Nine Years Ago- Ohio Primary Night and Beating Senator Barack Obama

Nine years ago I was in Ohio, working for Hillary Clinton. A year ago, I wrote this piece about my experience there for another blog. On the one year anniversary of Hillary’s second Ohio Primary victory, I want to share it again, and talk about it some more.

From that piece:

Eight years ago on the night of the Ohio Primary, I spent the election night party in Pittsburgh. That might seem like an odd place to spend one of the bigger nights of my professional life, but it made sense at the time. At the end of “getting out the vote” in Northeast Ohio, I got in the car and drove down to a buddy’s place in Pittsburgh, where we went to some dive bar to celebrate the elusive victory over then-Senator Obama that I had been seeking for a solid year. I had some good days on the Dodd campaign in Iowa, I won my county for Clinton in South Carolina, but both of those had been huge victories for Barack Obama, regardless of what I wanted to tell myself. On this Ohio Primary night though, I had finally been a part of beating him, and I was quite content with myself. It was on that night that I first contemplated, and decided, I should leave the Presidential primary campaign trail. I was quite happy, but also quite over it. I was over it enough to skip the victory party in Columbus.

There are so many things I could say about Ohio. I was given a really plum job, Deputy Field Director for Early and Absentee Voting. My job actually went pretty well, in no small part because we used President Clinton across the state in rural areas to drum up early voting numbers. It worked, and we won almost all of the counties in the state (I believe we won about 80 of the 88). I must say though, I was way in over my head on that job, and was at least partially lucky it went so well. It was my first time running any operation that big, and I never had a paid assistant or organizer at any point in the process (The Obama Campaign, by comparison had regional staff working under a headquarters director on my job). I got by, which was all I was really capable of at that point in my career in a job that big. It was a challenge, an exhausting challenge, but one I got through.

Ohio was draining. It lasted roughly a month, but felt longer than Iowa. I arrived the day after Super Tuesday in Cleveland, had dinner there, and then drove down to Columbus in the morning to get to work out of the AFT headquarters. I had to make contact with all of the counties and get a system set-up to receive their lists of early voters, then I had to work out a system with headquarters for turning that data into something workable with the technology we had at the time (not every county was using spreadsheets- some literally sent me pictures of handwritten lists). Once we mostly (and by this, I mean at least in all the major counties) got over this hurdle, we had robo calls going out to everyone who was mailed an absentee ballot, as well as live calls to voters who fit our demographic groups we were winning. The second component of my job, of course, was early vote events, which we organized with every type of surrogate from the former President to small town Mayors, and just about every office in between. These were much more fun, but could become quite time consuming. The honest truth was, the whole campaign was consuming in all ways. There were about eight levels of bureaucracy to every decision that needed to be made, and half of them weren’t in Ohio with us. Tack onto that the regular pains of any political campaign, and being the “outsider” who came over from Dodd (so I was either not sufficiently loyal, or good, take your pick), and the whole process made me quite exhausted. Unlike South Carolina, I can’t say it was a ton of fun, or that I loved every second of it. Ohio was a job.

I am glad I did it, obviously. I had many incredible experiences. There was the “clutch” (small meeting with local dignitaries) with President Clinton and the locals in a tiny town along the West Virginia border, which ended with him asking an intern to have pizza and Diet Pepsi waiting after the event (she had no car with her, so guess how that was resolved). There was sleeping in the back of a U-Haul underneath a Cincinnati hotel, since I had no room booked from the campaign upstairs, and then coming up into the hotel in the morning and meeting CNN’s political team (looking like someone who just slept in the back of a U-Haul). There was driving around a bunch of small-town mayors in a van, going from places like Toledo to American Legion halls in places like Lima. There was also meeting surrogates like Ted Strickland and Jon Corzine (both governors who would be out of office within two years after the election). There were some great times out around Ohio State’s campus (this I mean), living in a “cat lady” house (she had 18) while I was allergic to cats, and stepping foot into Kentucky for the first time in my life- all thrills.

The big thing that happened in Ohio though was that I finally caught the Clinton bug. I liked Hillary prior to Ohio, but I can’t say I was all that emotionally invested. It was the final Sunday before the primary, and she was speaking at a high school in suburban Columbus. I was back stage when she came in, and got to watch her interact with people in a more private setting- supporters, staff, and even press- and realized she was a much warmer, nice figure than she is often portrayed as. She seemed genuinely interested in everyone, and spent time talking to people like they were friends- even if she didn’t really know them. She then went out in that gym and knocked them dead, with a firey, inspiring speech that I had never seen from her before. It was after that when I knew I was with her.

That night eight years ago in Pittsburgh though, I knew I was done. I wasn’t really all that happy on the campaign at that point, I had been on the road for close to a year, and I just wanted to get back to life. My buddy Arthur and I were discussing if she really still had a shot, and I came to realize she may have netted ten delegates out of Ohio. Texas would be even more a wash. Barack Obama was going to be our nominee, and the fight had grown pretty tired. Top that off with how I felt, and I finally contemplated being done with the trail. I drove home the next day, and still was conflicted, as the primary was coming to Pennsylvania. I went so far as to go meet the team in Philadelphia and contemplate taking an organizing position for that primary, but decided against it. I helped out a little bit, building some crowds for Lehigh Valley office openings, and controlling the backstage area at President Clinton’s Hotel Bethlehem stop. It was basically the end though. Ohio ended a long, strange year for me. After that, politics has been a career, not just a neat thing to do right after college. As I watch tonight’s Ohio results, I will make sure to raise a glass to the experience I had eight years ago.

• ******************************************

Ok, so another year has gone by, and another Clinton campaign. Much of what I experienced the first time around, I experienced again the second time. Unlike that night nine years ago though, I have a frame of reference to judge it on. Hillary remains one of my favorite politicians, however I am more questioning than ever of her senior team around her, after watching another strong chance at victory slip away. There were a lot of smart people on both campaigns- maybe a little too smart, to be honest.

No matter what I do in life, I’ll never do anything as amazing as that 2008 Election ever again in my life. I often now think of it backwards, from President Obama’s victory in November all the way to my experiences moving to Iowa. When I say I’ll always be thankful to the people who made it happen for me, I mean that. I can’t do enough to thank them. Interestingly, and rather unexpectedly, I met some of my best friends in politics on that campaign trail, people I talk to regularly still today. It was amazing.

As the time has passed, I think back on that race, and how we can apply it to the political situation we are in now. Back then, it was Hillary Clinton representing the white, blue-collar Democrats (as well as much of the Latino and LGBT community, but I digress) against then-Senator Barack Obama’s coalition of African-Americans, white liberals, and millennials. Somehow in eight years of time, she became incredibly weak with those blue-collar white voters, and opened the door to Bernie mounting a credible challenge to her, and Trump beating her. I try to understand what changed to make her into an almost totally different politician- her husband’s record already existed, they were a wealthy former First Couple by then, who had given speeches on Wall Street- and all I can come back to is how the conditions changed. Her opponent in the primaries in 2008 was a young, charismatic African-American Senator, as opposed to Bernie Sanders in 2016, so the movement of African-American voters was somewhat expected. Sanders’ full-throated populism, mixed with a certain level of apathy and opposition to President Obama among even Democratic working-class whites, mixed together to take that base away from her in the primaries, and the tone of those 2016 primaries made that a very big issue. Obviously the e-mail issue happened, but can it really be that the e-mail issue did more damage to Hillary Clinton than her vote for the Iraq War? If that’s so, we’re a devolving society and I feel sick.

There’s a lot to unpack from 2008 and 2016, and having lived through it, I feel like both a primary source, and a biased one. Either way, I think reflecting on the last 15 or so years of American political life is important at a time when our political culture is so poisoned and damaged that we’re going to need to rebuild it over the decades to come.