Goodbye, and Good Luck

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared on April 27, 2008

Now that they are gone, don’t you miss them?

I’m speaking, of course, of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two U.S. senators and would-be presidents who occupied so much of our time and thoughts over the past seven weeks as they traveled every part of our state in their seemingly insatiable quest to get us to vote for them last Tuesday.

You opened the newspaper, they were there. You turned on the television, they were there. You went to visit your your son’s high school counselor and there was Barack, sitting in with you and discussing college choices, joking about how bad the food was when he went to Columbia. You went shopping for cammo hunting clothing at Cabela's, and there was Hillary offering to take you up to the family place on Lake Winola for a refresher course in gun safety.

For more than a month, they loved us and needed us and asked us to remember them come Election Day. Then, like Andy Dinniman’s mustache, they were gone.

I know Barack liked me, because he called me and left me a message. His voice on my telephone answering machine was as clear and powerful as it was in that “Yes, We Can” YouTube video that featured dozens of people whose names and identities I could not place, and Scarlett Johannson. He even sent me an e-mail calling me by name, and later had his wife, Michelle, follow up with another call. I was sorry I wasn’t home when they called so I could have spoken to them personally and told them how much I admired them and how all my friends were inspired by them and asked how Barack chose the music for his rallies; I hadn’t heard the O’Jays sing “Give The People What They Want” since I graduated high school.

I was less certain about Hillary’s feelings for me, even though she sent me e-mail after e-mail after e-mail every single day of the month she was here. She wanted me to know where she was, whether it was Scranton or Lehighton or Palmerton or Aliquippa, and what she was thinking about. But her messages always seemed like someone else was writing them, not her. I took it as a good sign, however, that she sent her one and only daughter, Chelsea, to stop in for a quick visit to my neighborhood near West Chester University. It meant a lot.

I wish they were still here because there is so much I wanted to show them about my hometown.

I would have taken Hillary to Jitter’s in West Chester and bought her a shot and a beer and watched the Phillies game with her and made sure she got home OK with her own Jitter’s T-shirt that she could wear when she wanted to fit in with us folks. If Bam had been there, I’d have even introduced them.

I would have taken Barack around the borough to show him that not all folks who live in small towns in Pennsylvania are bitter. Only when it snows and they don’t clear the streets on time. Or when they give us parking tickets for parking in front of our own homes. Or when they put up new stop signs, this time in the hallway between our living room and our bedroom. Come to think of it, we’re pretty much bitter most of the time, but we would have hidden it for politeness’ sake.

Now we are left with an emptiness, a void, a hole in our lives that qualifies us for a stop on U.S. Sen. John McCain’s tour of “forgotten places.” Like a spurned boyfriend who wallows in grief waiting for his ex to return to his life, we would give anything for a note in the e-mail or a flyer in the postal box.

All we have now are the memories. And the remaining campaign signs.