Chris Liddell-Westefeld - They Said This Day Would Never Come: Chasing the Dream on Obamas Improbable Campaign

So, Chris, I want to hear more about this project, Barack Obama said as Marine One lifted off the runway.

Staring back at the forty-fourth president of the United States, seated in his helicopter, I felt a familiar anxiety set in. When I first started organizing for Obama in 2007, the campaign leadership drilled into everyone that our most precious resource was the candidates timeevery minute he attended to staff could mean one less minute persuading an undecided voter or inspiring a potential volunteer. If you wanted to contribute to the organizations success, you should never divert focus from those two goals. This lesson had been so deeply ingrained in me that even after nearly seven years of working for Barack Obama, I never felt at ease interacting with him.

So I always tried to keep my interactions as brief as possible. My job at the White House was to handle the Booka black leather binder embossed with a gold presidential seal that functioned as the presidents nightly homework assignment. The Book contained all the memos, national security directives, draft remarks, schedules, constituent letters, and other documents deemed worthy of the presidents attention. Upon delivery, President Obama would confirm receipt with a nod, thanks, or sometimesreferencing the intense expression I wore nearly every time I entered his personal space, my attempt at professionalismyoure still looking really serious, man.

I had never expected to have a front row seat to the Obama presidency. When I signed up to volunteer for him in my hometown, Iowa City, on the day then-Senator Obama announced his campaign, I assumed he would lose. Nearly two years later, I joined hundreds of other former organizers in following the new president to Washington, looking to be a part of the administration we had played a small, collective role in bringing about.

Through a mix of timing, luck, and privilege, I had landed this West Wing position, where I saw up close how the government documents a presidents time in office. Every staffers email is public record, every photo is archived, and every piece of paper is preserved under the Presidential Records Act. These materials are eventually administered by the National Archives and Records Administration and become primary sources for future generations. Sometimes I would imagine historians reading the Book decades later, trying to reconstruct Obamas eight years.

But as he entered his second term, it occurred to me that comparatively little had been done to document the campaign that put Obama in the White House. Aside from memoirs by the campaign leadership, few had recorded what it felt like to live through the experience in their own words. The reflections of organizers and volunteersthe majority of the people who made up the effort to elect Americas first Black presidentwould likely be lost to history.

Only five years after his inauguration, the victory that had seemed so improbable at the outset was becoming more inevitable in the retelling. The outcome of the 2012 campaign had already reshaped the meaning of 2008, a trend likely to accelerate with each passing election cycle. Friends oft-told campaign stories began to strain credulity, omitting moments of hardship or doubt. It was easy to see how decades of nostalgia might erode the details and reduce their recollection of the experience to 2008? It was great we changed the world.

Thats why this was my final trip as a White House staffer. With no other appointments demanding the presidents attention, Id been given a chance to tell him about the project that compelled me to leave three years before the end of his term.

Well, sir, its an oral history project to document your 2008 campaign, I said. Im leaving to collect interviews with alumni, starting in Iowa.

In the early days, presidential campaigns attract dreamers.