The week between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary is my favorite week in American politics. As soon as the 2020 dates were set, I reserved a hotel room to witness first-hand the excitement of retail politics at its best.
A part of people who, like me, made the questionable life decision of working on a presidential primary campaign during our younger years, always feels connected to the early primary states.
I imagine this is how people who care about college sports feel when their alma mater’s in a bowl game.
That it is a special-enough occurrence to disrupt their lives for a weekend trying to grasp a sense of a life they used to live by bearing witness to the achievements of a new class.
I was in the New Hampshire primary’s class of 2004, and have found my way back in some capacity every four years since.
It’s not a matter of partisanship, but one of affection for the institution itself. I was just as excited to ask Chris Christie who his favorite wrestler was in 2016 (Bruno Samartimo) as I was to do an awkward stairwell shuffle with Michelle Obama in 2008.
But I don’t go for the celebrity encounters, I go for the energy. It energizes me to be around young people working passionately for something they believe in, rather than just against someone they don’t like.
We all know that the world is controlled by powerful forces that are hard to comprehend. But every four years, for at least one week, one of those forces feels like it’s within our reach.
Yet, this weekend I won’t be reaching for them. I won’t wake up in a New Hampshire hotel room. I canceled the reservation a few weeks back.
I won’t look the self-anointed Iowa caucus winner(s) in the eye(s) to measure their character(s) one last time before they either crash and burn or take off to unapproachable levels of status and power.
Instead, I’ll be at home, welcoming family and friends to watch my one-year-old daughter smash a piece of her first birthday cake with her cute little fist. And I’m really looking forward to it.
That’s just one of the countless ways my life has changed as I’ve grown into the role of primary caretaker to my daughter Senita.
While her birthday may have caused me to miss the most dramatic weekend of the New Hampshire primary, it didn’t cause me to miss it entirely.
Instead of running into the thickest part of the madness, I went over the holidays when interest was low and accessibility was high. And I took Senita with me.
We only attended two events but they scratched my nostalgic itch and let me introduce her to the primaries in a special way that she definitely won’t remember (which is why I took so many pictures).
Primary elections aren’t about government, they’re about values.
They’re about choosing the themes and policies we’ll devote ourselves to and using trial-by-error to find the best way to communicate them until the calendar runs out.
Parenting basically follows the same formula. You do your best with the resources you have, but you can’t control either the calendar or the outcomes, you can only plan around them.
While I’m not holding town hall meetings espousing my parenting philosophy, I’m working every day to create the infrastructure I believe will help my daughter best succeed.
Her first birthday provided the first real opportunity for me to take stock of our progress.
My gift to her is a compilation of the past year’s photographs and videos; It’s meant to provide her with a record of the moments I know she won’t remember.
To me, it tells a story of emergence.
To her future self, it may mean something entirely different. She might see it as early proof of a character trait she values, a connection to past generations, or another example of an intolerable father who revealed far too much of her personal life to other people.
A myriad of factors will influence the final outcome including ones neither of us could reasonably predict. It’s a new experience, but similar enough to make me feel like I’ve been down this road a time or two before.
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