My Story on Hope and Change

I had left fifteen pages of the South Asians for Obama call list on my family's dining table before I left for work. Super Tuesday was tomorrow, and I had plans to call South Asian voters to remind them to vote for Obama. I raced back home after work, so that I could make as many calls as possible before 9pm, and have my little sister help me out too. But someone had got to the list first. I looked through the call lists and saw notations marked on the sheet -- Muslim, Call Back—in my Dad's distinctively FOB handwriting. Three pages of it. I was stunned. In all my years of political organizing, my father, the quintessential Bangladeshi uncle had never taken part in any of the political activities of door knocking or phone banking that I had organized. Yet here he was, so inspired by Obama that he made over 50 calls this morning before he headed out to his blue collar job at Home Depot. My dad phone banked South Asian voters for Obama.

Huddled around the dining table, sister and I made rapid fire calls to Jayeshes, Hamids and Vikrams reminding them that tomorrow was Election Day. Some were nice, some were not, and almost all of them had voted by absentee earlier in the month. And every time someone said they were voting Obama, we high-fived each other. My dad came home from work at 8:30pm, and immediately we put him on the phones. “Call all your friends!” I implored.

He proceeded to call through his phone book of members of the Bangladeshi community. I would hear him as he sat in the living room making his calls. “Khalka vote dibeh?” Are you going to vote tomorrow? He’d ask his friends. “My daughter is making calls for Obama –“

“No, Abbu!” I whispered loudly. “YOU are making calls for Obama!”

“Oh…I am making calls for Obama,” he said into the phone. “I made them all day, and I’m voting for him tomorrow. I want you to vote for him too.” By 10pm, my family had made over 200 get out the vote calls on behalf of Barack Obama that day.

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“Did you know that in 1991 a 31-year old lawyer registered 150,000 new African-American voters, changing Chicago's political landscape?” my friend sent me in a chat the other day. “His name was Barack Obama. Now, I have big plans for you.” I was shocked. 150,000 newly registered voters. As a youth voter advocate for a third of my life, I have registered my share of new voters. But I hardly registered 150,000. Maybe, in my total lifetime, I have registered 10,000 voters. Maybe if I’m being optimistic and including everything, it could maybe 15,000 over the past ten years. My efforts in the non-profit I started registered 2,500 voters alone in 2004. But to have registered 150,000 people, Obama had to have registered 411 voter EVERY DAY for ONE ENTIRE YEAR. That’s 17 newly registered voters an hour around the clock.

I don't want Barack Obama to win. I need Obama to win.

And I need him to win, because he is like me. An older, more efficient, better organized, more charismatic version, but all the same, in him, I see me. He registered voters, like me. He’s a community organizer, like me. He’s a writer, like me. He’s been fighting against social injustices since he was in college, like me. He dedicated his life to shifting the political paradigm of the nation one vote at a time. Like me. And I need him to win, because I need to believe that someone like me can win something like this. That someone like me, that looks, acts, and believes like me can be elected as a President.

I need to believe that someone with grassroots values in community organizing – organizing for the people by the people at the local level – can be the leader of this great nation. That we can have a White House with values outside of the Beltway Mentality. That we can have an activist president that works across partisanship lines. That someone who registered voters can also manage to lead a nation. That someone who practices Critical Race Theory in his daily work, will be able to bring these ideas of race into how the nation is run leading to the change that our nation desperately needs.

I need him to win to restore my faith in electoral politics. Because it’s been ten years of my career, and my faith in doing electoral work is sorely jaded. I need to believe that a leader that can bring my family together to the point of action – to the point of making calls together – can win this thing. That a campaign built on positive messaging of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ can move a nation into a movement. That a leader that can inspire a new generation of youth voters to mobilize to the polls in ballot breaking numbers can actually win an election. That the youth vote is a viable voting bloc. That our nation is not built on a two family dynasty as it has been since I’ve been 18. That my electoral work and my vote can actually count and make a difference. This I need to believe.

I need him to win because I have made it my life mission to fight against social injustices. I have made a commitment to make this work my life, my passion my work. I am in it for the long haul, and I will be sustainable doing this. And I need him to win, because he has made it his life work to do the same thing too. And as silly as it may sound, I think that if he won, if Obama became president, it would restore my faith. It would tell me that I didn’t pick the wrong career path. That I can do this for the long haul. If Obama wins, I know that I’ll have a future and that my life path was not futile. If Obama wins, it means that someone with a life mission committed to fight social injustices can become president. And that gives me hope for my future. And I need that. I need to believe that more than ever.

And yes, logically I picked Obama over Clinton because his book was better than Clinton’s. His politics, his values, his writing style in his book were more in line with mine then those in Personal History. But secretly, it’s not about his policy stance, or how he voted while in Senate. Secretly, I want him to win because I am selfish and because in Obama, I see a little bit of what I aspire to be. And I have to have hope for that future for me.