Barack Obama's Democratic Insurgency: Poised for an SC Victory?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2008.

As the afternoon sun slipped behind a cold grey sky, Samantha Wilson, a university educator from Anderson, a small town in South Carolina's upstate region, leaned on a fence at the Clemson University Amphitheatre and waited for her choice in Saturday's Democratic Primary to arrive. Earlier in the day, she said her doctor told her that his mother, an 80-year-old white woman, didn't like Hillary Clinton and would not vote for Barack Obama "because he was black." Wilson, who is dark-skinned, said they shrugged. But that got her thinking about Obama's background and upbringing.

"If she can be excused for not voting for him because he's black, then why shouldn't people vote for him because he's black, or because he's bi-racial," she said. "Let's not forget about that. He is the best of both worlds, black and white. I think he is the most transcendental person we have ever had to run for president."

Transcendental is not an adjective usually associated with presidential candidates. But it is an apt description for the Obama campaign's view of itself and its message of being the only Democratic candidacy that can bring real and dramatic change to Washington's entrenched ways of governing. Obama said he could do that, unlike his chief rival, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, because political ties and legacies would not burden him.

"Everywhere I go, people are ready for something new; that they are ready to write a new chapter in American history," Obama told a crowd of several thousand students at South Carolina's Clemson University, his first of three stops on the day before the primary. "I tell people, if you are ready for change, then change will happen."

The Clemson rally was a fitting finale for a true grassroots insurgency. The Obama campaign looks like every insurgent presidential campaign -- except it won the Iowa Caucuses and is poised, if polls are to be believed, to win South Carolina on Saturday. The headquarters in the state capital is overrun with volunteers, particularly young people and people of color, who enthusiastically were deployed on Friday with door hangings, lawn signs, stickers, flyers and google maps with destinations across the state.

Obama is benefiting from a Democratic Party electorate that, in South Carolina, is half African-American. But his campaign also draws people who don't merely seek good government or acquiesce to the art of the possible on Washington's terms. Instead, it attracts people who have heard a moral calling in a message of moving past partisan divisions and creating a true populist storm that demands results on major issues.

"Change in America does not happen from the top down," Obama told the Clemson University audience, elicting cheers. "It happens from the bottom up. ... If we could join our voices together, I place my faith in the American people."

Like Corazon Aquino, who became president of the Philippines in 1985 after leading a "people power" revolution, he tells audiences that he did not dream of running for the White House. But the once-reluctant candidate said he was propelled by what the Rev. Martin Luther King called the "fierce urgency of now." Now, almost a year after he announced his bid on the Illinois Statehouse steps where Abraham Lincoln lingered, Obama has fine-tuned his pitch, telling voters, "If you are ready for change, we can" reform Washington's ways and policies on a long liberal to-do list, from expanding childcare to funding education to ending the war in Iraq to achieving energy independence to forcing Detroit to build cars that get 40 miles per gallon.

"I proposed this in Detroit, in front of the automakers," he said. "When I said it to them, the room was very quiet. Nobody clapped. Part of what we need in the next president is somebody who will say the truth, not say what you want to hear..."

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Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at AlterNet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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