When the announcement was made on Tuesday night that Ohio had been called as a victory for Barack Obama, I was overwhelmed with emotion not only because it assured an Obama victory, but because of the work that went in to shifting the political landscape of the state over the past four years.

The Ohio victory made me think back to 2004, when I was a college student at Ohio University attempting to use hip-hop’s power to drive people to the polls.

One idea that I implemented was The Ohio Battleground Mixtape. The concept was to gather politically charged material from hip-hop artists from all corners of Ohio and compile them into an official mixtape that was distributed online using Soundclick. I wanted to create an awareness both in Ohio and out-of-state of the issues on the minds of voters in Ohio within our hip-hop community- hoping that the message and concept may carry to other battleground states.

The project did not make a lot of noise upon release.

The lack of financing for a physical release was a major problem in getting exposure back then, which is a little strange to say now, but in 2004 it was a difficult task to rely simply on the internet for distribution of a free mixtape.

There was also a clear lack of organization between all the progressive groups working on the 2004 Election, which made forming the alliances needed to properly publicize this sort of project impossible. It was quite a contrast to the Obama campaign of 2008, which will be analyzed by scholars for hundreds of years. Instead, we had a million people running around working for way too many PAC’s- which were all under-funded and lacked a unified message besides “Go vote.” and “We hate George Bush.”

Looking back on the project now, I like to think that what I was doing at the time was setting the table to make history in 2008.

I took the results of the 2004 race hard because of the time I put into organizing voters in Ohio, only to have the State deliver a second term for George Bush. I questioned whether or not the minority vote, the youth vote or any other combination of voters could ever be strong enough to compete with the organization and financing of the Republican Party.

I knew changes were needed within the Democratic Party, but felt as though my euphoric vision of the party running a candidate myself and my peers could relate to was absurd. I blamed the party for alienating youth and minority voters by running weak candidates.

In a paper written for a Political Science class immediately after the Election of 2004 I made the following statement:

The young liberals need to seek out a candidate that is able to appeal to a broad spectrum of the voting population, while still focusing on youth based initiatives such as the cost of higher education and employment. We need to find a candidate that can defy the odds and win some of the Southern states that have traditionally voted Republican. Many will say this a battle we cannot win, but I believe that a candidate truly exists that embodies the values our generation is looking for, but this person has not stepped up and made their intentions clear of leading the Democratic Party into the future at this point in time.

If our generation is serious about putting “our guy” in office in 2008, the process needs to start now. The last thing most young people want to talk about now is politics, but this is also the most critical time to start to build a stronger movement in 2008. These same people who were so inspired to “Rock the Vote” or “Vote or Die” need to sit down together and figure out a strategy for building and shaping our own candidate for the next election. Somewhere buried inside the U.S. Congress, hiding in a State’s government or somewhere else in America’s political landscape there are suitable candidates for the Democratic Party that can be legitimate contenders in the next election if given the right support by our generation. We need to seek these people out and make them run for President.

I think when I wrote this I had Obama in mind because he was someone I had recently become familiar with. The final track of the Ohio Battleground Mixtape was not a hip-hop track from an Ohio artist. Instead, I decided to conclude the project with a speech that had inspired me during the 2004 Democratic National Convention from a little-known candidate for the U.S. Senate by the name of Barack Obama. I was memorized by the speech, the message that was being conveyed and mostly the amount of hope I felt from listening to this man talk and felt that his words, and not Kerry’s, would inspire more people to get involved in the 2004 campaign.

In under four years we have taken a hold of the Democratic Party and have put “our guy” in the White House. We organized, we dedicated ourselves and we showed up at the polls on Election Day.

This should serve as a reminder of how hard we worked to accomplish this goal and also as a blueprint for success in future elections. There’s no turning back now. We can’t blame the politicians for holding us back anymore because WE run the political landscape in America now and the only way that changes is if we give it back!

Below is the Ohio Battleground Mixtape 2004 in it’s entirety: