Forget the national polls. Obama is building a grassroots movement.
At what may have been his largest campaign event this year, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama drew on a hometown hero's words at an Atlanta rally Saturday to voice his opposition to the war in Iraq.
Recalling the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words that the Vietnam War had become "morally and politically untenable," Obama said the war in Iraq has come to be about "an administration that is trying to preserve its own political viability.""It is about stubbornness and obstinacy. And we have to keep ratcheting up the pressure every day and every week to tell the president that it is time to change course, that it is time for us to start bringing our combat troops home from Iraq," the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate told an enthusiastic midday crowd at Yellow Jacket Park on the Georgia Tech campus....
Among those who came to see Obama was Sheila Sumpter, who completed her overnight shift as a nurse anesthetist at Grady Memorial Hospital at 7 a.m., slept for two hours and drove to the rally, clutching a copy of Obama's second book, "The Audacity of Hope."
"I've never felt this connection with a candidate before," said Sumpter, 46, of Austell. "When he talks about what he wants to achieve, I don't think he's just talking. I feel he's speaking from his heart, and I believe him."
Jay Frasier, a 31-year-old attorney, was on crutches after breaking his leg at a soccer game.
"This is the first time I have gotten goose bumps from any politician in a long, long time," he said.
The crowd was both multi-racial and multi-generational. But it drew an especially large turnout of students from all the major colleges and universities in the area.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a venerable symbol of the civil rights generation, gave the invocation, calling Obama "a voice crying in the political wilderness."
Now if Obama can follow this up with a set of specific policy proposals by the end of the summer, this race will be his to lose. In the age of web-enabled social networks, bottom-up is going to beat top-down every time.
[Hat tip: Carpetbagger]
UPDATE: Check out this bit of anecdotal evidence from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers. One person at a time, from the bottom up. Change is coming...
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