We came from everywhere, spending two years of our lives in states we barely knew, to test Barack Obama’s proposition that Americans are more alike than we are different – that for all our outward differences, we share the same values and pledge allegiance to the same flag.

“They said this day would never come.”

After an improbable victory in Iowa, our campaign went on to New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina – ultimately through all fifty states, building a coast-to-coast movement for change.  Some of us lived out of worn-out suitcases for months at a time.  Some of us fell in love.  All of us made lifelong friends.

After one of the hardest-fought campaigns in memory, we secured the Democratic Nomination.  On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won a resounding victory, in the process changing the electoral map and validating what he said four years earlier about so-called red states and blue states.  And a new First Family took the stage on an electric night in Chicago’s Grant Park, where the President-Elect addressed “the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics,” a crowd 250,000 strong, and billions of people around the world.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he began,”  but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”  But he also made it clear that the celebration would be brief – because we had more work to do.  “What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night.  This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change…It cannot happen without you.”

The re-election campaign would test that question a younger man posed to us eight years before: do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or a politics of hope?

For four years, even during the worst economic crisis in generations, Republicans tried to block America’s progress at every turn.  Vote after vote to block President Obama’s steps to right the economy, create jobs, and put more money in workers’ pockets.  Vote after vote to repeal Obamacare and take away families’ health insurance. Their cynical argument was that President Obama was to blame for the economy – even as they wanted to go back to the same policies that wrecked the economy in the first place.  Their platform was simple: we’re better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

And yet, the Americans we met while organizing and campaigning across the country were showing us otherwise.  Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of so many, things were slowly, steadily beginning to improve.  Jobs were growing.  Plants and factories were re-opening.  New energy was beginning to power our future.  More Americans had health insurance.  More troops were coming home. 

At that make-or-break moment for the middle class, America decided that we are greater together than we are on our own; that this country succeeds when everybody gets a fair shot, everybody does their fair share, and everybody plays by the same set of rules.  That we all have a stake in each other’s success.  Those aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values.  And on Election Day, in another definitive victory, we reclaimed them once again.