The 2008 Campaign: Your Stories Are Rolling In
Have you sent us your favorite personal story from the 2008 campaign? Use the Share Your Story page to tell us about your experiences and upload a photo or two. We’ll share our favorites here in the blog.
Here’s one from Alex G. in New York:
blog comments powered by DisqusI liked Barack Obama from the start, but it took a while for me to be convinced that he could win the nomination, let alone go all the way to the White House. I wanted a Democrat to win, and if it was going to be Hillary, I was on board.
But my feelings started to change in the days immediately after Obama’s upset win in the Iowa caucuses. The race was really heating up, so a college friend and I drove up to New Hampshire to spend a day taking in the scene in the runup to the primary. We printed out a schedule of events and hit the road. That afternoon we saw Bill Clinton stump for Hillary at a high school gym, and later that night we saw Mitt Romney do post-debate damage control at a bar in Manchester (Romney’s performance was underwhelming, and everyone seemed to realize it, even him).
But the most exciting event of the day was Barack Obama’s early-afternoon event at a high school gym in Nashua. The line to get into the building was extraordinarily long, and we thought we wouldn’t get in. But we did, and we actually scored a solid position in the center of the room, perhaps 50 feet from the stage. Here’s a photo I took:
There was an energy in the room that I’d rarely felt in the presence of a politician—a sense that this candidate, so young and supposedly inexperienced, was not merely a vessel for his supporters’ outsized hopes. He seemed like the real thing. It still took several more weeks before I was totally on board with his campaign, but that speech was the turning point for me.
