In retrospect (and from a distance), Barack Obama's election as president may have seemed foreordained, even predestined, as inevitable as a sunrise after a long, dark spiritual night.But, in reality, the prize had to be won, wrested from a behemoth that, even if battered and bloodied from a thousand self-inflicted wounds, still refused to concede either the failure of its policies of governance or the impoverishment of its own self-serving vision of what government can and should represent to its own people.
Barack provided the vision and raised the rhetorical bar of eloquence higher than it had been raised in most Americans' lifetimes.
But even so, he also knew that the real victories in this election cycle -- the ones that matter, the ones that would put the points on the board, separating the victor and vanquished -- would be won in the field: on street corners and in public-transit terminals and on the front porches of homes and the hallways of housing projects, one hopeful conversation and one new voter-registration card at a time.
That's why the campaign assembled the biggest field operation in American political history: It had to -- simply to overcome the despair and disillusionment it recognized was our only real enemy in the 2008 campaign.
These are the faces of the Charlotte, NC field operation in action, staff and volunteers, alongside some of the places we visited and faces we were inspired by.
We knew then (and remember now) how lucky we felt ourselves to be, simply to have been chosen to serve as soldiers of amazingly good fortune and, perhaps most amazingly -- especially under the psychic stress of 100-hour workweeks fueled by candy bars and convenience-store coffee, barely punctuated by naps in cars and hurried showers in borrowed bathrooms -- amazing good humor and grace.
We knew we were in the fight of our lives for the fate of our people: winning a battle for the hearts and minds of fellow citizens in order to secure a chance at redeeming the soul of a nation.
And so dedicated, we applied every fiber of awareness and filament of energy we could focus and flare, every single day of the campaign, simply to prove a single incantation of our singular visionary leader: Yes we can.
So, yes, we did. We had to.
