They were all suppose to be for Hillary. Now they are suppose to be Obama’s Achilles’ heel, ready to vote for McCain. But there is something else going on out there. I had an opportunity to look at this development up close and personal this past week. My brother and sister-in-law dropped by for three-day visit. The subject soon turned to politics. My Republican brother didn’t have much to say, but my sister-in-law could not be stopped.

She has always voted, as she says, “against somebody”, but never worked for a candidate. This time she says “I am voting for somebody”. But she is doing more than that: She attends weekly Obama meetings in her community, where everyone sits around in a circle and tells why they are voting for Obama and what they like about him. It had an AA meeting quality to the telling. She then says we get to work with phone calls, getting people registered to vote, and going door-to-door, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or groups. It’s all new to her, and she is having the time of her life.

She is on a fixed income, but she still sends in her money, so she is waiting for one of her daughters to finish reading Audacity of Hope so that she can read it. Knowing my niece, it could be a long wait. I bought her a copy, and she said, “I’ll return it.” I said, no don’t do that, it’s yours. You would have thought I bought her a BMW.

Shortly before she left, in one of our final discussions about the election, she said, “I hope he wins. But if he doesn’t, our Obama gang has already agreed to work on other community projects. Through this campaign, we are already seeing that we can change things, if we work together as we have been. That, she said, will be his legacy.”