From:
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:21:35 EST
Subject: Barack Obama
To: joshua@
X-Mailer: 6.0 sub 10582Hello Joshua,
My name is [ … ]. I’m Sen. Barack Obama’s press secretary. [ …] passed along your email address. As [ … ] may have told you, Barack will be in DC Sunday-Tuesday, March 28-30. Ben thought that you might be interested in meeting with him during that time. Barack’s schedule is getting pretty booked so I’d love to set up a time if that’s something you’d like to do. Please let me know what day/times work for you.
Thanks very much,
[ … ]
(312) [ … ] cell
I think I’ll put this down as one of those meetings I should have taken. It’s a funny thing. I cannot say this email hasn’t bounced around my head now and then as Obama rocketed to the pinnacle of political power over the fewer than five years since that email was written.
As people who know me well know I’m not the best on staying on top of my email correspondence. And at the time I was deep into reporting what seemed like the story of a lifetime and in some ways was though we were never really able to bring it together. And as best as I can remember I don’t think I ever even responded.
A few months later I was down on the convention floor in Boston when Obama was giving that speech. When I got a floor pass during that convention my usual practice was to work the floor and pretty much ignore who was speaking. And I was doing that for the first several minutes of Obama’s speech, listening to it out of one ear but not focusing on it. And then at some point it all registered and I stopped and just listened. Something entirely different than I’d heard before.
