progress is difficult to judge because its timeline is extended beyond our own horizons or the hourglass of a lifetime.

Last year, I married a man I met on your campaign. We met in Virginia but he had been working for you since Iowa. We were married on October 3, 2015. He is the best man I know.

Now we live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I work as a writer and Luke is getting his Masters at the Kennedy School. He may run for office himself someday, a decision that will have so much to do with you. You gave us each other and a community of friends we turned to last month, on November 9, when little else felt solid or secure.

In an award acceptance speech a few weeks ago, Zadie Smith said, “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and re-imagined if it is to survive.” On the eve of your departure, our work entails redoubling and re-imagining. This is something we can do because you taught us how. Many of our first professional endeavors of imagination involved seeing you as President and working harder than we ever had to turn that image into reality. Hope is an act of imagination. So is empathy. The language of your campaign might be poetry but it’s a language that gives me fuel.

On the morning after you were elected President Joan Baez sang us “Imagine,” the poetry of her generation and the language to beat back injustice and vivify progress as if their lives depended on it — as, in fact, many lives did. They still do.

You were the first politician I ever heard speaking to me and to my generation. You made me feel seen and welcome in the processes of democracy. But I can not think you’ll be the last. Though it’s heartbreaking to watch you leave your post, it’s a failure of imagination to think our best days are behind us.

Thank you for eight years, for working for our country, for believing in the goodness of American people — a belief I share and restate — for giving us a language that fueled our imagination, and for giving me my husband and a community to work with now. Zadie Smith closed her remarks with a call: “Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.” Those of us who worked for you remember a finer music and are responsible for playing it, now more than ever.

Yours,

Katharine