Change is hard; change is painful. Those who benefit from the way things are have every interest to delay those who long for change. But eventually the waters that build up behind the dam cannot be contained. The status quo breaks: not by trickles, but in a flood.

This past Saturday, we were privileged to witness a flood that swept away the walls that have held back so many people in South Carolina.

If you want to know what business as usual in South Carolina meant, read this article in the Wall Street Journal from last week. (Free version). It profiles the precinct we were assigned on Saturday, where business as usual means paying off the power broker with “walking around money” and “consulting fees” to tell their followers how to vote.

In less privileged communities, it makes sense to band together and show solidarity in the face of stronger outside forces. But this banding together can lead to captivity and passivity among the community in following their anointed leaders. Over time, the very leaders who had fought so hard for their constituents slowly become a privileged class within the community. Self-interest conflates with group interest, giving birth to fiefdoms. (This happens regardless of whether the leaders are “traditional” or “progressive,” as I found in my undergraduate research on Boston’s Chinatown. And I would argue that the entire Democratic Party has been held captive this way ever since Reagan beat it into a corner.)

The Bluff Road community lies just outside the city limits of Columbia, SC. It is a predominantly black, working-class neighborhood, and it’s where we were assigned on the Jan 26 primary. It also happens to be home turf for State Senator Darrell Jackson, pastor of 11,000-strong Bible Way Church of Atlas Road, who the Wall Street Journal reports as being on the Clinton campaign’s payroll to the tune of over $135,000 since February.

On our side, by contrast, was Nicole Young, a recent USC graduate who deferred law school to hit local churches, barber shops, and beauty salons to uncover support for Senator Obama. The task, as the WSJ article makes clear, was not easy, but Nicole is both dedicated and passionate. (She was ultimately responsible for turning out the vote in all of Richland County). Most of all, she had a talent for spotting local leaders who wanted to follow their hears and were ready for change.

One of those leaders was Vernelle Graham, who Nicole had signed up for the campaign. Vernelle would be the local staging director; Rachel, her canvassing coordinator. Together, they had three days to pull together a team of volunteers and a game plan for turning out the local vote.

Vernelle doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but a number of volunteers who became canvassing captains did. They and Vernelle defied the stereotype of Obama supporters as starry-eyed naifs. “I wanted to show my grandchildren what it means to be involved,” several of them kept telling me on Saturday when I asked why they’d gotten involved in the campaign.

It became clear to us as we made our GOTV (Get out the Vote) calls that Pastor Jackson was out of touch with his parishioners, at least as far as Presidential politics were concerned. Months of hard work by Nicole and other staff and volunteers had paid off: the residents of the Bluff Road neighborhood had gotten the message. Many of them, we found out during our calls, were hooked by Sen. Obama’s observation that money spent on schools is money saved on prisons. In addition to the church where Jackson preaches and Bluff Road Park where the residents cast their ballots, another major landmark of the Bluff Road neighborhood is the Richland County Detention Center.

Election day came, and Vernelle, our other local leaders, a crowd of students from UNC-Asheville, and exuberant out-of-staters from as far as Baltimore flooded the nearby streets to urge the hundreds of supporters that the campaign had painstakingly identified over the past few months to get out and vote. Meanwhile, Pastor Jackson apparently spent his six-figure consulting fee on a few lawn chairs and refreshments for a “visibility” crew just outside 200 feet of the polling site. We were too focused on getting real voters to show up at the polls to bother countering that tactic until later in the day. Pastor Jackson himself apparently showed up at the polls and milled around for a bit, reminding folks by presence, if not words, where he stood. Our local leaders rolled their eyes when they heard about this final effort.

(We had so many volunteers that later in the morning, we did finally dispatch dozens of them to the polling site and rather overwhelmed the Hillary supporters, who abandoned their post sometime that afternoon. I had been concerned that so many of our visibility crew were white and out-of-state, but Vernelle assured us that, in fact, black citizens of South Carolina needed to see that Obama’s support crossed the lines of race, class, and age. And so there was much shouting at Bluff Road Park well into twilight.)

The final results for our precinct:
Obama : 688
Clinton: 191
Edwards : 26
All the hard work of meeting people face-to-face and developing local leaders had paid off, while the “consulting fees” did not.

Later that night, Sen. Obama emerged to his cheering supporters to U2’s “A Beautiful Day,” a shift from the campaign’s earlier preference for “City of Blinding Lights.” It seems appropriate that a song about the day after the Biblical flood would usher in a new era for South Carolina politics:

See the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out
It was a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away.

And anyone who saw the convention hall floor that night knows that all the colors were right out there, together.

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