Tuesday’s election still fills me with awe, and not just for Barack Obama. The American electorate is wiser than I dared hope. Even John McCain, who ran a shoddy campaign, delivered a concession speech that was generous and inspiring. Sarah Palin has flown back to Alaska with new respect, I would hope, for the power of community organizing.

I spent the week prior to the election in a place I’d never known existed—Northeast Philadelphia—with a marvelous group of people, most of whom were volunteers.

Follow up:

The salaried leader of our 58th Ward operation was Lindsay Randall, a 26 year-old woman who signed on to the Obama campaign in New Hampshire. Both of Lindsay’s deputies, Vita Litvak and Frank Schlupp, were volunteers, but their level of competence was thoroughly professional and enthusiastic and courteous beyond measure. I felt lucky to have found shelter under their wings. You can read an interview with Frank at">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-treuting/new-to-political-campaign_b_139864.html

Northeast Philadelphia is the kind of place that people assumed would be tough for Obama; Hillary Clinton clobbered him here in the Democratic primary. The Northeast is mostly white and working class, on the edge of the city but not quite suburban. To New Yorkers, it looks like Queens. The base was once Irish, Italian, Polish and Catholic judging from the names that still abound, but today the ethnicity is broader—a sizeable Jewish Russian population with a sprinkling of African-Americans, Latinos and South Asians. I stayed in the proverbial Indian-owned motel where the proprietor offered discounts for campaign workers and the Anglo bartender loudly lamented that people from out of state were telling Pennsylvanians how to vote.

I suppose it seemed that way to him. New Yorkers discovered in 2004 that their work to elect Democrats in New York were redundant, so lots of us (and people from other predominantly Democratic states) have learned to migrate. It is still one country, even if elections are decidedly state-run. We saw our job as ensuring that Obama supporters were enabled and not thwarted in their voting, and they prevailed by eight points in our 58th Ward. McCain carried only one ward in Philadelphia County, the South.

Democrats owe a debt to National Committee Chair Howard Dean for his insistence that we not concede any state. With their experience raising money on the internet, Dean and Joe Trippi set the stage for a candidate with Obama’s 21st century tech savvy and 20th century grasp of the power of community organizing. Obama harnessed an unprecedented number of people of all ages and walks of life to take back our government and our nation. In Pennsylvania alone, 55,000 people volunteered their time.

Lindsay had lost one of her New Hampshire precincts by a single vote, and she relentlessly cautioned us not to let up in our canvassing and phone banking. On the Sunday before the election, volunteers made more than 10,600 phone contacts from our office on Byberry Road, and they knocked on more than 4,000 doors. That set some sort of record inside the campaign.

Election Day found me up at 4:30 and standing at a firehouse shortly after the polls opened at 8. You might say we were a bit overstaffed with five Obama volunteers, two pro-Obama guys from the plumbers’ union and another two from the carpenters’ union. McCain had two volunteers, and they put up signs pitifully attempting to link their ticket with the World Series-winning Phillies. It was pretty easy to figure out who was voting Republican: they wouldn’t take the doughnut holes we were offering. After lunch, I moved to a large complex for senior citizens whose poll served not only its residents but those living nearby. The local Democratic honcho was 96 and amazed that I wasn’t getting paid, but he understood me when I said I loved my country and wanted a new kind of president.

As a young woman, I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship which answered the question I had always had about the Jewish Holocaust: How could so many well-meaning Christians and classical music lovers have supported Hitler and his facist ideas? Leaving aside my then-underdeveloped knowledge of European anti-Semitism, I saw how prejudice gave way to silence and finally paralysis. The Lutheran Bonhoeffer didn’t hesitate to call out church officials whose acquiescence facilitated Nazi operations. He was executed for his part in a plan to kill Hitler, and I wondered if I would ever be so brave. At the same time, I saw that my complicity in the Southern system of racial segregation was not all that dissimilar from the complicity of ordinary Germans in Hitler’s Final Solution.

Since 9/11, Republicans have exploited every ethnic, racial, religious, gender and sexual tension in our society to bend us to their will. It bothered me then, and still does, that so many Democrats went along with the Patriot Act and FISA. New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller has written insightfully about this, but I found his analysis almost as scary as the problem itself. Nevertheless, for the first time in many years, I got involved in the 2004 presidential election. Its results did nothing to assuage my concerns.

But in 2004, I had heard Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention and read his Dreams of My Father. Here, I thought, was an American whose circumstances and intelligence had forced him to come to terms with the undercurrents of our society. Here, was a rare politician who knew who he was. I celebrated his election to the Senate and, after a brief dalliance with John Edwards (don’t ask), threw my support behind Obama in the Democratic primary. It was heartening to see who else showed up; many, many of them had never been involved in the political process.

From that initial cadre, the Obama campaign organized a network of workers and volunteers in all fifty states. If you were inside it, you know how well the campaign was managed. From repeatedly rallying spirits with video to producing the best literature Democrats have had in my lifetime to asking more and more of every supporter and reminding us that success was as much in our hands as our candidate’s, the campaign grew to a roar and the money poured in.

While supporters may have had much to do with Obama’s success, his is the responsibility for cleaning up the debacle that our government has become. I don’t expect to cheer his every decision, but, most of all, I rest in the knowledge of his experience as editor of the Harvard Law Review and as professor of Constitutional law. Let’s hope this puts an end to preemptive war and torture and suspension of habeas corpus and signing statements and Supreme Court nominees from the Federalist Society and talk of the Unitary Executive.

Forever. Amen.