Change starts in the home

FLANKING a cell phone on speaker mode Saturday evening in her modest Boulder City living room, Barbara Polk, a 69-year-old, white, retired accountant, and Brett Turnage, 26-year-old, African-American graduate of the University of California, Riverside, listened in after a long day of canvas organizing as Barack Obama conference called roughly 20,000 campaign insiders nationwide.

A road-worn and weary Obama used the brief, motivational call to ask key players in his 5-million-people-deep field operation to "double down" on their time commitment, assuring them that they could sleep when it's all over, and that "no one needs it more" than he does. Turnage didn't make it.

After three weekends in a row of renting a car to drive from his Moreno Valley, Calif. home to the Obama campaign's Henderson headquarters for volunteer work, and -- after deciding to become a full-time volunteer and buying a bus ticket for a five-hour ride with a bathroom that smelled like someone "pissed on the walls" -- a week as Staging Director of Boulder City's field office, Turnage crashed. "Crashed" meaning he had to abort mission at 9 p.m. Sunday night, after calling his mom to stay awake while driving down to drop off paperwork at the Henderson campaign office. He told his fellow campaign workers he just couldn't assist with the usual data entry and next-day preparatory work, which often ran past midnight.

"I've never worked harder for anything in my life," Turnage said of his time spent helping a candidate whose election he felt "would do wonders for the black youth." Turnage may have also given up valuable studying time and about a thousand dollars of his own cash in travels for this cause, but he wasn't the only one in Boulder City making sacrifices. Not even close.

Barbara Polk was adamant that her decision to volunteer her home for two weeks as the Obama campaign's Boulder City field office -- some days having more than 50 people pass through, including Robert F. Kennedy's ninth son, Max Kennedy, for a pep-talk -- was not a "sacrifice."

She spoke of a time before she was born that her mother and father witnessed a Missouri mob burn a black man alive for allegedly killing a white woman; to how Bill Cosby changed the roles of African-Americans on television; to her part-African-American daughter-in-law's continued struggle with race. "The civil rights movement did a lot, but it didn't do enough," she said.

But race wasn't on everyone's mind. Reuben Bautista, a soft-spoken, 59-year-old Mexican/Native American union pipefitter from Upland, Calif., took a whole week off work -- half of his yearly vacation time -- to canvas for Obama in Nevada because his planned retirement was pushed back four years, and he wants to "leave something better" for younger generations of union workers who want to go to college. "I can't think of a better way to spend my vacation," he said.

Then there was Boulder City's very own John Tryon, an 87-year-old white man, hopeful that Obama will be "Someone like Abe, or FDR, who essentially came out of the wilderness to lead."

Or Brennan Smith, the 35-year-old, white hypnotherapist from Kansas who flew out for a couple days of canvassing in the mean streets of Boulder City.

Or the middle-aged woman who came from Ireland. White.

Or 13-year-old Ryan Batnik from Henderson who, without any adult prompting, went down and volunteered at the Henderson office a month ago and worked nearly every day up until the election because, "It's our future."

Obama supporters in Nevada are especially indebted to people like Kevin Hart -- the white, planetary scientist in his 30s who recently returned from Africa, where villagers in remote areas were making jokes about Sarah Palin. Or the thousands of other Californians who came to help their neighbors knock on some doors -- on the other side of many of those doors stood unpleasant people, such as the guy who said Obama supporters were the only thing "worse than Mormons."

Now, of course, everyone knows what happened. Hard work paid off, history was made, etc. But the big questions still on many peoples' minds -- whether or not Obama will be able to lead, will be able to unite Americans of every shape, color and smell, will be able to inspire "hope" that's more than just a clever campaign slogan -- were answered before the first vote was even cast, and if you were sitting on Barbara Polk's couch, you'd know it, too.