Pictures chronicle Dale Todd’s 10 years with President Barack Obama

CEDAR RAPIDS - For the past 10 years, Dale Todd has been compiling an old-school photo album - snapshots slipped under a protective plastic overlay.

The photos chronicle the Cedar Rapids developer and former City Council member's 10-year relationship with Barack Obama, from Obama's days as an Illinois senator and Iowa caucus candidate to Democratic nominee, president and now the outgoing president.

'Yeah, I was there from before the beginning,” Todd, 59, said about his involvement with the Obama campaign. 'I was talking to the Draft Obama folks before.”

As in before Obama made Cedar Rapids his first campaign stop after announcing his candidacy Feb. 10, 2007. Pulled together on short notice, Obama's Saturday afternoon appearance drew more than 2,500 people to the Kennedy High School gym.

That was after Todd's late mother, a Chicago church secretary involved in social justice issues, told him to keep an eye Obama.

From the start, Todd saw Obama as 'someone who represented change.” That included a change in the way his presidential campaign operated, Todd said.

The 2008 campaign was the 'ultimate experience in how to build a true campaign,” he said. 'There will never be another campaign like that. It was a true grass-roots, organic-coalition-inspired campaign.”

Although there was a 'degree of micromanagement and sensitivity based on his race and lack of experience,” Todd recalls the campaign experience in Iowa as 'incredible.”

In campaign offices, 'you had college kids sitting side-by-side with 70-year-old African-American women who had never been involved in the process,” Todd said.

Much of Todd's photographic history features pictures taken in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City area showing Todd, his wife, Sara, and their son, Adam, with Obama and his family members. Along with numerous 'grip-and-grin” photos with the president, there's Adam sitting at Obama's Senate office desk, Adam at the White House Easter Egg Roll and from the early days of the campaign, Adam entertaining the future president's daughter, Sasha, on the lawn at Coe College.

Todd, who recently attended Obama's White House Christmas party, acknowledged that many people assumed race was his connection to the president.

'We look a bit alike - both of our moms were Caucasian,” he said. However, there also were the facts that both were from Chicago and Todd had a relationship with Obama adviser David Axelrod, whose daughter has a form epilepsy similar to Todd's son, Adam.

'And we're both community organizers,” he added.

The Christmas party was Obama's way of saying 'thank you” to folks like Todd helped him get to the White House. It took on special significance because the party was Obama's last in the White House.

Obama referred to himself as the 'frontman for the operation,” but Todd said he thanked the people who supported him when most people couldn't pronounce his name.

It was a time to celebrate what they had done and what the president had accomplished in eight years in office. It was also a time to reflect on the lessons learned from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns and how to apply them to future campaigns.

'There is a commitment to the ideals and his legacy that we share,” Todd said. It comes from 'the sense of social justice that Democrats try to help people who don't have what others have.”

As he closes the photo album, Todd said the last 10 years have been an 'incredible experience.”

'The journey's not over, and we still have much work to do,” he said.

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