He told of his encounter with Edith Childs, a city councilwoman from Greenwood, S.C., who had lifted his spirits at the start of his campaign when his rallies were small and no one gave him a chance. She inspired him with her chant of “Fired up and ready to go.”
It’s a story he’s told hundreds of times but probably never so well. He lingered for effect, described the councilwoman’s church hat with a broad theatrical sweep of his hand and somehow was able to convey a time when he was small and vulnerable to the crowd of 90,000 that came to see him. “That’s how this thing started,” he said. “It shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room, and if it can change a room, it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state then it can change a nation and if it can change a nation it can change a world.”
As Obama told the story for the last time in this campaign, on the day his grandmother died, it was easy to imagine that, as he told it, he was thinking not only of Edith Childs but also of a woman he called “Toot.”
- John Dickerson of Slate from http://www.slate.com/id/2203422/
