Yeah Amos,

While he did go thru a couple of standard stump vignettes, most of the video exhibits a side of him that we won't get to see as the general election nears. I guess the whole thing becomes a media matchup now.

I'll tell you, I really miss working the canvass routes and the calling lists. I got footsore and the staff took pity on me - actually gave me my own logon to do my calling from home.... like I was one of those old Eugene McCarthy Era luddites that I would see hanging around the gathering places. ;-)   

But what I miss most is the kids, and their zeal and their quiet confidence.   The atmosphere inside the campaign is the most race-neutral environment that I have ever experienced. The beauty of their purity and their work has brought me to quiet but insistent tears on several occasions.

Working for the campaign has caused me to recall all sorts of nooks and crannies in my life where I witnessed barbaric racism - mostly Philadelphia Street stuff in my youth - along with a good deal of memories from my own community organizing activities in 1970s SW Baltimore. Perhaps my involvement with the Obama movement will give me a chance to put the racial incidents (they have been many - they have sometimes been bloody) into context - to make some use of them - maybe engage in part of the cleansing dialogue that Barack - in his soaring response to the Rev Wright blowup - has called for us to undertake as a nation.

The single political occurance that comes most frequently to my mind is the Julian Bond/Lester Maddox standoff regarding the seating of the Georgia delegation in the mid '60s.   Though I was very young at the time, in my mind's eye I can still see their faces on TV and the shots of the convention floor - the offered compromise - and then Maddox leading his group off the floor.   Thus Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' was begotten. The implicit racism in Nixon's clever opportunism is readily apparant. It has sustained his party for the better part of 40 years...

...but now, my friend Amos, my comrade volunteer, the chickens might indeed, at long and dear last, be coming home to roost.