Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”
We won the big one. I had dared, privately, to hope that Obama would win, and I always said publicly that I was sure he would win, but I felt something hard and tight melt inside of me when it was a fact that he really, actually did win. After Obama was declared a winner, my 11-year-old son reminded me that “now we can both say we shook a President’s hand.” I’m proud to say we did.
We lost the little one, though; Bob Alexander’s Congressional campaign for which I have lost sleep, accepted “snack sized” pay, and written, read, analyzed and studied when I was so tired I was sure I couldn’t do one more thing. We were not even close.
Most of the Democratic campaigns in our area watched results and ate potluck at UAW Local 652 starting at 8:00 on Tuesday night. We cheered when Obama took a state, and I sat at my laptop refreshing precinct totals in our Congressional District for four hours, hoping that a miracle would happen. It was a perfect Dem madhouse, with union workers of all ages and ethnicities, African American families taking pictures in front of the giant Obama signs and chasing runaway toddlers, exhausted candidates giving television interviews in their suits, and clumps of local college students who had volunteered for Obama until the minute the polls closed.
After Obama’s win was announced, a beautifully attired African American woman came to the table where I sat between Bob and a member of our campaign staff. She introduced herself as Betty, and said: “I don’t want to be racist or anything, but I wanted to just come over here and say thank you, white people” She high-fived us, and went on. “We couldn’t have done this without you. I just told all my friends over there ‘I have to go over there and thank those white people.’ I never thought I’d live to see this day.” We cried. It was that kind of night.
Obama won, and then we lost. We lost big. After four months of increasing pressure, fires to put out, press releases, press conferences, outrage, exaltation and conversations about who would fill what position “if”; it was just all over. No one is going to Washington, there’s a huge debt to pay off, the office needs to be cleaned out, and we are all remembering that even though you always say you’ll see people again after you leave a job, it just never happens. All of the things we put off until After the Election have to happen now, and we are all unemployed except for our intrepid Field Organizer Lydia. We all drank the Kool Aid, but, as is so often the case, the spaceship never came.
So I’m happy, and I’m sad, and I’m exhausted. I oscillate so rapidly among emotions that I have declared myself Unstable and Cancelled Until Further Notice. After I regroup, after I sleep, after my house is clean again and I have cooked real food and seen my friends and sunk back into my life, I will be ready to start working on the business of finding a job and being happy that this country is heading someplace better. First, though, this long, crazy ride needs to be “rounded with sleep,” and lots of it.