A couple of years ago at Christmastime, my conservative Republican sister gave me a copy of THE AUDACITY OF HOPE.  I'd read some reviews on it, but those same reviews also said that DREAMS FROM MY FATHER had actually been a better-written book, that this one was more "political" and so on.  But we were hanging out at a Barnes and Noble, and AUDACITY was all they had on-hand at the time, so that was my present.

When my sister bought the book for me, she said she was interested in this Obama-guy too.  I didn't really believe her.  She'd worked hard to get Bush into the White House not once but twice.  She's almost eight years younger than me and had grown up in a whole different town than I had--Texarkana, Texas (which is way more Old South than Old Texas).  She loathed Bill Clinton.  She'd married more than one redneck through the years.  I thought she was just being nice to me--hey, it was Christmas--and that she would never seriously consider ANY Democrat for the presidency.

I was wrong.

But two years ago, all I knew was what everybody else knew--that he'd given an incredible speech at the 2004 Democratic convention and that he was a junior Senator from Illinois. 

So I set out to find out more.

I once read a quote by Joseph Campbell that I love.  (Bear with me.  It's related.) 

He said that his form of meditation was to underline passages in books and make marginal notes while he read.  I'm the same way.  Even when my husband gave me a first-edition print of my hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson's, essays, published after his death by his brother--I still underlined and made marginal notes in pencil the way I have my whole life.  It's comforting to me to open up a treasured volume--whether it's the Bible or Emerson or Thoreau (I've had a crush on him since college) or Harry Potter for that matter--whoever--and seek out passages that spoke to me when I first read them.

So I had a pencil in hand when I started AUDACITY.

And two things happened.

One:  Before I was even through the Introduction, tears were sliding down my cheeks.

And two:  I underlined practically that whole damn book.  Then I went online and ordered DREAMS and damn if the same thing didn't happen all over again.

I am a writer by profession, (although these days I have to put quotation marks around "profession" whenever I go see my accountant, since I set aside authoring books to blog several years ago, and make no money writing online), and like all writers, I appreciate a well-written book even more than most literature-lovers because I know what you have to go through to Get There.

I can also always tell a ghost-written book, because I've done that myself.  My last book was a true-crime, http://www.amazon.com/Faces-Evil-Kidnappers-Murderers-Forensic/dp/0882822586/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219958039&sr=1-2  and although it was from the point of view of my co-author and the information included was all provided by her, I wrote every word myself.

So it was obvious to me that this man was gifted in many ways.  That he was not only a spellbinding speaker, but that he was a lyrical writer as well.

But he didn't just put poetry into prose in AUDACITY.  He also spelled out what he thought this country needed to do--and what he thought Democrats needed to do--to turn around this slow-motion train wreck we've been caught in since the Republicans took over congress in 1994.

One of the first things I noticed in his book was that he had a true gift for being able to see--and respect--both sides of even the most controversial issues.  He demonstrated a practical pragmatism that was so incredibly refreshing after so many years of partisan gridlock.  And he was not afraid of sacred cows on either side.  He'd plow right in, but do it in a way that made you think.

As I read that book, it was as if someone I didn't know had seen into my own troubled soul that has been so filled with anxiety and fear ever since George W. Bush took office, but ESPECIALLY ever since he started talking war with Iraq and I knew how it was going to directly affect our family.  Which it has.  Six times so far.

This Obama, was someone who said, "I understand your concerns, and I understand the other side's concerns, and I see how it is that we've gotten jammed up.  I don't have perfect solutions, but I'm willing to listen, and to try this...and this...and this to get us going again.

He would say, "I know of a school system in so-and-so that has had a great deal of success doing THIS," or, "We tried this in Illinois, and here's how it worked," or, "This Republican Senator So-and-So has tried to get this bill through with no luck, and it's a good one, and here's why."

After I finished his books, I Googled and printed up his speech on the Iraq war that he had given years before, in which he'd said, "I'm not opposed to all wars.  What I'm opposed to is dumb wars."

By the end of the speech, I'd underlined so much of it that you could hardly read it anymore.  I felt as if my head had exploded.  I was out and out sobbing by then. 

This is who I wanted to entrust with the lives of my Iraq combat-infantry-vet son and my Iraq combat-infantry-vet nephews.

You see, this election is life or death to military families.

From that point on, I took Barack Obama seriously.  I deliberately sought out every policy paper, every boring point-by-point speech he gave on everything from the economy to energy to education.  I printed them up.  I read them all and underlined stuff.  I filed them.  (Used those cute little tabs and everything.)

And I studied his candidacy.

The first thought that occurred to me was that Obama had cut his teeth on community organizing.  I distinctly remember thinking aloud one day, "I wonder if he's going to, basically, community-organize THE WHOLE COUNTRY?"

At the time, Hillary out-polled him by almost 30 points, and this lead of hers held steady for month after month.  She had every top Democratic party mind you could name and some you couldn't working for her.  She had buzz and she had the cloak of inevitability.

There were nine or ten candidates on our side--I can't even remember now how many--and not a single one of them took Barack Obama seriously.

Hillary got in her own little dig famously, on the night that they all gave speeches before the Iowa Democratic party at the Jefferson Jackson dinner.  This was early November of '07, before the Iowa caucuses, when Hillary still outpolled Obama by well over 20 points.

It was one of those long boring nights that only party regulars can endure.  Speech after speech from every single local and state-wide party bigwig they could dig up.  Then the candidates all spoke, including Hillary.

FINALLY--at nearly midnight--Obama's turn to speak rolled around.

And while he was up there at the podium giving his talk, those present at the event later reported that Hillary had not just ignored him--she had pretended he did not even exist.

They said she chatted and laughed with supporters all through his talk, even got up and posed for snapshots.

This was classic Clinton.  It was a deliberate diss.  It was Hillary's way of saying, "Here is how seriously I take you.  You are an upstart pissant to me, and I am going to squash you once and for all."

There was only one problem with that plan.

Even though Hillary was clearly not listening--everybody else was.  The next day, influential Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen gave Obama a ringing review, referring to the speech as a "tipping point." http://blogs.dmregister.com/?cat=33 Not just for what he said, but for the fact that even though it was midnight and they'd all been trapped there for hours listening to politicians drone--nobody left during Obama's speech.  And they leapt to their feet when he was done.

And even though, ultimately, the Register gave its official endorsement to Hillary--it turns out Yepsen was right.

If there is one BIG BIG mistake that Hillary and her handlers made in this campaign, it was that they did not take Obama seriously.

And it's not just Hillary who didn't.  Every day I read the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, the Military Times, a couple of British papers from time to time, Time and Newsweek of course, and several political blogs.  I read conservative op-eds as well as progressive ones, even when they make me want to scream. 

I know all the best war correspondents by name, and what their strengths are.  I know the most partisan political writers and those who are the most thoughtful on both sides of the aisle.  Every day I spend about four hours reading the latest news and op-eds, print up and add to files what I think I might need, on the war, and on this campaign.

I do this because when my son first deployed to Iraq with the Marines, I decided to pour all the energies I used to put into my books, into bringing him and all his buddies home, doing whatever small thing I can do as a writer and a thinker and observer, to end this war and to throw the bums out who have caused so much chaos and confusion in our government over the past years.

So I've watched them, the pundits, pontificators, and politicians, for months on end.

I watched while they laughed off the youth vote, they dismissed the enthusiastic support of audiences, they pontificated at length on all the many shortcomings they perceived in Obama's person and in his candidacy.  They mocked him.  (Maureen Dowd, who is SUPPOSED to be a liberal columnist for the NY Times, famously referred to him as "Obambi," and basically said he would be a deer in the headlights to Hillary's Machine.)

Some even lied about him.

Meanwhile, in states nobody cared about in previous campaigns because they were considered a sure thing for one side or the other, Obama supporters fanned out doing just exactly what I'd predicted two years ago--community-organizing millions of people.  He also hired the sharpest and smartest and hippest young minds he could find to set up an unprecedented Internet organization to reach out to, enhance, and unite potential supporters.

And fund-raise in record totals their $25 donations.

Above all, Obama understood that in order to depend upon millions of people to donate countless hours and dollars to one person's campaign, you have to INSPIRE them to WANT to, and that is why he had the big-speech events, to get 'em revved up and make them want, more than anything, to be a part of something BIGGER THAN THEMSELVES.

He knew--better than anyone running--that if he could truly start, not just a campaign-as-usual, but a MOVEMENT, that all those voices would then put massive pressure on OTHER elected officials, so that if he did indeed finally ascend to the White House, he would have a majority of the electorate on his side and would thus have a better chance of making the change he spoke about so movingly and intelligently in AUDACITY.

After 18 months of reading his papers, I finally had an opportunity to take part in an Obama rally in Austin, Texas

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deanie-mills/obama-rocks-austin_b_74021.html

--I felt for myself the energy of the crowd, the excitement.  I looked around and I saw all ages in the thousands who were there.  I saw all skin colors.  And when I talked to six of the people standing closest to me--turns out they were all Republicans, just like my sister.  (It is a Red State, after all.)  They understood that he was reaching out to them and had come to hear what he had to say.  Some, like my sister, had already made up their minds to support him.

The Bush/Rove/McCain machine has always done just exactly the OPPOSITE.  They whip up flames of hatred and smears and innuendo, turning half the electorate against the other half, and then, as Dick Cheney sneered once on-camera--took a "fifty-plus-one" majority--and treated it like a mandate, forcing three hundred million souls to go along with a radical agenda that many millions did not really support.

But while other campaigns in this season worked top-down with heavily overpaid advisors--(Hillary paid Mark Penn TEN TIMES what Obama paid David Axelrod during the same time-frame, for doing the same work)--linking up with party bosses in major states, and working with traditional lobbies such as unions; Obama's organizers worked bottom-up, opening an unprecedented number of statewide offices even in places like Alaska--hooking up with the 50-state organization that Howard Dean had already put in place over HOWLS of protest from the Joe Trippis and Howard Wolfsons of the world when he first took over the DNC.

In some states, by the time a primary or caucus got underway, Obama would have 25 or more offices open and running, and Hillary's people would be stumbling to open offices just a week or two weeks before the primary.  In Texas, for instance, I attended an Obama precinct captain training-session SIX WEEKS before the caucus/primaries.  I'm on Hillary's e-mail list, and they sent out notification of training sessions for her campaign TWO NIGHTS BEFORE the primary.

And while I and other Obama volunteers were calling hundreds of our neighbors on our calling lists to get out the vote, I was getting robo-calls from celebrities for Clinton.  I never got a call from a real volunteer.

Is this any way to run a campaign?

We can holler all we want to about whether sexism cost her the nomination or whether she underestimated the power of the change-mantra or any other excuse we want to come up with, but the truth is that Obama runs a streamlined, efficient, cost-effective and powerful organization that is, as we speak, reaching out in massive voter-registration drives, volunteer-training camps, online fundraising and blogging networks, and other reach-the-people smart moves that are just waiting to be inspired to action by the candidate himself.

But still, the pouters and doubters don't take him seriously.

To this day, the Clintons just don't see HOW they got beat by this man.

The Republicans are doing all they can to, as usual, frighten the electorate by seizing the media-led initiative, smearing his personality and his politics with every breath.

Socialism!  End of capitalism!  Hitler-appeasement to our enemies!  Secret Muslim sleeper-terrorist in the White House!  Help! Help!

They STILL don't get it.

It's not a whole lot better on OUR side.

You should read all the op-eds and blogs I do every day.  Good lord, how they all think they know better than Obama how to win this election. 

Give specifics tonight!  No!  Be inspiring tonight!   No!  You need to say this!  You MUST say that!  I expect to hear you say THE OTHER!!!

And that's just on this one speech. 

I have read entire speeches written even by the likes of Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/142642 that he or she thinks Obama should give.  Complete with quotation marks, as if Obama is actually speaking the words.  Just about everybody on both sides of the political spectrum have done it.

In fact the only pundit who said, basically, leave the man alone and let him say what he thinks best--was conservative columnist David Brooks, in the NY Times: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I've read blogs and op-eds dripping with sarcasm, others ever-so-lightly condescending and patronizing, others more in the panic-mode. 

He MUST do this!  We're LOSING!  HELP! HELP!  Somebody STOP this man before he f**ks it up for the rest of us!

This has been going on for months and has reached a fever-pitch this week, most of it from his own party.

Even when Obama does something of which most of the pouters and doubters approve, they can't help but then analyze it, break it down, try and figure out if he did it because THEY TOLD HIM TO.

I've been studying this man and this candidacy for two years now.

What most people do not realize is that he is an exceedingly savvy and smart politician. 

The first thing he has always done when starting out in a legislative body, is seek out the Wise Men and Women on BOTH sides of the aisle.  He apprentices with them.  He learns from them.  He plays poker with the older ones and basketball with the younger ones.  He studies.  He keeps quiet.  He joins them on bills important to them.

One of those Wise Men of the U.S. Senate was Teddy Kennedy.

When Obama was trying to decide whether or not to run, he sought the counsel of Wise Man Kennedy, because Obama knew it was kinda crazy, running for president so soon after getting into the Senate.  And Kennedy told him that these moments only come along once in life, that if you wait, they may never come again.  So Obama decided to run.

And it was Kennedy's endorsement that first blew the roof off this race.

Obama's choice of Joe Biden was just exactly what I would have expected--and not only that, but he SAID, MONTHS AGO--that what he would choose in a vice president was somebody who could help him govern, somebody who was not about ego, and somebody who would not be afraid to confront him and express conflicting opinions.

Another thing people don't realize is that Obama is now, and has always been, his own man. 

When Hillary and her people started bullying him, that first week after he won as the presumed nominee, to take her on as VP, they made yet another strategic blunder.

He is his own man.  He will not be bullied.  To have taken her on would have been the ultimate sign of weakness, and you can be sure that is exactly what the Republicans would be saying now.  Yeah, I know they're all about, "Obama has made a terrible mistake!  Only John McCain can fix such an outrage!  Come hither, little Hillary ones!"  But you can bet that if he'd taken her on, there would be a snotty ad out right now saying, "If he can be bullied by a woman, think how he'll be bullied by THE IRANIANS!!!!"  (Cue horror-music.)

Obama could not trust that Hillary would not use her office as such a launching pad for her own ambitions that she actually would undercut him behind the scenes in policies with which she disagreed.  This sometimes happens in politics--it would not be original to her.  But he could not take that chance.  And he could not trust Bill Clinton to either remain scandal-free or not mouth off and put the whole White House in panic mode, as we have seen previously. 

This presidency would not be, alas, about the Clintons, brilliant though they may be.  It would be about Barack Obama and what he thinks this country needs right now.

Barack Obama is his own man, but those who have traveled with him and worked with him for several years say that when he makes a decision, he calls everybody into the room, props his feet up on his desk, closes his eyes, and hears everybody out.  If someone is shy and doesn't speak up, he'll call on them.  He can do it even without opening his eyes.

After that, he will keep his own counsel and make his decision himself.

He writes his own speeches, in longhand, on a yellow-lined pad.  His speechwriters and aides go over it with him and make suggestions, but the main body is always his own words, just as his books were before that.

The pouters and doubters continue to question everything the man says, call into doubt everything he does--on both sides of the aisle--and basically call this election a toss-up.   

Why, just 24 hours ago it was all melodramatic Clinton-soap-opera mode with the pundits and pontificators.  To hear them tell it, man, EIGHTEEN MILLION PEOPLE WILL NOT VOTE FOR HIM BECAUSE THEY LOVE HILLARY TOO MUCH!!!!!

He's been compared to all the party's great winners; such luminaries as Michael Dukakis, Adlai Stevenson, John Kerry, and second-term loser Jimmy Carter.

The pundits and pontificators and politicians cite polls and problems, just like they did during the primaries.  They give the Republican machine way too much of the bully pulpit, as always.  And they talk amongst themselves with almost total lack of originality, if their op-eds and commentaries I read every day are any indication. 

(That press bus gets REAL claustrophobic after a while.  Read Claire Messud's masterpiece, "Some Like It Cool," in the new Newsweek: 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/154899 )

Even some of Obama's own most ardent supporters worry and worry about their candidate.

But I'm telling you.

He's going to prove them all wrong.  All the doubters and all the pouters.

This is because this is an extraordinary man, who has come along at just a moment in our history when such a man is so desperately needed.  He will inspire, and he will unite, and he will organize voters, and he will reach across partisan lines. 

Listen to him tonight, but better yet, TRUST him.  I know it's hard for some of you, and some of you want him to still prove himself to you.  That's fine.  I'm just telling you what I've learned on this two-year journey myself.

I am no groupie or Obamabot or Obamamaniac or whatever other derogatory term has been laid on supporters.  I'm well-informed, thoughtful, and well-read.   I make up my own mind. 

Obama's going to surprise everyone in November, which does not bother him, because one of his shrewd strengths is that he KNOWS he is underestimated ALL THE TIME. 

That's fine with him.  He doesn't mind coming in under the radar, as long as he gets in.

Then, he will prop up his feet, close his eyes, and listen.

After that, he will make his mark on the 21st century.