it was illuminating to sit in the obama precinct captains' meeting wednesday, too. not for exactly the reasons i expected.

i looked around a lot, and what really caught my eye, over and over, was a cluster of the national staffers, who were mostly standing up along railing. (there were 500-600 precinct captains in that meeting, btw, so it was not an intimate experience. they had driven from all over the state, some six hours or more away. those people must have gotten up around midnight to start their journey.)

so the meeting was held in the basketball court in the same complex with the arena, and we were packed into the bleachers. i picked a seat up at the very top, in the handicapped section, partly because there were actual chairs and my back was aching (i have two six-inch rods in my back and seven fused vertabrae), and partly to watch the participants. i was more interested in watching them than the candidate.

when barack came out, i looked over my right shoulder to see how the full-time staffers were reacting. they were pretty used to this stuff, and had been unfazed by anything throughout the morning, but when he came out on the court below us, those guys up top just glowed.

one guy, in particular, i was watching: the one who had recruited me first thing in the morning, six hous before. he had been very nice all day--and really freaking good at his job--but i'd never seen him smile. he had been pleasant, but intent. now, he was beaming. he turned to the guy beside him--one of the guys with a radio in his ear all day--and they exchanged the nicest smile. they were so proud.

is this what it felt like in '68?

bobby's bid didn't pan out, of course, for very sad reasons. it might not have anyway, even if he lived. his brother really excited the country in 1960, too--both were before my time, but i always pictured '68 being more powerful. both ended painfully, but JFK's legacy lives on, both in what he did and what he set up for LBJ to do.

this barack phenom may or may not pan out. he's got a big institutional power to unseat in the clintons. in a week or a month for next december, he might be yesterday's news.

but either way, it will have been exciting and illuminating just to experience it as it unfolded.

(i wrote this immediately after i got home wednesday, so the timing in it is two days off. and i was too damn tired to capitalize. hehehe):

i just got home from obamamania. quite a day. obama campaign to Denver today, and unexpected chaos ensued.

the campaign announced on Monday that he would come to Colorado at 10 a.m. Wednesday. They booked a 7,200-seat arena on the University of Denver campus and planned on filling about a third or half of it on a weekday morning with 36 hours notice. they thought 2 or 3 thousand would be great. fifteen thousand showed up.

it was nuts.
 
it's not that that was such an outlandish number of people, it was that no one was equipped to handle that. sporting events handle 50, 60 thousand or more all the time. but they have huge teams set up, and paid employees who handle the same thing every day, and standard processes they use over and over at the place, and facilities, and so on. t

his was planned in 36 hours, mostly using volunteers with little or no experience in this sort of stuff. even the 2 to 3 thousand they expected would have taxxed their ability to control them well. this mob, nobody had a clue how to get ahold of.

obama was set to arrive at 10 a.m., doors were opening at 8:30 and i got there at 7:30 to help set up. (my field organizer said don't come at 7, there would be nothing to do yet.) i expected early birds to start showing up around 8.

large numbers were lining up at 6 a.m., in the dark, temp about 9 degrees, about an hour before sunrise.

when i got there, at 7:30, thousands were massed around the entrance, and it was crazy out there. i could barely get in. security refused to let me in as a set-up worker. hundreds of people were pushing forward trying to use that. i said the name of noah, my area coordinator, and someone back there recognized it and said to let me in.

i was in about 30 seconds when a guy came around with clipboards asking for volunteers who were dressed warmly to go back out and do crowd control stuff. that sounded fun, or at least interesting. it took me about one second to volunteer.

people had all sorts of printed web-reservation reciepts, and VIP badges, and lots of other VIP connections to get in, and tons of people who didn't know they needed to bring a printout, and we were also signing up volunteers on the spot.

someone in the campaign made a great logistical decision: no way could they deal with the bottleneck of trying to figure all that stuff out at the entrance. the security people allowing people into the building had to go by one standard thing to stand in instead of a "ticket."

in the end, no matter who you are, or what you had, the only way you could get in that arena was with a big X on the back of your right hand from a dark highlighter.

a handful of us with highlighters roamed the crowd converting all the different entry papers and sob stories and volunteer offers into Xs. it worked really well. i spent three hours working the line, which spanned the length of much of the campus, shouting, "does everyone have an x! you must have an x to get in!"

it was fun.
 
i did all sorts of jobs--i would see one and just start doing it. had a blast.

how exhilarating to be a part of something like that. i knew pretty early on that i was going to lose my seat in the VIP area if i didn't turn in my highlighter and clipboard and go in. but big deal. i've met politicians. the thrill for me was outside, in the mass of confusion. you don't get mobs every day.
 
when barack spoke, i was out on the lacrosse field, with the people from the very tail end and lots of organizers. we had told the crowd barack could come out to speak to us afterward, but he came out first, and so did special guest caroline kennedy, and that was nice.

there was a precinct captains meeting afterward, and he came to that, too. he's really something.

---

i learned a lot. and there were a few odd moments. just because i happened to be there--and was willing to run to the end of the block to tell people--i got to make the announcement to huge numbers of people that they would not get in, but barack was going to meet with them outside. i parroted the phrase the campaign manager said to me, "the senator will address you/them." i started telling one chunk of crowd at a time--the line still stretched about two blocks--and they did seem that excited about it. and about the tenth group, a lady asked, with a little disgust, "what senator?" i was taken aback. "barack." the went nuts. then i started telling the other groups "barack will come out to address you," and i got the same excitement. that cracked me up.
 
i can't wait till Super Tuesday. it's cool that most of America gets to be a part of choosing the nominees again. we get our chance in Colorado that day. i've never lived in a state where i had a voice. exciting.

I have made some changes to the look of this place: new logo, navigation bar below it, new pic of me, simplified sidebar. Changes still to come soon include: simplifying the sidebar further, updating my blogroll, fixing bugs (I know about the Macro Error under each post), propogating the new look to all the archive pages, and making sure the archives are all up.

I've got a ton of updates about my book, my life and BarackOMania, but first . . .

Blessing #1: Painful as it is to say, I needed to break from this blog for awhile. The book needed my full attention. A blog and a book was too much for me, it seems, at least for this whale of a book. So the blog crashed, and I could not restore it, and got so frustrated, I gave up for a long while.

That was a good thing, it turned out.

In this case, "crashing" meant that something on the ancient PC I used to run it crashed. Salon blogs are stuck on an outmoded system where the master contents of the blog reside on your hard drive: so if it crashes, the blog crashes. In this case, something went awry with the PC's web access. I tried changing cards, uninstalling IE--all sorts of things, all of which failed. And I'd lost my tech person, so I couldn't resolve it.

It seemed time to move to a new PC anyway, and I had a newer PC, so I tried porting it over on May 1, 2007, but that failed. Radio UserLand's tech support is abysmal, and all they succeeded in doing was helping me get up a single I'm Back post, which wiped out the (five?) years of previous content, and then froze again. Ugh. I stayed stuck there for nine months.

So . . .

Blessing #2:

Two days before my book deadline, as I was racing to make final changes to the manuscript, my hard drive on my new/main computer crashed. (I got a corrupted dll file.) After three precious hours wasted on the phone with Dell tech support, they told me it was hopeless: I had to wipe my hard drive and re-install Windows XP. Ugh. They always say that. But I had no time to mess around.

I had the manuscript broken into four different pieces, with friends around the country proofing different sections and offering editorial feedback. I had a most-recent copy of only one of the four. It felt like disaster.

My friends really came through for me, though. A wonderful guy named Alan took the whole PC to Best Buy five minutes before closing on a Sunday night, and got the Geek Squad guy to move it to the front of the queue and copy the full hard drive to a backup device. Alan stood there for 2.5 hours babysitting it, and brought all my files back safely. Lydia and Ira and Dave continued proofing and offering edits.

So I had to wipe my hard drive and that included removing the failed re-install of Radio UserLand, the software for this blog. Today, I decided to start from scratch, and I'm not sure what I did differently this time, but it appeared to work.

So now I'm back up and running, on a much faster PC which is several years further from death. Eventually I will port the whole thing to a new system that is not dependent on a single PC, but that's down the road.