2008 Election

HOPE Prevails

By Maegan Carberry ⋅ November 5, 2008 ⋅   Email this post ⋅  Digg This ⋅  Share on Facebook ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Tonight is one of those nights where you don’t even bother trying to sum up your emotions. No one will ever write it well enough, and attempting to do so undermines the experience itself. You cannot write what it feels like to drive through the streets of Los Angeles, hearing the honks of horns and screams of enthusiastic, hopeful Americans, knowing it’s happening in every other city around the country. You just live it and savor it.

So … reallllllllly need to go to bed so that I don’t sleep through my plane tomorrow morning, or our fantastic Wilshire & Washington with Harvard KSG genius Zach Tumin, who will discuss how Obama’s victory will also be a win for technology and a new era of governance.

Still, a few thoughts for those of you who have followed me on this wild two-year journey.

It was a weird day because I decided to stay home in Los Angeles and run the local voting precinct, a choice that prevented me from paying too close of attention to media coverage, watching Obama’s speech until just now, or even celebrating with the usual suspects. Frankly, this was a bit sad. Still, it was a fantastic experience in the kind of grassroots activism this revival has always been about. I suppose I could have been traipsing through Grant Park with stars in my eyes, but I’ve gotten plenty of that over the last couple years and I’m very proud to have ensured that more than 500 people in my own community were able to fairly and efficiently cast their votes in this historic election. This is especially important to me since it’s always bothered me that California gets treated like an ATM machine when it comes to electoral politics. Waiting in line Sunday to vote in Norwalk and working with my amazing team in Silverlake today was exactly the call to service Obama made in his speech tonight. (Also, check out the pictures of my goofy precinct — which was actually a furniture store — in the gallery! Well, everyone but my ex-boyfriends. I woke up at 4:30am and didn’t shower today and I don’t want to spoil any remaining fond memories.)

We all need to ask ourselves what it was specifically that got us engaged in this campaign, and make a new commitment to continuing our efforts in that niche. For me, the issues of youth civic participation, gay marriage (which, sadly, we appear to have lost the battle on tonight in CA), immigration, ending the war in Iraq, technology legislation, and election reform continue to be the cornerstones of my personal engagement. Once I recover and celebrate for a beat, I hope to delve deeply into those arenas.

Beyond that, I’ve been working on some longer essays about lessons from the campaign trail that it’s now time to finish. Lately it has seemed like the schizophrenia of the blogosphere has impeded my ability to be analytically compelling. My Twitter issues alone have stymied many a great commentary; don’t even talk about my addictions to Facebook, Talking Points Memo and Blog Talk Radio. I love the instantaneous information, but as I cultivate this site and the conversations I’m instigating I hope to err on the side of quality. With that said, I am off to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit, where I’ll be pondering some exciting questions with many great minds, and also writing writing writing. More later this week.