2012 Elections More Inspiring Than 08

found this on TPM great read

A couple of thoughts about the election:
I’m from Boise, Idaho but my wife and I relocated to Ohio to volunteer for President Obama’s campaign for the four weeks before the election.

I admire Nate Silver for his election model and its forecasts; they are one of the few things I read about politics while we were on duty and they gave me a lot of hope during those dark days after the first debate and while the skewed Gallup polls were coming out. But I want to add that there was a huge army of people who tried to make sure that the polls that Nate used turned into actual votes.
For the last four days of the election, we helped manage a staging location for GOTV in one ward of a city in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. I imagine that the campaign will never release the total number of people who worked or volunteered in Ohio; they might not even know. But extrapolating from our experience, I estimate that there might have been close to 50,000 people on the ground in one way or another during GOTV in Ohio including 700 lawyers, 300 in the Cleveland area alone, protecting our vote.

I believe that our democracy was at serious risk this election. If we had lost to lies, a torrent of dark money, voter suppression, and racism, it might have taken decades for our democracy to come back from the bad laws and court decisions on further voter suppression and corporate power, if it could recover at all. Certainly beyond my lifetime since I’m 67. But people seemed to sense the crisis and responded, and folks from all walks of life joined together to do one extra-ordinary thing: re-elect an African American President in a time of high unemployment and in the face of everything the would be aristocracy could throw at us. I certainly sensed more determination and intensity at the door than I did (in a different suburb) in 2008.