Decision 2008

A short story by Hoff Matthews

On a rational level, I know that John McCain’s victory over Barack Obama in 2008 was not the direct result of my decision to spend election night with Amy Zyskowski instead of showing up to phonebank. Just as the outcome of the World Series does not actually depend on whether or not you wear your lucky rally cap, presidential contests are won and lost on the basis of any number of factors—social movements, campaign strategies, the weather in Michigan—and the hormone-driven whims of one individual college student must rank very low on that list. Nevertheless, after twelve years I still can’t shake my nagging feeling of guilt for the misery of the McCain presidency and all that’s followed it.

My roommates and I had just finished our nightly game of Super Smash on the communal Wii when I got a text from Amy asking if I wanted to come over. This was, perhaps, the one thing capable of drawing me away from the GOTV phonebanking shift that was scheduled to be my last contribution to the efforts of BU for Obama. Amy and I had been hanging out for the last couple weeks after meeting at an Allston house party, not officially “dating” nor doing anything physical beyond kissing—so far, at least. Amy could decide at any moment that she was ready to take things to the next level, and my attachment to the Obama campaign paled in comparison to my seething anxiety about my virginity, which had been eating at me ever since I read in The CollegeHumor Guide to College that I would never find love if I didn’t have sex before graduation.

When I told my roommate Dan, a fellow BU for Obama member, that he’d have to go on to the student union without me, I could see he was disappointed. Dan was actually the person who had drawn me into the campaign in the first place. He was a pale, slight Coloradan with a strangely nerdy sort of charisma, and over the years we’d known each other he’d introduced me to various esoteric internet phenomena I’d have missed out on otherwise, like the Something Awful forums or the “Unforgivable” videos. He latched onto the Obama campaign early in the primary season, and his enthusiasm for it rekindled a political consciousness I had long been neglecting.

Ironically, when I was younger I had been precociously political. I was raised by leftist parents and had absorbed their ideology with the diligence of the A-student I was, to the extent that I annoyed my seventh-grade English teacher by insisting she allow me to write our election stump speech assignment from the perspective of Ralph Nader rather than Gore or Bush. While I never consciously disavowed this mindset, the monotonous horror of the Bush era and my own adolescent malaise gradually drained my enthusiasm: What good was it to know what was right if that knowledge wouldn’t stop the grinding machinery of the American empire, or get me a date?

The Obama campaign and the groundswell of support that rose up to greet it brought back a sense of genuine stakes I had forgotten I was capable of feeling. Maybe we really could be led by a decent man who had spoken the plain truth about the Iraq War, who would protect the civil liberties that so-called patriots had spent the post-9/11 era tearing to shreds. Why not? Wasn’t this America? Didn’t we deserve better than more war, more lies? When I think about what might have happened if 2008 had gone differently, I imagine a different path not just for the US but for myself as well. Maybe there’s some alternate universe version of me who never lapsed back into indifference, who kept pouring sweat into political projects instead of just accepting the government as an unknowable force of nature.

As it turned out, Amy and I didn’t have sex for the first time until a couple weeks into November. She was on her period on the 4th (as she explained to me later), so we just listened to Tha Carter III, made out and watched a Flight of the Conchords DVD before tuning in to CNN to watch the election results come in.

When things started to look dire I considered running back to the student union to see if the phone lines were still open, but that seemed rude.

You know the rest of the story. The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party had been right all along: Voters weren’t ready for a black man with a foreign name who promised big, potentially disruptive changes. In retrospect, I’m not sure how we ever thought we could defeat a well-liked war hero with a reputation for bipartisanship, no matter how awful the GOP was.

Heroic as McCain might have been, his presidency was a seamless continuation of Bush’s. More Mideast war, more lies, more of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. When the Democrats finally managed to retake the White House in 2016, it was only at the hands of Obama’s old running mate, the corporate-friendly Iraq War hawk Joe Biden. And even that meager gain might be short-lived: We’re now seeing strong poll numbers from his presumptive 2020 challenger, Bain Capital vampire Mitt Romney.

Could it have been different? Obama’s conservative critics always labeled his ideas as pie-in-the-sky foolishness, and it’s easy now to regard him as a McGovernesque gentle spirit who was simply too pure for the dirty business of politics. But who knows? Maybe his impossible dreams—ours—could have been a reality.

What I do know is that I didn’t show up. As the skeptics predicted, my whole generation didn’t show up, at least not in the numbers needed to put Obama over the top. If we really wanted “change,” wasn’t it the least we could have done to get in line and pull a lever? Couldn’t I have gone to the student union and told a few old ladies in Wisconsin where their polling places were, instead of sucking face with Amy Zyskowski to the tune of “Mrs. Officer”? And don’t we—I—ultimately bear the blame for what happened next? Maybe the future could never have been as good as us Obama supporters imagined. But I often think about that night twelve years ago, and the world we could have been living in today, and I have trouble imagining how it could be worse.