I’ve moved on to one of our staging areas, set up at a supporter’s home here in Portsmouth. People were scurrying around the living room and kitchen, preparing to hit the streets to talk to voters about Barack.
Sarah Sewall, a senior foreign policy advisor to Barack, dropped by to provide suggestions to volunteers in anticipation of handling questions from voters.
“The world is changing quickly, but Barack has the right judgment to take on the unexpected. He’s made the right calls on the big issues like Iraq, Pakistan and Iran while his opponents were steeped in conventional thinking,” she said.
That advice resonated with one volunteer I spoke with. Carter spent large parts of her past 35 years living overseas before returning to New Hampshire to live in North Hampton. A career journalist, she has been volunteering for the campaign since Barack’s announcement because she believes that he will do the most to restore America’s standing in the world.
“I am not sleeping I’m so excited. It’s just so exciting,” she said. “Doing this door to door canvassing, when you see all these people who are so fired up--it’s incredibly inspiring.”
Before I left for the event in Rochester, I ran into David, a civil rights attorney in New York.
David worked with Barack on the Harvard Law Review, and the pair turned out to be the last two candidates standing in the race for president of the Law Review.
“Barack had this tremendous ability to speak to people across the ideological divide,” he recalled. “Many of the people that he worked with on the Law Review have gone on to be some of the leading legal minds in the conservative movement, but he found a way to get them to work together with the liberals.”
David added, “Barack is the same consensus-builder today that he was back then.”
Like so many of Barack’s supporters, David is working on a campaign for the first time. “I’ve done a few small things before, but this time, we have a once-in-a-lifetime candidate and I’m willing to do what it takes,” he said.
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