Daniel Alarcón
Please Try
Four years ago, during the last American election cycle, I was living in Arizona, John McCain’s home state. That campaign, like the current one, was tense and hard fought, sordid and often shallow, dragging all manner of fear, resentment, and apocalyptic speculation into the open. Everything was suffused with the kind of tension specific to close elections held amid great crisis. The United States has bumbled into calamity after calamity since the beginning of the Bush years, and 2004 felt like an opportunity to set things right. I threw myself into volunteering, knocking on doors in South Tucson and Nogales, wilting in the miserable summer heat, inspired, not by the candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket (John Kerry), or his generally spineless political party, but by a despairing need to do something for this country that has done so much for me.
Canvassing is awful work, but there is a logic to it: the more you repeat your pitch, the more you believe it. The more you believe it, the easier it becomes to approach a stranger and ask him or her about their politics. Still, it was often dispiriting how little people cared, how disengaged they were, or how their anger trumped everything. It was common to be yelled at, to be threatened, to be called names, to hear an outrageous lie repeated self-confidently as fact. I remember meeting a man in an electric wheelchair, doing laconic figure eights in front of a house I assumed to be his – after all, there was a ramp on the steps. It was an address on my list of potential Democratic voters, so I approached him. He wore a hissing copper snake coiled around his neck. I asked him if he was registered to vote. He asked me for a dollar.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, thinking he hadn’t heard me correctly. I repeated myself.
He scowled and spat.
‘I heard you, asshole,’ he said. ‘Now give me a dollar.’
But eventually you become inured to it, and you convince yourself there is hope. You have no choice. A few weeks into this, and I was beginning to believe it. Sure, I was yelled at; sure, I was called a Communist and much worse, but increasingly, I found people willing to listen, willing to express their discontent with President Bush, with the war in Iraq, with the general state of the world. For someone like me, this was heartening. I have never voted for any presidential candidate who won. Voting has always been something done out of protest, a stoic, even noble acceptance of defeat implicit in the very act. But now, to my surprise, I found ordinary Americans (is there such a thing?) agreeing with me, and in spite of myself, I began to believe we might win.
Until one afternoon, at the Pima County office of the Democratic Party, when I realized we wouldn’t. I was phone banking in a sweltering room with a half dozen other volunteers, and we still had hope. It was August, and the Swift Boat attacks had not begun in earnest, but they would, and soon after the Kerry campaign would begin to corrode from the inside, and the sense of inevitability that had animated our mission would dissipate so completely it would be hard to recall that it had ever existed. At that moment, however, it was all just beginning, and victory still seemed within reach. If the election was to be a referendum on the war, we had a Vietnam veteran to lead the way. We felt cautiously optimistic.
The Democratic party office was a squat cement rectangle on a dusty Tucson side street, with an almost sheepishly small sign out front and a faded American flag hanging limply in the still desert air. Inside, there was a single air conditioner for the main area, where volunteers gathered to make phone calls and stuff envelopes. At the back of this large room, through a narrow hallway, was a door leading out to the gravel parking lot and into the boiling summer heat. On that door was a sign which read: PLEASE TRY TO KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED.
The word ‘TRY’ was underlined.
I came across this pathetic little sign one afternoon, and knew this was it. The beginning of the end. I stared at it for a while, bothered, disconcerted, as if I were watching the entire sad trajectory of the coming campaign unfurl before me. The undisciplined Left could not be expected to stay on message, to get things done, to accomplish the necessary and tedious work required to win an American election essentially devoid of ideas. They couldn’t even be counted on to keep a door closed so that our useless, sputtering air conditioner might be slightly less useless. No, they – we – had to be implored to make the effort. It was something so simple, but so damning.
On the other side of Tucson, at the Republican offices, which I imagined to be plush and luxurious compared with our rather proletarian environs, there were likely multiple air conditioners to keep the volunteers cool and comfortable as they plotted their takeover of the world. They had such an excess of cool air that they likely didn’t have to worry about keeping the room sealed. But if they did, I felt certain their sign would not cajole or equivocate; it would not praise effort or appeal to best intentions. It would be exacting in its demand, specific and unrelenting: DOOR CLOSED!
This election cycle, I’ve been waiting anxiously for a similar moment to arrive. As I write, in the last days of October, it still hasn’t happened. I’m a partisan, obviously; there’s no point in denying that. I heard Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and was moved. Hopeful. I thought how exciting it would be to vote for this man one day, though I assumed I’d never get the chance. It was clear then that he represented the future, and for that very reason, I thought this wouldn’t happen, that we’d never get here. I’ve wanted to believe, but have resisted it, have been waiting for this candidate and the movement behind him to be revealed for what it usually is: a gesture, a feint toward something, but not the real thing. I was even prepared to go along with this, finding some comfort in reprising my usual role as a sometime volunteer in a quixotic, ultimately ill-fated campaign. It’s a comforting story to tell yourself: we are the good guys who lose with dignity. This disaster unfolding around us – it isn’t our fault. After all, weren’t we the ones who tried to keep the door closed?
It hasn’t happened this way. At least not yet. It’s been impressive to watch the Obama campaign meld the wide-eyed enthusiasm of its early supporters (many of whom were too idealistic for someone as cynical as me to take seriously) with a ruthless tactical efficacy one used to associate with Republicans. After these last eight years, for reasons any casual observer knows all too well, competence seems an especially alluring trait in a potential Commander in Chief, and Obama’s campaign has been remarkable in this regard. And now he may win – think about this: he might really win – and if he does, I will have to own the fact that for the first time in my life I actually helped elect an American president.
If it turns out this way, the most interesting days lie ahead. Barack Obama will not be a radical president; there is no such thing. His impact, however, will be immediate and global. The rewriting of the United States’ reputation abroad will begin on November 5, and there is no way to predict exactly how this will play out. This much is clear: many who had written us off will give the Americans a second chance. At home, his influence will extend far beyond the political sphere – culturally, an Obama presidency will have consequences we can hardly foresee. A black president – I never considered such a thing possible. There are people even now, older black men and women I’ve met, who refuse to believe, and I understand: they don’t want their hearts broken. They held out for a long time, but by late August, he was everywhere. At an early September music festival here in Oakland, California, literally half of the people present wore some kind of Obama paraphernalia. My neighbourhood, a working-class section of the city, is awash in Obama clothing. Every store on International Boulevard is selling unofficial campaign T-shirts, and one begins to see how slogans written for a national audience of ‘ordinary Americans’ are repurposed here at the street level, in a black and immigrant neighbourhood of a crime-ridden, economically depressed coastal city. The other day I bought a shirt emblazoned with a photograph of Obama in front of the White House. It read CRIBS 2009 – a reference to a show on MTV where rappers, athletes and rock stars give tours of their ostentatious homes – and at the bottom: YES WE CAN! There are others: Obama in front of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, his regal profile rendered in silver on black – like the colors of the local Oakland football team – looking pensively at the glittering city, over the words Change We Can Believe In , in cursive lettering most commonly used around here for neck tattoos.
What will it all mean? It’s impossible to say, of course, and part of me won’t believe it until I see it. All the polls could be wrong, or there could be massive fraud, or once again, the indolent, newly self-confident Left might forget to try. It’s happened before, though this time I can hardly tolerate the possibility. I’ll believe it when it happens, late on Election Night perhaps, or when he is sworn in, or even much later, eighteen months from now, when it is no longer news and no longer remarkable, when the words President Obama are so ordinary we must force ourselves to recall how astonishing they actually are.
Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru in 1977 and raised in the southern United States. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly magazine based in Lima. His short-story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His first novel, Lost City Radio, is published by HarperCollins in the US and Fourth Estate in the UK. He currently lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.