WASHINGTON — Shivering in the Washington cold on Jan. 20, 2009, Beth Johnston didn’t know how many like-minded Barack Obama fans were standing with her on the National Mall.
“I wasn’t at the Washington Monument, but I had a friend who was at the Washington Monument,” said Johnston, now a University of Minnesota sophomore and campus fellow for Obama’s re-election campaign. “I had no clue the crowd would stretch that far back. It’s like half the National Mall. That’s a lot of people crammed in there.”
The crowd won’t be quite as thick this year. About 600,000 people are expected on the Mall on Monday — a sizable sum, to be sure, but far fewer than the 1.8 million that were with Johnston in 2008. As you’d expect, Obama’s approval ratings are much lower than they were in January 2009, and fairly low relative to newly elected presidents going back 60 years. He lost about 3.6 million votes between 2008 and 2012, voters sent him a split Congress, and the country remains deeply polarized. Though he was re-elected going away, Obama’s luster has, for so much of the country, worn off over the last four years.
But not for everybody, and especially not for those reveling in Washington on Monday. For Johnston and three fellow U of M Obama organizers in town for the inaugural, today is a victory lap of sorts. The group helped organize Obama supporters on campus. They voted for president for the first time. And they are vigorously optimistic about the second half of Obama’s presidency despite two years of bruising policy-making in Washington and bitter fighting on the campaign trail.
“[The inaugural is] going to be a pedestal from which he can either bring it back together … or a time to take a stand,” said Jackson Fate, a 19-year-old freshman who served as a campaign fellow. “I’m hoping it’s a, 'Let’s get out the duct tape and try to mend this together' situation. The way he phrases his speech, it’s going to have a lot to do with the way the next four years go.”
Coming to the campaign
Laura Pratt is only 19, a political science sophomore who came to the Obama campaign after reading an ad written in chalk on the sidewalk her freshman year.
She led the Obama campaign’s efforts at the U last fall. Her group started with six fellows (“super volunteers,” as Fate describes them) but before the election, their numbers would swell to at least 500 volunteers, mostly students, who would spend the better part of two months organizing campus events, registering voters and trying to convince them to vote for Obama.
Francis McNamara was one of them. McNamara began working for the campaign nearly as soon as he arrived on campus, and he’d soon find himself arguing politics and policy and working to persuade students to vote not just for Obama, but against the two Republican-backed constitutional amendments on the ballot.
But McNamara didn’t cast a vote himself — he was born and raised in Ireland, where he’s long loved Obama, getting within two meters of the president during his visit to the country in 2011.
“I figured, when I’m in America during an election year, how could I not get involved?” McNamara said.
The group spent the months before the election simply trying to turn out as many of the campus’s voters as possible. The U, obviously, is a massive school in the middle of a diverse metropolitan area. It’s a highly liberal voting bloc, but not a particularly well-informed one, at least at first. Most students didn’t bother to watch the debates, McNamara said, primarily because they had their minds made up before hand. They voted the way their parents voted, or were influenced by what their friends were saying. Campaign volunteers spent a lot of their time talking about the amendments and just getting students to show up at the polls.
“On Election Day, people see the lines or hear the lines and you’re going around to the dorms and you’re like, get people to go vote,” Johnston said. “And they’re like, ‘Oh, I heard the lines are too long,’ and you’re like-“
“It’s not going to get any shorter,” Fate said.
“Bring a book, you can read your textbook in line,” Johnston said. “Just go and do it.”
The group worked phone banks until 9 p.m. on Election Night (calling voters in Iowa, where the polls close an hour later) before heading to the DFL’s election night party.
“We were there until 2:15, then we were in my car crying,” Pratt said.
Their efforts were rewarded. Turnout at campus precincts jumped 8 percent over 2008, Pratt said, and in the 11 precincts closest to campus, 73 percent ended up voting to re-elect the president, according to Secretary of State data.
“I think in general, people were very excited to be voting for the first time, and excited to be voting for the president again,” Pratt said.
High hopes for the next four years
Outside of a couple days in high school for Pratt and Johnston’s trip in 2009, this is the group’s first trip to D.C. They have good tickets to today’s swearing-in (they’ll be in the first standing area just behind the seats), and high hopes not just for Obama’s speech this afternoon, but also for a more liberal second term.
“I’m a college-aged Minnesota progressive, so I’m hoping he takes everything he’s done and take it seven or eight more steps,” Fate said. That means making good on his pledge to raise upper-income tax rates to move toward a balanced budget, something McNamara wants to see by the end of Obama’s first term.
Pratt said Obama should work on social issues like gay rights, immigration reform and gun control. Despite the political battles that have waged since Republicans won back the U.S. House in 2010, Johnston said she expects a more diplomatic Obama during his second term.
“You can tell he lacked maybe a little executive experience there,” she said. “So now, since he has a term under his belt, he has more confidence, maybe he can work with them better so there will be less gridlock and there will be things passed.”
All agreed they’re enthusiastic about what the next four years hold. But that work starts later in the week. For today, they’re focused on the festivities.
“Four years ago I was in high school, I skipped physics class,” McNamara said. “I watched [the inauguration] in my school lobby on a television screen and I was just like, ‘This is amazing, This guy is so cool.’ And now, four years on, I’m actually going to be there and see what I saw on the television screen. And I just cannot believe how much has changed in four years.”
Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry