The Obama Half-Dollar

[Written in the summer of 2009]


I've been holding on to one particular coin for nearly a year now. Nothing rare or particularly exceptional about this coin but it has grown in personal value and I am reluctant to part with it. It is a 1984 Kennedy-face half-dollar. It has no real distinction except that it was a tip I received while tending bar one chilly night early in February of 2008. I should go back just a bit before I continue with this story.
I first became interested in Barack Obama as a serious Candidate for president after hearing his speech at the Democratic Nation Committee meeting in the fall of 2007. He made one remark that made an impression on me. He declared that "I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called 'the fierce urgency of now" His speech covered his remarkable and unlikely story, and his belief that a few voices can build and rise into many and finally into one unified voice.
At the time there were still 10 candidates running. Among those running was Obama's strongest opponent Hillary Clinton, his eventual running mate Joe Biden, and the former Senator from North Carolina and John Kerry's Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards. The others had name recognition and vastly more playing time in Washington, but it was clear that in this campaign washington experience would be a liability. People across the nation were itching for something new and were, for the first time in a while, looking beyond party affiliation, gender barriers and racial divides.
I was undecided. I knew that I wasn't going to vote for a Republican but I wasn't necessarily too keen on the Democrats. I wouldn't call myself a democrat nor any other label with such concrete implications attached to it. If I had to look at all of the parties this country has to offer (and there are more than 2) I would probably align closest with some form of a progressive party. In my four prior presidential elections I had Voted for Bill Clinton in 92, Ralph Nader in 96, Al Gore in 2000 and in 2004 I wrote in Howard Dean feeling that Kerry didn't have the political strength or personal charisma to affect real change in Washington.
It appeared Barack Obama was that instrument of change, the progressive voice that I, along with a multitude hungry for common sense, had been looking for. I became a supporter. For the next few months I would defend my support for Obama to my father and my friends who were Clinton supporters as well as to my good friend Patrick who was an Edwards Supporter. My reasons for not getting behind Hillary Clinton were simple. She was part of a political machine that had already had a go at the White house and though the eight years of Bill flanked between 2 Bush presidencies was like a quick gasp of air while having your head repeatedly dunked in a barrel of water, it was time for something fresh and new. I found it harder to come up with reason not to throw my support behind Edwards. Both he and Obama had similar backgrounds coming from working-class families and overcame considerable odds to put themselves through Law school. Both brought a similar grass-roots approach and anti-poverty message to there campaigns. But again, as good of an orator and as capable a statesman as Edwards was, he lacked the charisma and the dynamic personality to rally the people, to cross race and gender lines and to unite a nation divided. in my mind Obama was our only hope.
By the beginning of January 2008 Joe Biden had dropped out of the race along with Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich leaving Edwards to compete against two candidates with more historical significance than he. Edwards was now running a campaign that, if successful, would keep this nation from nominating either the first Woman or the first African-American for president. On January 30, 2008 John Edwards speaking from the ninth district in New Orleans, where he had began his campaign a year earlier, announced that he was dropping out of the race “so that history can blaze its path.”
Later that week I was Tending Bar at Mcneill's Brewery in Brattleboro Vermont. McNeill's is a local gathering place where unlike-minded people can feel free to exchange ideas and opinions without fear of judgement or prejudice. My Edward supporting friend Patrick was, on this day, getting his usual dose of peanuts and porter. He paid for his beverage and snack and laid down a single coin and said “Hold on to this until Obama is elected” It was the aforementioned Kennedy-face half-dollar.
It certainly was not the biggest tip I'd received in my time in the service industry but it had a particular weight that I didn't realize until after holding this coin for several weeks and subsequent months. I began to consider the implications that this coin carried with it. I, of course, thought of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, elected the year that Barack Obama was born. I thought of the Democratic party, once the party of slavery, that had become the beacon of civil rights one-hundred years after Abraham Lincoln removed one of the final stains of the American experiment by abolishing slavery and who maintain a union out of a nation divided and made it possible for a man of color to eventually assume the highest office in this nation.
I thought of the year, 1984. A year that saw the biggest electoral sweep in US history as Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale, Mondale only carrying his home state of Minnesota and Washington DC. I also thought of the totalitarian nightmare that George Orwell wrote about in 1948, a path that our nation was dangerously close to realizing with the direction of the previous administration.
The coin has been with me since it left the bar top and conditionally entered my pocket. It has been part of my daily routine, keys, wallet, phone, Obama coin. Obama has since surpassed and defeated the Clinton political Machine to win the democratic nomination for president and he has defeated the McCain/Palin ticket to win the Presidency.
I held onto the coin as I made my voice heard in a private voting booth on November 4th . And as the polls closed and the results began to come in periodically reached into my pocket to make sure the coin was still there. Before midnight Obama had clinched the election by surpassing the 270 delegate mark. There was a roar of celebration around me that night, much larger than any game-winning home-run or Super Bowl touchdown.
The following day as I went about my usual morning routine there was something different. People were smiling at each other. Strangers were greeting one another and making eye contact. It was a togetherness I had not felt since the days following September 11, 2001 but with a noticeable polarity of emotion. People were coming together in hope rather than fear. A heaviness had been lifted and it seemed that American promise and our status among the nations of the world had been restored.
The coin has remained in my pocket. It hasn't been given up to make the difference to purchase a cup of coffee. It hasn't been broken into smaller coins to make change for parking. it's value has well surpassed the face value of the coin as it was printed in Philadelphia. It has been the most valuable fifty cents I'll never spent.

Vermont Independence: Introduction

The following is the introduction to the culminating study of my undergraduate degree from Union Institute and University. Entitled 'Vermont Independence' the study intended to uncover the roots of Vermont's tenacious spirit. It was written in 2006 and reflects much of the political culture in Vermont at the time (God, I miss Jeffords).

My plan is to overhaul this study. Edit it for content, add chapters on topics not covered, make it current and ready if for publication. But for now I am publishing this here in it's raw form. This was the final draft just before it went to my Advisor and faculty readers.

Introduction

Vermont is said to be one of the most liberal state in the union. Progressive may be the more accurate wording, but regardless of  terms, both of these descriptions fail to capture what is at the core of it all: independence. When the events are looked at, it's the willingness to go it alone when the government fails to meet the needs of its citizens that is the hallmark of the story of Vermont.

    The most glaring example is in Vermont's representatives in Washington, D.C., who act as the collective voice of all Vermonters. Most notable is Vermont's lone congressman Bernie Sanders. Former mayor of Burlington and self-described Democratic-Socialist, Sanders is the longest serving socialist congressman in the history of the United States. It's impressive enough to be elected without the financial backing and political infrastructure that national parties provide, but also to overcome eighty years of red scare propaganda. While serving as mayor of Vermont's largest city, a letter to the editor in a local newspaper read; “I don't know anything about socialism, but Sanders is doing a fine job repaving the streets” (Sanders 64). This is a simple example of how taking care of your constituents can get you much further than political alliance.

    Senator James Jeffords, a longtime republican, served in the state legislature and as attorney general in the sixties. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1974 and represented Vermont until 1988 when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Early in 2002, Senator Jeffords left the Republican Party and became an Independent, a move that shifted the balance of power in a 50-50 Senate. He had become increasingly distant from his party and was disillusioned with the Republican leadership.

    In his many years as a Republican he often voted across party lines, he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Brady Bill, the Family and Medical Leave Act, an end to the ban on gays serving in the military, and was a strong supporter of President Clinton's national health care plan. As an independent he would caucus with the Democrats and chair a number of committees in the Democratic-controlled senate.

    Patrick Leahy, senior Democratic senator, has, throughout his career, stayed true to the core conservative values that has kept Vermont from social, economic and environmental ruin. Leahy is successor to Vermont's most famous politician of the twentieth century, George Aiken, longtime Republican senator and governor who, as a minority Republican governor, opposed Roosevelt's new deal, not on party lines, but on the grounds that it made people rely less on community action and more on the federal government.  Aiken was one of the few senators to oppose military action in Vietnam and when asked what should be done about the situation said, “Let's declare we've won and get out.”

    Although Vermont's representatives may come from different backgrounds and political affiliations, they have usually served the interest of Vermont before the interest of the federal government. One of the points in Republican governor Jim Douglas re-election campaign was Vermont's many law suits with the federal government. One of the strengths of Vermont voters is the ability to look beyond party affiliation and elect the candidate who will best serve. In 1990 Vermont elected a Republican for governor, a Democrat for lieutenant-governor, and a Socialist to Congress.

    When asked whence this spirit of independence came, many people would credit it to the influx of liberals in the latter half of the twentieth century, and if one were going by Joe Sherman's Fast Lane on a Dirt Road this might be the only conclusion one could arrive at, but I see a thread that has linked this spirit since settlement began in Vermont. I searched out many interpretations of this idea but found the historians getting in the way of the facts.  Although in many cases the historian is an able guide through time and space, in this study I wanted to tell the story from my understanding of the events, quoting documentation gathered by historians rather than quoting the historians themselves. I gathered facts, names and dates, to make a timeline of events, and from that, made an attempt to understand the cause-and-effect relationship among these facts. Although the interpretation from some historians lingered in my brain and couldn't be ignored, it is in the synthesis of these ideas that the real learning occurs.

    It has been said that Vermont has more history per capita than any other state. With towns whose charters date back as far as the 1750's, and with most records held by town clerks or local historical societies, so much of the primary documentation is still available to view. This allows historians to gather the facts and synthesize them into a cohesive picture without direct influence of the work of prior historians.

These are some of my notions: Vermont is unique in being the only state that truly created itself. It was never in the plans for the United States; no royal charter was ever issued. Vermont is the bastard child of the American Revolution. After a period of appeal when it was clear that no government would recognize or legitimize the claims of the settlers who cleared and worked the land, an independent state was created from within. New Hampshire had abandoned the settlers and appeals to New York had turned violent.

Autonomy came about out of necessity, and was given validation by a declaration of independence and a constitution. Vermont maintained itself with its own coinage, postal system, and unique system of government that worked on the most grassroots level of town meeting (which still exists strongly today). Vermont took part in international trade and negotiation, and operated as a sovereign nation for fourteen years between 1777 and 1791 without the authority of Great Britain or the United States.

In trying to find answers to how the revolutionary history of Vermont has continued to have a tenacious effect on the politics and the people, I looked to several contemporary histories, and a few that date back as far as the mid nineteenth century. I began trying just to understand the facts of that period in which American independence was achieved and how Vermont got skipped over. I began to see a thread that linked today's independent spirit in Vermont directly to the land disputes in the New Hampshire Grants during the period leading into the American Revolution, out of which rose Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys.

I found that the independent spirit in Vermont is a learned trait, and has been passed down for two centuries. Each generation has witnessed or been a part of Vermont's independent spirit. This statement is supported by former senator and governor of Vermont, George Aiken; “Vermonters for two hundred years have handed down certain attitudes of mind from generation to generation. Some folks called us old fashioned and backward-looking for adhering to the ideals and principles characteristic of the people who settled our state. We value our heritage of ideals” (qtd. in Sherman 607) Since joining the Union, Vermont has maintained its individual identity and has stood up to federal authority when it seemed inconsistent with the laws of the state, nature or the Vermont way of life.

Short of studying the entire history of every state I will support the claim that far from a band of rogue citizens in the United States, the people of Vermont are the conscience and the voice of reason for the entire nation. In a speech delivered at Bennington in 1928, President Calvin Coolidge said, “If the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the union, and our institutions should languish, it all could be restored by the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.”

This supports my notion (or perhaps just a strong personal belief) that if Vermont continues to work from the grassroots and stand up for what is right and not necessarily easy,  it can save the United States and hence the world from self-destruction.