Confessions of a Campaign Manager

Prologue

When I was a kid, I wanted to be everything. I wanted to be an astronaut, a teacher, a writer, and an actor. I wanted to sing on Broadway and be President of the United States. Because that's what my parents, and the parents of all first generation immigrants, taught their kids. That we were in America now, and so we could dream bigger than they ever could. My parents never pressured me to take the traditional routes for an Indian of becoming a doctor or an engineer. They encouraged my sister to fulfill her passion of teaching math and took me seriously when I said I wanted to pursue theatre professionally (although I'm certain they were relieved when I gave up that dream). My parents did their best to make sure I had access to opportunities they never did, but along with these opportunities came responsibilities; my mom and dad expected me and my sister to improve the country that had opened its doors to us and had provided so much. Like many Indian fathers, my dad was a quiet man who kept his emotions to himself. Growing up, the only time I was 100% sure that my father was proud of me was when I was 12 years old and we were leaving a grocery store. As we walked to our car, I saw that a lazy shopper had had left their empty cart in the middle of a parking spot, preventing someone from parking. Dutifully shuttling it back to the drop-off, I returned to find dad smiling. That's when I knew what our family valued – making life just a little easier for others. My dad never missed an opportunity to live by that creed, that we should try and help others whenever possible. Helping people was drilled into me from an early age, and it's why I ultimately decided to pursue politics. Because at its core, politics should be about helping ease society's burdens; not expecting others to remove the burdens of society entirely, but making them just a bit more manageable.

My family was one of only about thirty Indian families in Roanoke, Virginia, a city that was about 200 miles south of Washington, D.C. In fact, when I was in kindergarten, I initially thought I was black since everyone else in my class was either white or black. As kindergarten ended, and our class was shown other countries on a map, like India, I thought about what being Indian-American meant. I had learned that there were white people in the world and there were black people in the world, but where did that put me? This crisis of identity extended itself to my social life; I would hang out with the 'cool kids' one day, and spend time with the 'nerds' the next day. In searching for a sense of belonging, I sought out the only thing that brings a southern community together – religion. I didn't much care for the strict constraints of my family's Hinduism growing up, especially the belief that eating meat was bad, but I knew that going to worship on Sundays was something all of my white and black classmates did. And since there wasn't a Hindu temple where our families could worship, we used to rotate weekly among each other's houses to hold our services.

While I enjoyed our weekly gatherings, I knew that I was different from the other kids as my family moved to Reston, Virginia, about 30 minutes outside of Washington, DC, when I was in 4th grade. I played video games and watched Star Wars movies like my friends, but I also loved talking to the grownups about why society functioned the way it did. This difference between where I came from and where I wanted to go manifested itself most visibly at my father's grad school reunion in December 2006, when I revealed to the other children of Indian graduates that I was going to college to study politics; my gleeful smile as I shared my exciting news was met with nothing but disconcerting frowns from these children who were determined to pursue medicine and engineering, traditional and respectable careers.

            My introduction to politics centered around race relations in this country – from watching Senator George Allen attack an Indian-American in his 2006 re-election campaign when I was in High School, to the election and re-election of the first African-American president and beyond. Racially driven events like those can bring out the most tribal instincts in our society, like the riots that occur at Donald Trump's rallies, but they can also inspire, like when a New York Times reporter dedicated an entire article to the meaning of a single photograph of a young black boy touching Obama's hair in the Oval Office.

Over the last 10 years, I have traveled the country and worked on different political campaigns to observe how the nation reacts to these types of events. Have they changed how we speak to one another? Have they changed how we organize ourselves? The answers I found convinced me that it was important that minorities become more involved in our political apparatus. That it wasn't weird that I was going into politics over a more traditional field for someone of my background; it was necessary. Because over the last ten years, I've seen how our democracy fails to reflect who we are as a people, and that has to change before anything else can. Politics brings out the best and worst in people. I've seen a presidential candidate play footsie with anti-Semitism, but I've also seen a U.S. Senator lose his career for calling a minority a racist name. I saw how the law can be flipped on a dime to suit a person's political whims and have been cussed out by a political donor, but I've also encountered the unwavering kindness of strangers as I stayed at their houses all across the country. I saw the sublime, the ridiculous, the honorable, and the sleazy. Through it all, I grew as a person and learned that what happens in Washington, DC is just a small part of the story about who we are as a people.

The story of my ventures in politics really began on May 25, 2006, on a sunny summer in Chicago. My theatre class had gathered for a trip over Memorial Day weekend to watch a play, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. A group of students participate in the aforementioned spelling bee, and at the end there's a scene where the narrator tells you what the contestants went on to achieve in life. And one person, the narrator says, went on to become Education Secretary under President Barack Obama. Bear in mind, this was in May 2006 when he was a freshman Senator who was just starting to have people talk about him as a presidential candidate. But here in Chicago, where the president established a life for himself, the crowd went absolutely wild. Leaving the theater, I remember having to tell many of my friends who Barack Obama was since he was so unknown at that point. I had drunk the Kool-Aid willingly, and it reignited that thirst for helping others that my father had reminded me of that day at the grocery store. The fact that Barack Obama had turned down lucrative jobs after attending Harvard Law School to help out on the South Side of Chicago for barely any money really struck a chord with me. I felt this was a fundamentally decent man who was in politics for the right reasons, I had felt the energy in that theater, and now I knew that if he ran, I had to do everything I could to get him elected.

            And then he ran. It was 2007, and during the winter break of my freshman year of college, I decided to travel to Des Moines for the Iowa caucuses. I even got to meet Obama's senior strategist, David Axelrod, at a rally at Roosevelt High School, just days before the state would vote. Though I was an introvert, usually quiet around people I considered to be too important to bother, I knew I wouldn't get another chance to talk to him. Wearing my dark blue American University hoodie, I walked across the gymnasium that had been the site of a recently finished rally and told him that I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He laughed and told me that he hoped I aim a little higher.

We live in an incredible country, a country that is centered around a set of ideals instead of a national identity based on race or religion, and my generation is bearing witness to the best time in its history. We face very serious problems; we are living in the first economic recovery that has benefitted the top ten percent at the expense of the bottom ninety, resulting in median incomes falling year after year for all but the richest among us.  Still, these problems are self-made and so, by their definition, they are fixable. With technology at our fingertips, bringing life expectancy to an all-time high, there has never been a safer and more exciting time to be alive. Consider for a moment that the iPhone had just come out when Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president. Human progress has been turbocharged and a new Renaissance period has captured the world.

To explore the progress America continues to make, and to see if it extends to all of us and not just a select few, I managed or played senior roles on 17 campaigns from California to Virginia. What I've learned is that people can be base animals, prone to our worst instincts in one moment, but capable of great empathy the next. We don't all want the same things, and I saw this play out in our politics.