Reflections from the campaign trail

So we lost. Big. Pete Ricketts was defeated by current Senator Ben Nelson in a romp, Tuesday. Despite using $12 million of is own personal wealth ($61 spent for each vote), he only recieved 36% of the vote in the reddest of red states. Had he won, the Republican party would still control the Senate. Today the Democrats do.

The story can be found here, in today's edition of the Lincoln Journal Star.

I'm not going to say it wasn't discouraging or even really all that fun [some of the time]. Going door to door, dodging dogs and angry Democrats to ask people for their votes is difficult. Telemarketing people to get them to the polls is unpleasant. Challenging voter eligibility and voting procedures is contentious at times. We worked very hard, very long hours and really did our best to get this guy elected.

All of this sucks even more when you realize that the election was such a landslide that literally nothing I did the entire time made a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things. I could have stayed home and nothing would have been different.

But I did learn this: If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone and do unpleasant things you never imagined you would do. Like spending vacation time at the Super 8 in Omaha Nebraska, away from my wife, doing telemarketing and not sleeping.

There is a famous quote from Theorodore Roosevelt that I thought about today and thought I would share:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

I don't want to be too dramatic, but I felt a little bit like that today. Then I came home to Ann Arbor to a beautiful and loving wife and ate dinner with her while we talked about her day at work. And I realized maybe everything will be OK after all.