From 2012 to 2020: Elections of Resilience, Failure, and Hope
By: Sameer Assanie
Tags: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, 2020 Election, Hope, President

The first time I walked into a voting booth to cast a ballot for president was in 2012. I was 18 years old, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, and a proud supporter of Barack Obama.

Walking into that polling place was something I always imagined doing. Since childhood, something in me was fascinated by politics. My earliest political memory is being interviewed by a local paper about the 2000 election when I was just six. So by the time the 2012 election rolled around, I was ecstatic at the prospect of standing in line to vote for the man who made me believe in hope and change.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when my interest in politics transformed into infatuation, but by the time Obama was running for reelection, it was in full bloom. After all, I had come of political age during his presidency. And somewhere between 2008, when I was 14, and 2012, I came to think that my passion for politics could, maybe one day, lead me to a profession writing speeches for a president. In 2016, two weeks after graduating from college, I set off for Washington, D.C. to live out my political dream of working in the halls of Congress. And while I haven’t reached that ultimate goal yet, I know full well that the three years I spent in political communications wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Obama and what he inspired in me.

As important as Obama’s presidency was to shaping my worldview, his 2008 campaign wasn’t one that I watched all that closely in real time. (I still remember that on election night, as my dad was glued to the TV, closely following the elections returns come in, I was busy watching the Mavs play the Spurs in a regular season NBA game.) And so, I didn’t initially study the lightning in a bottle that made Obama such a powerful, magnetic candidate in 2008. It was only much later that I came to understand the power and potency behind his 2008 message of hope and change, which had inspired the country during the midst of daunting circumstances. After all, he was elected amid a terrible recession, two ongoing wars, and the political polarization of the Bush years. Unbeknownst at the time, his election hid an undercurrent of rapid cultural, racial, economic, and technological upheaval that we wouldn’t truly recognize for almost another decade.

That was until the 2016 election.

No one seemed more antithetical to Barack Obama than Donald Trump, the man who would succeed him. Nothing seemed stranger than watching the country that had just elected its first African American president in history decide to hand that office to the person who most opposed everything I believed our country represented.

That entirely unexpected outcome led me to rethink almost every conviction I had ever held about what it meant to live in America or be an American. Because I had grown up in a country that allowed my parents, two immigrants who moved here in pursuit of a better education and greater opportunities, to build a life for themselves; a country that allowed my grandparents, two immigrants who fled their homeland after the outbreak of violent incursion and war, to rebuild anew. Well before the country had heard the name Barack Obama, I had seen and lived the reality that America was, at its core, a big-hearted and welcoming country, which is why Trump’s election left me shell-shocked.

In the days and years that have followed, I’ve thought back constantly to what attracted me to Obama in the first place, what had made me believe in his vision of America. Sure, it was his compelling personal narrative and the improbable odds he overcame to reach the presidency. But more than that, it was the way he spoke about America.

“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope,” Obama said on election night in 2008.

Until I recently revisited this speech, even as a fan of Obama’s throughout his presidency, I had never thought of hope as something unyielding. But it made so much sense, the idea that hope was indeed something resilient that could face down seemingly insurmountable odds and still overcome whatever stood in its way.

Coming of age in Obama’s America left me with the impression that hope would always triumph over fear, and that that triumph was the inevitable outcome of fate. Late on election night in 2016, that impression was shattered. But it was replaced the next morning.

“The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back,” Obama said the morning after Trump’s win.

Those words gave me a new perspective on Obama’s idea of hope, which made me realize that our progress was not — nor would it ever be — inevitable. While this realization was new for me, I wondered if, for Obama, these words represented a response to witnessing who the country had just chosen to become his successor as the next steward of the presidency.

It wasn’t.

“As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path,” Obama said on election night in 2012, the night he won a second term.

The great lesson I came to learn arose from the idea that it’s easy for us to believe in hope when our preferred candidate wins, and when those wins lead to the progress we seek. The true test of our convictions comes when we face setbacks, when the straight line forward zigs, and when our best efforts meet failure.

It was during these trying times that I had to determine whether I genuinely believed in an optimistic America. For me, I decided the act of remaining hopeful wasn’t symbolic of some naivete that ignored the turbulent and unpredictable road ahead. Instead, my worldview was once again born of words spoken by Obama.

“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting,” he said during his victory speech in 2012.

Nothing had lifted up my faith in America like voting for the future I believed in, a future filled with hope.

That’s how I felt when I voted for the very first time in 2012 for Barack Obama and how I felt again when, in 2020, I voted for Joe Biden.

Being one of the record-setting 80 million Americans who elected Biden was more than about just beating Trump and overturning the cruel, hateful, and harmful policies of last four years. It was an act of hope.

Biden was far from a perfect candidate, and I didn’t vote for him in the primary. And yet, by the time I went to vote this fall, I didn’t view him as the lesser of two evils or even the last remaining alternative. I recognized that his victory would represent returning this country to one that valued people like my parents and grandparents and one that welcomed them here with open arms.

Like Biden, our country is far from perfect, but essential to the American story is that we strive to make it more perfect. That means protesting when we come across injustice of any kind, speaking out when we see the cloaked hints of prejudice among our loved ones, and voting in every election, especially if the last one didn’t go our way.

The outcome of 2016 reminded me of another quote. Not one of Barack Obama this time, but one uttered by Joe Biden.

“Failure at some point in everyone’s life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.”

Over the last eight years, I felt at times that our pursuit of progress was met only with failure. But just as voting for Barack Obama in 2012 made me optimistic about America, voting for Joe Biden in 2020 made me glad that I never abandoned my belief in hoping, and working, and fighting for that brighter and more hopeful future.