[A year ago—can it really have been that long?—I wrote a couple of pieces about the Obama presidential campaign, as seen from the Indiana trenches. It seems like ancient history now, but I’m putting them on the blog over the next several days, for any political archaeologist who may be interested.]

FOOT-SOLDIERING IN OBAMA’S ARMY

The last time I got involved in politics, it was 1968 in upstate New York, and “Clean Gene” McCarthy’s local troops were bivouacked in our living room to hiss Lyndon Johnson on the telly.  You could almost hear the air seep out of their esprit de corps as LBJ announced he wouldn’t run again. Johnson you could hate, but Hubert Humphrey?

 Forty years on, I read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and felt some of the old excitement stirring my 73-year-old blood. A literate president, what an idea! Then I heard his Philadelphia speech, “A More Perfect Union,” and was hooked. Grabbing my credit card, I sent off $100 to the campaign, and on the next two Saturdays  drove an hour to Bloomington (home of Indiana University) to register voters for Indiana’s May 6 primary.

To be a Democrat in Indiana is doubly depressing. Not only do you know in advance that Indiana will go Republican in the fall—even the Democratic primary is meaningless, since it always comes after the nomination has been decided in other states. But not this year. Hoosiers may be the ones to finally push Hillary Clinton’s candidacy over the cliff—or they may revive it and send the whole circus gallywampusing toward a colossal train wreck in Denver.

 If I sat at home, I’d never forgive myself. I like Hillary and think she’d be a capable president—but Barack is a force I haven’t seen in national politics since Bobby Kennedy. “A phee-nom,” my ex-sportswriter friend Max would call him.

 The two Saturdays in Bloomington were idylls. I teamed up the first afternoon with Ben (a doctoral student in sociology) and we knocked on doors nonpartisanly all over two apartment complexes, registering voters. Each of us took a block and then met to compare results. It didn’t take much to make us happy, which was good, since these were student apartments—most occupants were either gone, still sleeping at noon, or from foreign countries. Still, we registered a handful and signed up some Obama volunteers.

 The next Saturday was even better. It was a perfect spring day, with star magnolias blossoming around the apartments. What better way to spend it than talking to strangers and urging them to vote? (Disquieting at times, though. Two doors were opened by small children who were home alone.) This time my partner was Sydney, a grayhead living on Social Security. She mixed Obama politicking with her registration pitch, lectured one student for watching Fox News, and took me home to her apartment for a lunch of toasted cheese and tomato soup.

 The Bloomington Obama forces seemed well organized. They had their own downtown headquarters, and had signed up hundreds of new voters. But the registration drive ended, and I was tired of driving a hundred-mile round trip. Why wasn’t anything going on closer to home?

 It turned out something was. A few days later, the candidate himself came for a “town meeting” at Columbus, 20 miles to the south. My $100 had gotten me on the Obama Internet, which I was checking out one afternoon when an announcement flashed up: Free tickets for the town meeting would be handed out starting in an hour. Karen and I jumped in the car and drove to Columbus, where a hundred people were already in line. The line (outside a theater)  had stretched to nearly two blocks before the tickets finally arrived by car—delayed, an Obama organizer explained, because the printer had died halfway through the job.

 Two days later, tickets in hand, we drove to Columbus East High School where by 9 a.m., about a thousand people were already in line for Obama’s 11 a.m. appearance in the school gym, the Orange Pit. (The crowd reached 2,500, newspapers reported.) We got upper bleacher seats, with a good view of the arena-style speaker’s platform. Others were being prodded to higher seats, but a friendly Obama usher said, “I’ll leave you two here, for mobility reasons.” Actually, Karen and I are still quite upwardly mobile, but gray hair can be an advantage.

 Barack gave a stock stump speech, with his familiar lines about the need to reform health care and about “pain trickling up.” Only once or twice did something else peep through. During the question session, an elderly woman put a young black up to asking about Social Security. Barack  caught on instantly, and chuckled—a throaty “heh, heh, heh” that—it suddenly flashed on me—came straight from some long-ago African uncle. And he called on one youngster who blurted, “How do you like Columbus?”

  “Is that your question?” Barack asked. “I like Columbus fine—you were just  taking a star turn, weren’t you?”

 “He has a sense of humor,” Karen said on the drive home.

 Later that day the storm broke over Obama’s “elitist” comments to a California audience about small-town  Pennsylvania. At 4 p.m. Kitty, the CNN anchor, was pounding the point relentlessly. “Stay tuned and we’ll tell you more about Obama’s stunning comments.” After half a dozen repetitions of stunning, I was remembering why I hate TV news.

 A day or two later, the Obama Internet invited me to join a “township team” in my own area. I did, and was directed to a meeting in Greenwood, just north of my home. Nate, a young field organizer, gave us a basic pitch and apologized for a certain frazzledness—he had just taken over from Kali, who had caught mono and gone home to Ohio. “Campaign organization is an oxymoron,” he said.

 The next weekend, I went back to Greenwood to knock on doors and this time blatantly urge ballots for Barack. Others had some depressing experiences. (Greenwood was a KKK stronghold  in the not-so-old days, and one canvasser reported meeting a diehard.) But my encounters were all pleasant. One man was vehemently anti-Clinton—“a conspicuous liar,” he called her. Another was just as soured on Obama, who he said has “no integrity,” because he didn’t walk out on Reverend Wright’s sermons. My list of names and addresses had been targeted at registered Democrats, and I had several undecideds or leaning-toward-Obamas, all of whom I faithfully recorded, with their responses, on my canvasser’s tally sheet.

 One man, about my age, was not on the list, but was in his yard. “What’s your business here?” he asked. It turned out that he not only was enthusiastic about Obama, but wanted to give me money on the spot for his campaign. (I took his name and address so Nate could contact him, but there may be a problem. He couldn’t remember his house number and had to go ask his wife.)

 Oddly, in my nonrepresentative microcosm of voters, there was not a single Hillary loyalist.

 Foot soldiers need a little R&R, so Karen and I have been inviting my fellow canvassers to a party at our house this Tuesday night, to watch the Pennsylvania results come in. I don’t expect more than half a dozen, but Karen—a better crowd predictor than I—is already planning food and figuring out how to move the bedroom cable TV to the living room.

 A lasting impression: the Obama campaign has organized itself superbly through the Internet, a little less efficiently through its fallible human troops on the ground. My local newspaper gave a large front-page spread to the Clinton effort, but hadn’t been able to locate the Obama side until I put the editor in touch. What’s really fueling the Obama drive is the army of people who have fallen for this candidate and taken time off from their lives to do something about it—and to send money. More than 100 attended the opening of the Bloomington headquarters, which surprised the organizers and forced the ceremony outside. Leonard Pitts, the columnist, says Obama’s opponents have made a fundamental miscalculation: “They’re running political campaigns—he’s leading a movement.”

 Will all this frenetic activity mean anything in the end? At the moment, Barack has a 5 percent lead in Indiana. We may yet be a pivotal state for a resurgent Hillary. Or by May 6, a Barack win or near-win in Pennsylvania may have reduced Hoosiers once more to an afterthought.

“Had there been a battle? And was it Waterloo?” asks a foot soldier in a Stendhal novel. My bit of soldiering is lost in the ruck of this vast, exhilarating, boring, frustrating, endless, and inspiring campaign. But as I sit drooling in the chimney corner (perhaps just before the 2012 election), I can at least say to the enthralled children at my knee that I once did “see Obama plain. . . . So strange it seemed, and new.”  (And if you recognize that quote, keep it to yourself, or it will tag you as a hopeless elitist.)