Sunday, January 18, 2004

Off to Iowa I am off to Iowa to try and make this campaign of Howard Dean real.  As I left this morning, I daydreamed on the plane.  Boston was quite frozen, the Charles River was full of ice.  It reminded me of the cold January day in  1986 when my daughter was born, and I held her up to look out the window at 7:30 am at the frozen river, at the beauty of clear bright light and ice.   I am flying into Chicago, and then Des Moines.  I am going because my son, who lives in Philadelphia, called after a meetup last December, and said, why don’t we go to Iowa together.    I jumped at the chance.  I have been doing letter writing, fund raising, meetups, phone calls, and other activities for the Dean campaign, but the idea of meeting other Dean supporters from around the country, and talking to individual Iowa voters and seeing how they think—that was irresistible.   I am supposed to meet a reporter from WBZ TV later today in Des Moines.   He is doing a story on people from Massachusetts going out to support the campaign.   I have been thinking what I want to say to him.  I think its that this election really is about recreating the sense of American community that we felt in the past.  The feeling of community does not always mean that everyone agrees—but it is a sense of working toward common purpose, a sense of empowerment, a sense of accomplishing goals.    After 25 years of Republican divisiveness, we have a rebirth of empowerment and purpose in the Democratic party.  This is what Howard Dean means by a people powered, anti-Washington campaign, and this is why I, as a person from Mass., feel every right and duty to go to Iowa and participate in the campaign.   We need to care about Iowa, and Iowa needs to care about Massachusetts.  I hope to say something along these lines—that we are building a national community where we all need health care, need support for our local school systems, need a role in the world that promotes democracy and respect, instead of war and corporate power.   This will not happen if we allow ourselves to be divided—by race, by region, by culture.  That is the beauty of the Dean campaign, and why, win or lose, it represents a rebirth of the true spirit of the democratic party.    Is it strong enough to win Iowa.  I don’t know.  In three days we should find out. 8:50:30 AM   comment []

© Copyright 2004 Toby Sackton. Last update: 1/19/2004; 8:23:18 PM.