The skies over Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia are a clear Carolina blue, the temperature a balmy 70 degrees. More than 29,000 Southerners have come together to hear Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and presidential hopeful Barack Obama speak to the need for a climate of change to spread from the White House to a nation desperate for a new beginning. It is the largest crowd ever assembled for any candidate, we are told. Here. In South Carolina. The crowd loves it.
I arrive in time to hear a longtime favorite group in performance. Arrested Development is among the entertainers taking the stage for Barack Obama. I come hoping they sing "Tennessee". They do, and I am not the only enthusiastic fan among the throng in the press section. The mood is light.
Before the event begins in earnest, thousands of attendees pull out their cell phones and call thousands more undecided SC voters, whose names and numbers are provided them by Obama volunteers as they enter the stadium. The result? Another record broken by South Carolinians, who set a new one for the Guinness Book of World Records: The largest phone bank. Ever.
The tone is set for the rally. This is a day of unabashed optimism, of confidence in both the candidate and the outcome of the January 26th SC primary.
Michelle Obama comes onto the stage beaming, waving both arms overhead. "Hello, South Carolina! Man! What are you all doing here?" Her greeting is met with a rousing chant: "Obama! Obama! Obama!" She laughs, chants with them. She speaks briefly about her husband as a leader who can touch the soul of the nation, one who will make us feel better about ourselves, unite us for the common good. "It is not the time to be afraid," she says. We've had enough of the politics of division and fear. She introduces Oprah Winfrey, "A woman you can trust."
Ms Winfrey, in a bright yellow jacket, has the crowd on their feet, their response to her is thundering applause and cheers. She's all smiles. "It is amazing grace that brought me here today...I've never done this before. I've been disappointed in politicians. I've had some apathy going' on. But apathy is the attitude that disappointment is normal...I've been inspired...I'm stepping out of my pew! You have to step out of your pew...If you do things the same way all the time, you get the same results."
It is, Oprah tells everyone, time to step out of the box.
She believes in Barack Obama because she knows him. There is no veil of political rhetoric about him, she says; he is a man who "has an ear for eloquence and a tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth." He knows, she emphasizes, how to BE the truth. It is clearly a matter of character, of a man who "actually has a conscience." Oprah tells the hushed thousands in the stadium to see right through people who try to tell us experience in Washington is more important than sound judgment. She speaks to the importance of having a conscience in governance, of consulting that conscience and acting on behalf of all Americans with true moral authority. We live in dangerous times, she continues, made more dangerous by our estrangement from the rest of the world. Cockiness and arrogance are no answer--and it does matter what the rest of the world thinks of us. The crowd responds, their cheers the exclamation point to her statement. Obama is the answer to healing our image. "Because he is an evolved leader, he can bring us evolved leadership."
She wouldn't be Oprah without making reference to a good book. She chooses The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, both the book and the film. She speaks of the gnarled ex-slave's touching or holding one child after another, one person after another, asking "Are you the one?"
"I have the answer to Miss Pitman's question!" she declares. "Barack Obama." She turns from one side of the stadium to the other asking, "Is he the one? Is he the one?" People shout out their response--he is the one. Oprah grins. "It's Obama time!" she cries. "It's Obama time!"
Barack Obama appears and 29,000+ Southerners rise to greet him. The sound they make as they call out his name can be summed up in three words: A sonic boom.
And Obama is Obama. "Look at this crowd!" he exclaims. "Look at this crowd!" When the cheering drops a few decibels the Senator from Illinois says "It is unbelievable...I am grateful today--all praise to God--look at the day that the Lord has made!"
Obama's speech is what we have come to expect from him. He is eloquent, he is impassioned, he's amusing. He inspires the crowd as he speaks to issue after issue with both "Yes! We can!" and the caveat that it will take effort and determination from all of us. There are too many American without health insurance; it enrages him. Healthcare crises are bankrupting too many families. Insecurity about the future, about keeping our jobs and our homes, plague too many of us. No Child Left Behind fails when the funding for it is left behind. The "haves" are well-served while the "have-nots" are ignored and an endless, futile war costs us over $10 billion a month.
The crowd cheers wildly when Obama says minimum wage should be raised to keep pace with inflation; there should be no such thing as the "working poor." If you're working--working hard, he tells us, you should not be poor. South Carolina is a poor state with expanses of rural areas where industry has been outsourced and towns are too small to offer high-wage jobs. The issue of minimum wage resonates here.
The rally is an uplifting one. People leave smiling, singing, believing in themsleves and in their candidate. They leave filled with hope about a better future for America if this man if vision becomes the next president. In the flesh, Barack Obama leaves no doubt that he means exactly what he says; he is exactly what we see. And that is reason enough for optimism. For hope.
But this South Carolinian had other feelings lifting her spirits today. I'm sixty years old. In my lifetime I have seen small black children working in cotton fields while I was on my way to school. I've seen a cross flaming in a Carolina pasture, a group of racist "'ghosts" prancing around the symbol of violence. I've seen "whites only" signs hanging over water fountains and the doors of public restrooms. I've watched the evening news and seen the body of a young black boy, wrapped in chains, washed up in the shallows of a river; black bodies hanging from trees; little girls carried, lifeless, from the debris of their church in Alabama--the church bombed by white men so blinded by hatred they never gave a thought to whose house that was and that innocent children were praying there.
Yesterday I was in my state capital to hear a black woman endorse a young black man for the presidency. Over 29,000 cheering South Carolinians and other southerners were with me.
I was taken with an analogy: There was no case of racist arrested development standing in our way. Not today. Not In South Carolina. Even here--in the deep South--where prejudice and intolerance have run deep, it seems Barack Obama inspires us to rise above it. I could imagine the martyrs of slavery, of racism, of the Civil Rights movement, smiling down on us at this moment in our history. Obama might put it this way: We are turning the page.
The only Arrested Development under the warm glow of the South Carolina sun on this day was a band. And they were great.