You Can’t Be Serious(57)
To round out the ways in which Obama was walking the walk on his staff hires was a marine named Brian VanRiper, who served as both the Veterans Affairs and LGBT outreach coordinator. With Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell still in effect, the decision to make the LGBT and Veterans outreach person the same dude was a blatant embrace of intersectionality. Obama was focused on bringing people together to do the hard work, not caught up in tokenizing different groups or hiring people who “looked the part.” Compared to my time in Los Angeles, each of the three days on the campaign felt like I was living in a far-off idealistic future, where people are uplifting, inclusive, encouraging, and also don’t ask you where your turban is.
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At the grassroots level of the campaign staff were the Obama For America field organizers, or FOs. FOs were in charge of organizing particular areas of the state, divided into regions. Most were in their midtwenties and had been inspired by the senator’s message enough to put their lives on hold. They moved to Iowa to do this hard work, and their stories almost always had a humble spin.
Ronnie Cho was an FO who hailed from Arizona and had convinced his childhood friend Ryan Lynch to move to Des Moines with him.
ME: What made you want to join the Obama campaign?
RONNIE: Hope and Change.
ME: Ha, right. Then how did you convince Ryan to join?
RONNIE: He was broke and lost.
A deputy field organizer, Ryan joked, “I never worked in politics before, but I had a chance to be part of history. When you’re twenty-six and all your shit has been in the back of a Honda Civic for over a year, you can be flexible.”
Behind the upbeat “What the heck, let me go make a difference!” rhetoric of these selfless, talented people were sometimes dire circumstances: loved ones who couldn’t afford higher education, parents who had recently lost their jobs, acquaintances who were overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nobody was working on Team Obama because they thought it would lead to a job at the White House. Obama was the longshot, underdog candidate, and the work his staff was doing was tough and often scary. Ronnie once passed someone with a swastika tattoo while canvassing. He heard the n-word multiple times when he’d knock on doors to get supporter cards. The staff wasn’t even being paid much. They were doing this work because they truly believed in our collective ability to make the country a better place.
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By the end of the third busy day, Olivia, Megalyn, and I were physically spent and emotionally fulfilled. Our last stop of the trip was to thank staff and volunteers at Obama’s Iowa headquarters in Des Moines—an unassuming, one-level office building with faded, thin gray carpeting from the days when it used to be an ice-skating rink. (Today it’s a church.) Over the course of seventy-two hours, we had spoken to thousands of college students and hundreds of high school kids.
We said our thank-yous to super-volunteers like sixty-five-year-old Samantha Wright, and took some photos with “Barack Stars” like the energetic seventeen-year-old Romen Borsellino. We hung out with the senator’s impressive young staff—Ronnie and Ryan, speechwriter Jon Favreau, and Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor—before going back to the motel to crash. This place was magic. I was having real conversations with motivated, down-to-earth people who were judged on the content of their character. Megalyn and Olivia needed to fly back to LA the next morning for work, but I wasn’t scheduled to be back on set at House for another five days.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should probably do more for people in my life who were in dire circumstances: guys like Brady in Texas. I thought about my grandparents, and the historic sacrifices they made for things much more significant. I considered some of the nonprofits I had the chance to partner with over the years, like ARCH in India, where I spent the summer before eleventh grade. I even thought about the international security graduate certificate program I was enrolled in, wondering if that could help me dabble in public service one day. Inspired by the staff, who were working around the clock for something they believed in so strongly, I wondered, What excuse do I have not to stay in Iowa a bit longer?
Before passing out for the night, I asked Teal if it was possible to change my return ticket to LA and extended my stay in Iowa. For four additional days, I did more surrogate events and helped the FOs with canvassing, supporter cards, organizing, phone banking, and late-night data entry. Instead of Colby and his emergency van, I was riding shotgun in various FOs’ cars.6
On the evening before my new flight home, Paul Tewes called me into his office.
“So, listen,” he said with a wide smirk, “we want to hire you. Can you stay here?”
“Hire me for what?”
“Well, we thought you were just an actor who did these stoner movies, but it turns out you’re a damn good organizer too,” he explained. “Word spreads quickly around here. Every day that you’ve been here, you’ve broken the single-day record for supporter cards by a lot. You’re dedicated and motivated. You’re very good at working with people, and you’re incredibly persuasive without being disrespectful. You should stay. I want to hire you. The job pays two thousand dollars a month. I know that’s not much, but you’re really good at this, and it’ll make a big difference.”
This was crazy. Flattered as I was, there was no way I could stay in Des Moines—I was working a hard-earned dream job in Los Angeles. I loved the random week I’d spent on the campaign, but it couldn’t last beyond the additioinal days I already put in. “Paul, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m on a TV show right now, and I go back to work on Thursday morning.”