From today’s NYT Caucus:

By Jeff Zeleny

WASHINGTON, Iowa – By now, the stump speeches delivered by presidential candidates have become routine, at least to many of the politically inclined voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. So the most interesting moments at campaign appearances often are inspired from those seated in the audience.

Near the end of a stop here today, Senator Barack Obama was asked this question from a man seated in the crowd at the Washington County fairgrounds: “What would you say is the most painful and character-building experience of your life that puts you in a position to make important decisions of life and death and the well being of our country?”

For a moment or two, Mr. Obama paused. It was far different from the string of questions posed on policies and issues. Finally, he said: “It’s a terrific question.”

And here, in its entirety, is his answer:

“I would say the fact that I grew up without a father in the home. What that meant was that I had to learn very early on to figure out what was important and what wasn’t, and exercise my own judgment and in some ways to raise myself.

My mother was wonderful and was a foundation of love for me, but as a young man growing up, I didn’t have a lot of role models and I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned to figure out that there are certain values that were important to me that I had to be true to.

Nobody was going to force me to be honest. Nobody was going to force me to work hard. Nobody was going to force me to have drive and ambition. Nobody was going to force me to have empathy for other people. But if I really thought those values were important, I had to live them out.

That’s why it’s so important for me now, both as a United States senator and as a president candidate, but also as a father and a husband to wake up every morning and ask myself, am I living up to those values that I say are important? Because if I’m not, then I shouldn’t be president.”

It’s countdown plus 6 hours for the Hillary Clinton rally in downtown Oakland and already 14th street is blocked off by police barricades. Big staging companies are hefting huge platforms to erect the elevated stage. Five or six spotlight-trucks are already in standby mode. Bleachers are assembled. Secret Service have secured the area.

A battalion of young co-eds, clad in brown t’s with green “Hillary’ logos (her autumn line, assumedly), are assembled, awaiting marching orders. A young, dark suited George Stephanopolus clone, oozing arrogance and authority, clutches his clipboard and calls out to a young man setting up his display of “Obama Love” caps on the other side of the divide.

“Hey, you’re in the wrong place. Your event is down there. Two blocks.”

The grand opening of Barack Obama’s first West Coast headquarters marks the first time a major presidential candidate has set up shop in the City of Oakland, where Obama last March drew an unprecedented early campaign crowd of 12,000.

But today on the last day of September, it is Ground Zero for the Clinton campaign.

Further up 14th, with less than three hours to go before 1 pm kickoff, The Balloon Lady truck is busy pumping out product outside Obama headquarters. Afternoon events include local political supports, including San Francisco DA Kamala Harris and performances by hip-hoppers Blackalicious and R&B star D’wayne Wiggins.

The pint-sized lobby of the historical building is near overflow with scores of humongous red, white and blue bouquets. Upstairs in the third story offices, volunteers stream in, grab an assignment, and head back down in the elevator carrying tables, chairs, boxes of Obama gear. A small crew assembles some rope, masking tape, scissors and a slew of Obama signs and leaves to cordon off the street in front of the building. Someone sweeps the floor, clears away clutter.

By 11:15, everybody’s outside, pitching in to unload the stage from a delivery truck. By 12, it’s up and ready and a tad further down the street, the kid’s jump house rises from the pavement.

From up above, someone shouts out for help as a huge Obama ’08 banner is lowered and hung level from the 3rd floor windows. A small cheer.

Operating procedures are clear: if you’ve done an Obama event before, you’re the expert. Mentor the newcomers. And by opening time, everything’s syncopated and copacetic; store stocked, information tables manned and equipped, loudspeakers checked, balloon bouquets positioned.

Standing behind the merchandise table, UCB student Christina Milton chats with Natalie Rojos, California Coordinator of Students for Barack Obama.

“Everyone is so pumped up and so involved”says Rojos, “I worked for the Kerry campaign, and students were really excited then. But it was more about ‘Anybody but Bush.’ Now it’s about Barack. People are inspired by him. They’re talking real politics, they’re really engaged.”

Rojos, a student at University of Santa Cruz, tucks the latest campaign tee under her arm (white bearing a large impression of Obama) and says she’s already student leaders are already working not only on country-wide campus registration rallies but also on ensuring there are enough voting machines available on election day.

“We don’t want a repeat of ‘04, when students had to wait on line for 2 or 3 hours,” she says.

Milton is one of two UCB students selling Obama swag. Veterans of three events each, they know to push their products by telling potential customers all purchases are 100% donations to the campaign. It’s a major incentive today, the last day of the 3rd quarter.

An older woman and her sister almost purchased cheaper shirts from a rouge vendor but wanted to make sure their money went directly to the campaign.

“Barack isn’t accepting any money from lobbyists so it’s up to us. I’m not yet maxed out on my contribution so I’m shopping,” she says. She purchases shirts for herself and her two grandchildren, a couple of bumper stickers and a handful of Obama signs to distribute in her neighborhood.

By 2pm, the Obama celebration is 500 strong, the usual diverse group, a veritable melting pot of staunch supporters, the curious, and a smattering of Hillary folks arriving early for her mega-event.

Two blocks away, the streets are eerily empty and subdued. Secret Service men stand on perimeter rooftops, gazing out over the city through high powered binoculars.

Now even the sidewalks are off limits and from the fortififed rooftops a sentry trains his binoculars straight on a woman approaching in an Obama ‘08 cap and teeshirt carrying a large “Go Barack Go” sign.

“I’m parked down there,” she says to one of the Hillary co-eds behind the barricade.

“Nobody’s allowed in here.”

The Obama lady doesn’t budge. And for just a moment there’s a slight hesitation, the coed looks as if she’s thinking about saving the Obama lady the inconvenience of walking two blocks out of her way.

“It’s not up to us,” another girl says. “We’re just following orders.”

I received a letter from my liberal Senator Barbara Boxer the other day, asking me to donate more funds to her campaign to insure her victory in the 2010 election. Now while Boxer has more chutzpah than just about anyone on Capital Hill, I turned her down. Conditionally. In essence, I told her that I was ’sick and tired of being sick and tired” of politics as usual in Washington.

And then I spelled out in clear and uncertain terms what she would have to do to receive any more mullah from me: Publicly endorse Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic Presidential candidacy in 08.

The power of the purse strings. We might not have much leverage when it comes to how our representatives fail to allocate our tax dollars. We may not have control over the huge conglomerates and lobbyists stretching campaign finance laws to jettison their candidates into office. But there is a form of ‘bundling’ we can engage in. A million strong refusal to add any of our bucks to election coffers until our representatives announce that they, too, are ready for a sea change in America. A sea change led by the good Senator from Illinois.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to Senator Boxer. Feel free to copy, amend, elaborate and augment as you see fit.

Let’s bundle letters like one!

Dear Senator Boxer:

Before I contribute any more funds to your campaign, I need something from you! A public endorsement of Senator Barack Obama.

You have done an outstanding job representing California, but you will not have my support (nor the support of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters) if you back Senator Clinton for the Democratic presidential election. As Senator Obama has said repeatedly, the time for change in American politics is now. I expect you to join him in this fight.

I especially recall attending Sen. Obama’s immensely successful fundraiser for your last reelection campaign. There’s a lovely video post of the packed event on YouTube; you were very excited and grateful, a most gracious and worthy benefactor of his 2004 Democratic Convention speech popularity.

Given the fact that Senator Clinton is funding her campaign with oil, pharmaceutical, mainstream media, and military contractor industry contributions that break all Congressional records, and are in no small part tied directly to her being the politically active Clinton, I see no reason to believe the Senator has any inclination to effect any positive change in Washington.

Here are my major concerns with the first Clinton administration:

1. Vigorous support of China’s entrance into the WTO despite ongoing human rights violations
2. Support of NAFTA, the WTO and economic policies which have outsourced manufacturing, resulting in economic devastation across America (most recently resulting in massive recalls of goods from CHINA due to insufficient quality control)
3. Contributing to economic devastation in Mexico and other Central American countries through unfair trade practices and relocation of US mega corporations to the region, thereby destabilizing labor organization and employment for rural Latin and US Americans especially, and throwing the US into the race to the bottom instead of into the lead for an equal playing field for workers on both sides of the border
4. Failure to render illegal offshore accounts of major US corporations resulting in the loss of billions of dollars in corporate taxes for America
5. Introducing the Telecommunications Act, which essentially has resulted in government (now synonymous with Corporate) control over virtually all mass media
6. The passage of the Terrorism Act, which resulted in exhaustive constitutional violations, as Americans were secretly surveilled by our government
7. Clandestine dealings with the Taliban on behalf of pipeline plans of mega-oil companies
8. Failure to address the Rwanda genocide because of commercial interests in using Rwanda as an entry point to exploit the natural resources of the Congo
9. Initiating education policies which paved the way for No Child Left Behind, a system which has virtually destroyed our public school system and any hope for advancement for millions of children
10. Backing down on the promise to open the military to openly gay, lesbian and bisexual soldiers and a failure to deal effectively with any gay rights issues.

Senator Boxer, I count on your integrity to ensure that Hillary Clinton is not our party’s choice to resume power in the White House. Your constituents and the people of America rely on fearless leaders such as yourself to speak truth.

Sincerely,

So Senator Obama is telling us this campaign is about us, right? So what do we do? We rally an unprecedented 24,000 in NYC. On ten days notice!

But if you live in New York and you weren’t anywhere in the vicinity of Greenwich Village last Thursday night, chances are you have no idea what went down there.

“Obama appearance No Story.” So reads the subject line in an mail from a friend in New York this morning, who reported no coverage of the event in the dailies or local news stations. (In all fairness, the NYT wrote up the event on “The Caucus” election page, Newsday did a short blurb as did The Post, and local tv had some footage.)

But I’m a former New Yorker; in fact, I am a graduate of NYU, and back in the day any crowd of 24,000 in Washington Square would have led Eyewitness News at 11, won a splash photo on Page 1 of the New York Daily News, and been all over the Today Show the next morning. Just to give you some semblance of reality: 24,000 in a downtown Manhattan neighborhood park is more than 1/3 the total capacity of Shea Stadium. In fact, a crowd that size would just about fill up the San Francisco Giant’s ballpark.

Folks across America are hearing the Senator and they are showing up: The Springfield 15,000, The Iowa 10,000, The Oakland 12,000. The Austin 20,000.

But the media is all about those poll numbers, Senator. I’m beginning to think Obama supporters just never go home, let alone answer the telephone. They’re too busy traveling from rally to rally, state to state, hosting house-parties, walking for change. God knows, they’re always too busy text messaging to answer a land line anyway.

I’d have to say judging from the turnout whenever or wherever across the country Senator Obama shows up, that so far he’s done a pretty good job of waking America up. The way I see it, most of our newspapers, radio shows and tv news stations just aren’t fired up yet. They sure ain’t ready to go.

Most of us will concede that no candidate has won the presidency in recent history without being first anointed by the corporate elite. And we’re well aware that in today’s America the average citizen feels about as powerless as a young child tossing rocks at invading Israeli bulldozers and tanks.

Assuredly, we have our grievances … and as the Senator says, we’re “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Right now, we have to cede them the polls. Nobody would listen anyway if we talked about how Angus Reid himself called the biggest secret in polling the “no response” rate.” Or if we questioned the reliability and authenticity of automated polling systems or called into question the conflict of interest that appears to exist relative to most polls and their corporate sponsors.

They just keep predicting all the hoopla will burn out pretty soon, as polls continue to coronate Clinton and turn a blind eye to any and all references to her questionable ethical practices and all that lobbyist money rolling in. Just yesterday, I heard Bill put a stop to an article due to be published in GQ discussing in-fighting in the campaign. Apparently, all he had to say is he just won’t talk with them anymore if they printed it.

Does anybody in the Obama campaign have that kind of clout? No, but we sure do try harder.

Roll up your sleeves and get ready to duke this one out. The real battle between Clinton and Obama is not being waged in the headlines of the nation’s tabloids, on the Fox Noise Machine or even on Keith Olberman. No, the Obama campaign is taking this thing out onto the streets of your neighborhood. You are going to have to open that front door and step outside.

We’re not talking states here, we’re not even talking Congressional Districts anymore. In fact, this campaign is honed down to pre-Precinct level. In ‘08, the race for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States is happening right in your front yard.

This is David v. Goliath; it’s The Little Engine that Could; it’s a real life rendition of The Heroes, an unfolding story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

So put your Obama sign out. If you don’t have one, make one. Let’s create a 21st century version of ‘the peace sign.’ Start tipping your thumb and index finger together and flashing the big “O.”