Coming to Washington

To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate's head over the toilet bowl after his first frat party. Yet as I paced around my Bard College dorm room on a freezing February night in 2007, on a conference call with other students across the country hoping to organize ourselves for Barack Obama's nascent presidential campaign, I was convinced of only thing: we were not going to change the world. Obama might be a generational spokesman, he might invoke the memory of John Kennedy, but he was facing the most powerful family in Democratic politics, as an inexperienced liberal senator from a major city. And he was black. Why should young people get behind such a futile cause? Why should anyone?