Run for office

“I think the most compelling thing about running for office is the volunteers. I always heard candidates refer to how they didn’t do it alone – it was a team effort – and I thought it was a bit trite. But I don’t think anyone who has not run for office can appreciate the overwhelming emotion that you feel for those people who put aside their own lives for 36 days or longer, go out in the snow for 11 hours at a time, eat crappy food and fold brochures until three a.m. – until you are the one they are doing it for. I will never forget election night. I knew I had lost, and I was driving to the hall where my election night party was being held. I saw cars parked on both sides of the street for at least ten blocks. And I realized it was for me. When I walked in and saw hundreds of people chanting my name and red-eyed young people crying while trying to smile at me and the 80-year-old man who had been out door-knocking every day actually looking his age for the first time, it was all I could do to get up to the stage and say something. I felt I had let them all down. I looked at all these people who shared the same vision and passion as I did, and who believed in me, and I felt what can only be called love. I loved those people.”

“As I walked slowly to the front of the room, the events from the last month flashed before my mind. Everything I’d gone through culminated here, in this room, in front of the City Commissioners, a courtroom stenographer, and a gentleman jingling three bingo balls inside a 60 year old Horn & Hardart Coffee can that has its own Facebook page. This, right here, is democracy at work.”