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This has been an incredibly exciting week for the United States and the world at large. Like so many others, I’ve decided I need to get my thoughts on what just happened down. Having been awakening to the political process in 2000, newly active in 2004, this was my first presidential election since I’ve turned 18.

Truth be told, I was feeling pretty good going into election day. The last few weeks I had started to believe the numbers at FiveThirtyEight and was fairly sure we’d win. I wagered that Obama would take 375 Electoral Votes, winning swing states NC, IN, MO, VA, PA, OH, FL and CO. I also somewhat secretly expected one big upset: ND, MT, GA, or AZ. I heard the calls not to become complacent but having worked on several losing elections I felt like I needed to avoid the absurd stress levels that accompany the final week of any campaign.

Tuesday I sat at my desk, like everyone else I was barely able to work, keeping an eye on election websites despite my knowledge that nothing would start to appear until 7pm. My mind raced back to the three days that I had felt this way before.

I had been reluctant to publicly support a candidate so early in the primaries in part due to my leadership position in the College Democrats. On January 3rd of this year however one of the candidates that I had a tremendous amount of respect for and imagined as Hillary’s likely VP choice had shown that he could organize a campaign and beat not only the inevitable Hillary Clinton, but also 2004 VP candidate John Edwards. Due to my state of birth and the state I was living in at the time I was assumed to support one of those two, but starting that night in January I saw that there was a chance that a man as unlikely as Barack Obama could win the nomination.

I was also distracted by thoughts of four years ago, the election that marked my first real involvement in a campaign, when I went from joining the grassroots NC For Dean group despite not being of voting age, and then after going to college helped revive the campus College Democrats and campaign for John Kerry. By November 2nd, young and naive, I was sure that the nation would reject George W. Bush and his joke of a presidency. November 2nd 2004 was also the day before my 18th birthday, a single day shy of voting, not that it would have swung either of the states I could have been registered in, but it made for a hell of an 18th birthday. Would the day after my 22nd birthday be just as disappointing?

The third day on my mind was the result of the biggest fear I had, that the election would be stolen. In 2000, I, like much of the nation was glued to the TV through election night and ensuing weeks, watching the recount take place. Recently having become politically aware, I was distraught at the idea of a stolen election, and it seemed plain to me that I was witnessing just that. Would desperation and fear within the Republican party lead to more attempts to subvert the democratic process?

Fortunately, early in the evening it was clear if they were going to steal it they would have to make it obvious, Pennsylvania and Ohio looked great, Virginia and Florida looked pretty good too, Kay Hagan was en route to unseating Liddy Dole which said good things about North Carolina. It was apparent by the numbers that as soon as the west coast polls closed an Obama victory would be certain. By 11pm it was clear that we were going to hear from President-Elect Barack Obama.

President-Elect Barack Obama.

Obviously this wasn’t the only election of the evening. As I mentioned Kay Hagan beat Elizabeth Dole in a race that mattered nearly as much to me on a personal level. I was remarkably proud of my state rejecting Dole’s fearmongering ads and politics of hate to elect Kay Hagan, as well as the fact that North Carolina voters chose Barack Obama after being a solid red state for so long. I was also proud to see Pennsylvania and Virginia go for Obama, two states I along with good friends of mine had volunteered in. In a strange way the race I cared about most of all was the NY 29th, where Eric Massa, a man I’ve had the pleasure to spend a bit of time with, defeated incumbent Randy Kuhl correcting one of the biggest disappointments of the 2006 cycle. I had swore to friends in that district that it would be my adopted district as long as I lived in DC without real representation. So in some way I got a new president and a new congressman on November 4th. I thank and congratulate all of my friends, and the country as a whole on what was achieved on Tuesday, and I hope that we will not forget that winning an election is the beginning — not the end. We have won, it is time to start healing the wounds our nation has suffered throughout the better part of my life. For those elections where we lost, most notably California’s Proposition 8, we must and will continue the fight and not let our victory rob us of the fighter’s spirit cultivated by the outrages of the last eight years.

The mood on the streets tuesday night in DC and other cities around the nation should carry us forward, the spontaneous peaceful rally I was so fortunate to be a part of in front of the White House should set the tone for how we as a nation are now reclaiming our civic duties and patriotism.

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So I disappeared for a bit, just in case the quiet here has given off the impression I haven’t been writing I figured I’d post a few links to things I’ve written elsewhere.

• I was in Berlin in July for work and did a few interviews. Here’s one in case you wonder what it is that I do all day. Netzpolitik interview
• A post I wrote for work about Django vs. using a CMS that people seemed to like: Cool project, what CMS did you guys use?
• Via work I’m also the October Blogger of the Month at FreeGovInfo, and have a few posts there.

I figured I’d link to this stuff so you two people that actually like to read things I write have something to hold them over.

(linking to work-related posts shouldn’t be taken as an implication that this blog is in any way endorsed by my employer or any of the sites I linked to)

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One of my closest friends, Patrick Simmons, recently left for Honduras with the Peace Corps. He’ll be down there for 28 months mostly out of contact with everyone else. In order to help him stay in contact he and I set up theDepths.org which is a blog that will be updated with letters he sends for me to transcribe.

Even if you don’t know Patrick it should make an interesting read, he’s going to be helping to educate and help with conservation efforts down there in Honduras, and there might even be some great pictures that come back.

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I’ve been asked how I got involved in politics and I’ve always had trouble coming up with a clear answer. I certainly do not come from an overly political family, I rarely remember politics being discussed in my presence save for sporadically around presidential elections. None in my family have been particularly involved, in fact the opposite seems to be more true, my political involvement has encouraged them to be slightly more active or at least outspoken.

Growing up in North Carolina, one of the few politicians that I do recall coming up among adults was that of Jesse Helms, who passed away this past weekend. Mr. Helms was a controversial symbol, to some representing a reverence for tradition and for some an icon of unrepentant bigotry. It is clear that he was masterful at exploiting superficial differences to stir up divisions in the populace for political advantage. Whether he was a racist in his heart or not (he denied being the bigot he was painted as and so often seemed to be) he was a master at using in the language of hate for political gain.

I spent the first ten years of my life in a fairly rural area of North Carolina, an area where the twin scourges of racism and poverty were well known by many. My own family wasn’t particularly poor, and our neighborhood was relatively nice for the town we lived in. Like most children, I have fond memories of my early childhood, playing in the yards, riding bikes in the street always with my regular neighborhood pals. My best friend Chris and I were nearly inseparable, both of his parents worked and my mom was typically at home to take us places, give us snacks, etc. He also had an older sister and brother that we would sometimes spend time with. Chris and I were like brothers, his family getting a dog was nearly as good as mine getting a dog because our adjacent yards were treated as one and the same.

Chris’ father was a hard worker often working the night shift and having to sleep during the day and his mother held a fairly important government job, his family as a result was relatively well off. Their house was one of the few two story houses in the neighborhood, one of my most persistent memories about his father is the way he spent so much time taking care of the lawn. Chris and his siblings were treated in many ways like part of our family, I can even recall being childishly jealous on at least one occasion over my mother’s treatment of Chris’ sister. Besides the meticulous upkeep of their lawn and fact that both parents worked, there was one difference between our families that to some made all the difference, Chris was black.

I don’t remember how or when I first became aware that this was an issue. I don’t know if it was the time a neighbor threatened Chris and I with a pellet gun if we came in his yard when I had played there with his kids in the past. It may have been overhearing a discussion that the reason that Chris’ dad took such delicate care of his lawn was that he knew if it was even half as ragged as the yard across the street they neighbors would talk about how his family was lowering property values. It may have been a time when one of the particularly troubled kids in the neighborhood didn’t want to share a pool with Chris. One thing that I found encouraging even then was how all but that one of the neighborhood kids had not yet adopted their parents attitudes, and would play freely with Chris most of the time. I saw racism as an odd hurtful thing from a previous generation.

Eventually Chris moved away and not long afterwards my family moved to a much more affluent suburban town where the poverty and racism were not on prominent display. I of course spent more time thinking about my crush on some girl in my social studies class than about any sort of racism or injustice. It wasn’t for several more years that the aftermath of the 2000 election would get me to start thinking about the importance of democracy and down the path by which I would eventually discover my own political nature. When my beliefs began to crystallize I have no doubt that it was seeing how people like Jesse Helms had been a part of a tradition of legitimizing racism and using the lack of racial understanding and fears of uneducated southerners like many in my old neighborhood that helped me see the importance of having equality as the core of any set of political beliefs.

Just as I saw how my peers in the neighborhood had not yet adopted their parents prejudices and had hope that racism was a thing of a previous generation; I hope that Mr. Helms can be remembered as a relic of a past we would be well advised to leave behind.

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I graduated in May from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science although I’m sure it still hasn’t finished sinking in. I decided to write a bit for self-reflection on my time there, and hopefully it will be of benefit to others in similar situations.

Four years ago I went to RIT to study computer science, but not unlike most college freshman it wasn’t long until I felt that I’d perhaps made the wrong choice. The CS courses I was taking simply weren’t challenging or holding my interest, and I’d narrowly chosen going to school for computer science over something like political science. I have enjoyed programming since I was 13 and it has always been something that has come fairly easily to me, but after my first year in college it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t what I truly wanted to do with my life.

At RIT, computer science majors are required to do four quarters of co-op before graduation, which are typically either done at local Rochester companies or at the big software companies. I had decided to wait until after my first co-op before transferring to a political science program elsewhere, so I wanted to try to make that first co-op count. In 2006 I compiled a list of over 20 political organizations and managed to get in touch with most of them to find out if any had need for an intern with my skills. It turned out several did have internship programs, but mostly for more typical internships, nothing that would count for my co-op requirements. It did occur to me that it would have been much easier to apply via the school’s “JobZone” that listed hundreds of jobs I was eligible for but seemingly none that fit my interests.

I ended up finding a co-op with Project Vote Smart, a non-profit that collects information on politicians and candidates. There are a couple things that are important to note about working on the dev team at Project Vote Smart: it is a very popular site that gets massive traffic in election years, the development team is extremely small (a third would be that it is based in Montana, but that doesn’t come into play in this discussion). These details meant that this massive site was basically being written and maintained by just three people. This was a great opportunity as it meant that I wasn’t given the typical grunt work given to many of my peers on their first co-ops. Being the only intern on a small team meant that I was given a large amount of responsibility, and after a few weeks I had proved myself and I was given a fair deal of autonomy. Working there proved to me that coding 8+ hours a day can be fun and rewarding even when it isn’t on the most exciting application in the world.

Of course, I decided to continue to pursue my CS degree, with the hopes that I could complete it in two more years and if I wasn’t happy with CS then go on to grad school for something else. In the next two years at RIT I added minors in public policy and political science and my coursework generally improved. I also worked at a more typical co-op once just to give it a try (it was worse than I had imagined, which is a story for another time). In the summer of 2007 I did another co-op at Sunlight Labs, then a relatively new creation of the Sunlight Foundation that proved to be the perfect place for someone like me that has straddled the politics/technology fence and wished there were more people thinking about how to bring the two together.

I stayed on at Sunlight as a consultant for my last year at school and now that I’ve graduated have made the move down to DC to work in what is perhaps the best possible place for someone with my skills and interests. Any regrets I had early on about choosing computer science over political science are long gone.

One of my reasons for writing this post is that my brother is on the verge of entering college and like virtually everyone else at that age, he isn’t entirely sure what he wants to do. I know five years ago when I was applying to colleges I spent a lot of time fretting over where to go/what to study, but I think what I’ve learned from all this is that what really matters is finding out what it is that you want to do, not what major you want to have for four years.

There is a lot of advice out there about choosing a major, ranging from “go with what you love even if you can’t think of a purpose for it” to “pick the degree that will get you the best job.” I suppose if you define “best job” as job that allows you to fulfill your potential instead of earn the most money, then my advice would be a combination: to pick the thing that you love that will help you find a job that maximizes your potential.

This is a hard equation to get exactly right, and I’m not convinced that many people can find that in the short amount of time that they are at college. I suppose the good news is that we tend to live and work for about four decades after our four or so years in college, so there’s plenty of time to work on finding that balance.

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