Obama and the People in My Life

Back in the summertime, I got hitched to the Draft Gore movement. I believe that Al Gore is our next FDR-caliber  President and he's just waiting for his time. I was a daily Draft Gore diarist (you remember how persistent we were by October) and a statewide organizer for New York.

In early November, a cryptic email,  claiming to have heard from his Nashville office, called off the whole movement in the middle of the night. When I recovered, I chose Obama.

In Gore, I wanted a statesman, someone who was above the fray, someone respected and trusted. If I couldn't have that, I wanted a Kennedy type figure (not that these conflict). I felt like America could instead benefit from a President who was young and exciting. He might make a few early mistakes, but we're all routing for him. I felt like I'd made the right bet after I saw his Iowa victory speech.

That night, my fiancee (know around these parts as brooklynkrow) decided on Obama. Now she's an avid Democrat: volunteering, donating for Obama, donating for some obscure House candidate. She is turned on to America's political fortunes for the first time in her life.

And that is what this diary is about. How all the people in my life have switched to Obama.

My Fiancee

So back to my fiancee. She has never been that political but has become increasingly so now that she's engaged to a political junkie and liberal activist. We've been watching debate after debate together and watching the Sunday shows and primary results, etc. I've been donating a little here and there and talking lots at the proverbial water cooler. She was mostly taking it all in.

Her earliest conclusion was that Hillary was a phoney. She flirted with John Edwards through the holidays because of his anti-corporate message. We were both deeply moved by Obama's victory speech and we haven't shut up about Obama since. We are voting for Obama with our hearts more than anything.

Since then, she convinced my future mother-in-law.

My Future Mother-in-Law

She was on the fence for quite a while and, while we talked politics a lot while we were visiting her in Connecticut, I don't think she had really committed to voting for any one of the candidates in the primary. She knew she'd be out of the country on Super Tuesday so she ordered an absentee ballot.

We got word that she decided on Hillary after the crying thing on New Hampshire Eve. She, like apparently many other people, felt bad that people were being too hard on Hillary. I'm sure there was much more to it, of course, but that's what put her over the edge.

My fiancee began to work her over on Obama. They talked about health care and foreign policy. They talked about strategies for Democrats in the general election. This past Sunday, as she was visiting and standing right her by my desk, "I wish I could take my vote back."

She had voted for Hillary in mid-January. She is disappointed in her vote and jokes often how she wishes there was a way to change her vote. In jest, I told her just tonight how New Jersey ruled that you can "do-over" your absentee ballots. Too bad.

But she convinced her husband, a Republican who has voted Democrat since 2004.

My friend Neil

We were IMing while I was at the office today. He told me a while ago that he and his virtual husband were planning on voting for Hillary. She has very strong support in the gay community. I asked him if he was still supporting her after the positive press began to turn his way after South Carolina.

He did. Obama hasn't said a word about gay rights, he said. I copy and pasted the link to Obama's Pride site with his piece on Don't Ask Don't Tell. I told him that gay right had been mentioned as recently as Kennedy's endorsement speech.

I ran to a meeting and got back to my office after an hour. I asked him what he was doing. He was convincing his boyfriend to vote for Obama.

And we agreed to hang out soon because it had been too long. And we will. He's coming over on Super Tuesday to route for Obama with us!

My friends Allen and Mike

They're not really active but we can talk for hours about all this. We're pretty much of the same ilk. At least two of us were Gore guys. Then we became Obama guys. We talk politics over burritos at lunch. Allen has a whole different view of the 90s I think and he loathes Hillary. It's kind of entertaining really. Not much else to report here. My boys are on board

My best friend Robert who I never see

We finally saw each after a month at his girlfriend's birthday party last weekend. Without having talked about it before, we were - as always - thinking the same thing and automatically assumed the other was for Obama. Duh.

So is his girlfriend.

My Dad

I'm not joking on this one. He's not a bona fide Obama supporter but I think he could easily be pushed into becoming an Obama Republican. My Dad: lifelong Republican who warned me when I was 10 that America was going to be bought up by the Japanese and we'd be called Jamerica.

He'll never say it but I know he doesn't like Bush or at least the Iraq War. He startled me when he said last fall that he would vote for Edwards. This really was a testament to Edwards' appeal to blue collar Republicans. I don't know that my dad agreed with Edwards on most things; I think he just appreciated that Edwards was talking about issues that mattered to him.

He hates Hillary like every other Republican. Man, he thinks Hillary Clinton is running for President because her husband and she are "after the money".

Anyhow, just the other day, when he and his fiancee were in town to meet my fiancee's mother and stepfather (man, nuclear families are getting big!), he made some comment out of nowhere that  he could see himself voting for Obama. There's millions of guys like my dad out there who are thinking they are done with the Republican Party but just can't attach themselves to Hillary Clinton.

My Friend Sam

She decided on Obama just a week or so ago. She told me when she and I were downstairs at the office smoking a cigarette. I think she told me that she chose Obama because he wouldn't be as much of a lightning rod to the Republicans. She was noticing how everyone got so damned excited by her and she thought it would be bad for our chances of winning.

And it goes on and on like this. People I know are slowly converting to Obama. With every day, there's another big endorsement or another great poll or something. It's all part of the fun of momentum. (Remember the Dean days? Gore folks, you remember the week before the Nobel Peace Prize?) With every day though, people are talking to their friends and family about Barack Obama. He gets people talking.

All the people I listed above made up their minds to vote for Obama in their own particular way. A different aspect of Obama and his campaign appealed to them in different ways. It's fucking impressive.

It's a movement so strong, it's all around me. I hope it's all around you too.

Here's a poll and please tell us your stories too.

-fink