I’ll never forget the day Barack Obama was elected president of the United States of America. My husband and business partner Chris, an american living in Guernsey, booked the next day off work and promised to wake me up in the early hours once the result was in. I watched with him Obama’s acceptance speech, a speech I remember parts of till this day, and that morning I sat at my desk as the news editor of The Guernsey Press in love with politics as much as I’d ever been. When I left the paper to move into PR I told the MD I was taking the leap because I wanted to one day run political campaigns.
This week I met a hero, David Axelrod, one of the brains behind Obama’s 2008 campaign. He was in Springfield, IL for a book signing of Believer: My forty years in politics. We talked about the Illinois 18th Congressional race for which Gem PR & Media is managing the PR for democratic candidate Adam Lopez, about his visit to the capitol city and about Guernsey. On walking away he shouted: ‘don’t ever lose your accent.’ I said: ‘I promise I won’t.’ So in a matter of weeks I’ve met a man I admire as one of the greatest political minds of our time and have joined the campaign to get a democrat elected to a seat in The House of Representatives, which has belonged to the republicans since 1939 - an area which Abraham Lincoln himself served (although he represented the 7th district). What a fantastic start to a our first summer in the USA and the penultimate months in the second year of Gem PR & Media.
