it was looking like we might not be able to win there.
For the better part of a year now, Barack and his team had poured resources
into Iowa, but according to most polls he was still running second or third behind
Hillary and John Edwards. The race looked to be close, but Barack was losing.
Nationally, the picture appeared worse: Barack consistently trailed Hillary by a
full fifteen or twenty points—a reality I was hit with anytime I passed by the
cable news blaring in airports or at campaign-stop restaurants.
Months earlier, I’d become so fed up with the relentless, carnival-barker
commentary on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News that I’d permanently blacklisted
those channels during my evenings at home, treating myself instead to a more
steadying diet of E! and HGTV. At the end of a busy day, I will tell you, there is
nothing better than watching a young couple find their dream home in Nashville
or some young bride-to-be saying yes to the dress.
Quite honestly, I didn’t believe the pundits, and I wasn’t sure about the
polls, either. In my heart, I was convinced they were wrong. The climate
described from inside sterile urban studios was not the one I was encountering in
the church halls and rec centers of Iowa. The pundits weren’t meeting teams of
high school “Barack Stars,” who volunteered after football practice or drama
club. They weren’t holding hands with a white grandmother who imagined a
better future for her mixed-race grandchildren. Nor did they seem aware of the
proliferating giant that was our field organization. We were in the process of
building a massive grassroots campaign network—ultimately two hundred staffers
in thirty-seven offices—the largest in the history of the Iowa caucuses.
We had youth on our side. Our organization was powered by the idealism
and energy of twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-olds who had dropped
everything and driven themselves to Iowa to join the campaign, each one
carrying some permutation of the gene that had compelled Barack to take the
organizing job in Chicago all those years ago. They had a spirit and skill that
hadn’t yet been accounted for in the polls. I felt it every time I visited, a surge of
hope that came from interacting with true believers who were spending four or
five hours every evening knocking on doors and calling voters, building networks
of supporters in even the tiniest and most conservative towns, while learning by
heart the intricacies of my husband’s stance on hog confinements or his plan to
fix the immigration system.
To me, the young people managing our field offices represented the promise
of the coming generation of leaders. They weren’t jaded, and now they’d been