Anatomy of a moment: how team Obama & Black America are making history

Karen Richardson had never worked on a political campaign and was headed down an entirely different path when the Barack Obama campaign tapped her last April to become the Iowa state policy director. But the 30-year-old African-American, who interned in Obama's Washington, D.C., Senate office in 2005 after a stint at UNICEF in Italy, was so impressed with him and his Senate operation that she caught "Obama fever" and put off plans to go work in Angola.

With undergraduate and law degrees from Howard University, a master's in international relations from the London School of Economics and a godfather named Muhammad Ali, Richardson is not easily impressed.

"When they asked me to stay on, I was sort of on a different course," she says. "But I looked at Barack and the way he interacted with his staff. I knew he was brilliant, and I looked at his character. There are a lot of smart people, but being on the Senate staff with him, you knew there was something special happening. All that combined to keep me there. It just felt right."

It's not only inside the campaign, but all across the nation that people feel that something special may be happening in America.

They feel the excitement of a movement that's not just attracting young, gifted and Black staffers like Richardson, but marquee-name advisers, fundraisers and supporters like Oprah Winfrey.

They feel the magic of a special moment in time that swept up the nameless masses of first-time caucus-goers ill Iowa who helped Obama win his historic victory there and the passionate Black voters who were expected to turn out in record numbers in South Carolina and on "Super Duper Tuesday" in primaries and caucuses across 22 states. They feel the passion of a race that has split the vote within Black families and, at the same time, has energized Black debate. And they are hopeful that, indeed, 2008 could be the year that the African-American dream of a Black president in our lifetime just might come true.

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"I do not believe that we can solve health care or high gas prices or the war in Iraq if we can't unify the country," Obama told EBONY from the campaign bus in Iowa. "I think I can do that better than anybody else in this race."

But despite false reports early in the campaign that there were no African-Americans in top campaign staff positions, Richardson epitomizes the more than two-dozen talented Blacks in key slots that Obama has attracted from the ranks of the nation's best and brightest minds. Like New Jersey State Campaign Director Mark Alexander, whose father, Clifford Alexander, was Secretary of the Army in President Bill Clinton's administration, foreign policy adviser Susan Rice, who was an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, and

National Policy Director Matthew Nugen, a veteran of the Democratic National Committee and former adviser to Joe Lieberman's 2000 presidential campaign.

"I give credit to Sen. Obama and our campaign manager David Plouffe for building one of the most diverse campaign staffs I have ever been involved with in Democratic Party politics," says Nugen. "The people that you see, [communications director] Robert Gibbs and [chief strategist and media adviser] David Axelrod, they are amazing," says Richardson. "And they are where they need to be. But people don't realize ... the state policy director for Iowa is African-American, and nobody would ever think that."

Indeed, Richardson says one thing that makes Team Obama so effective is that there is no ego, no drama and everybody understands the ultimate goal of the campaign and their respective roles in achieving it. "We came in here with our heart and with our passion, and we checked our egos at the door," she says. "That's what Barack attracts. None of us are confused about why we are here. We are here to change the country and to elect the best person able to do that. This is not about us. This is a grassroots campaign for change. It's a movement for change."

Obama's chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, also has considerable support among well-known African-Americans, including some of the most prominent Black politicians, civil rights leaders and entertainment icons--names such as Georgia Rep. John Lewis, NBA legend Earvin (Magic) Johnson, and music giant Quincy Jones--many of whom have been with the Clinton family for decades and see her ascendancy as the best outcome for Black America. And, with an experienced, tested political machine that delivered the Clinton victory in January's New Hampshire primary, including several key Black staffers, they are ready, willing and able to put up a fight.

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"We know what they will be coming with," says one Obama campaign insider, "and we are read),."

NO REGRETS

The morning of the Iowa caucuses, Valerie Jarrett sat calmly sipping mint tea in front of a fireplace at a hotel in West Des Moines. As the CEO of one of the nation's largest real estate firms, The Habitat Company, a member of the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees, former chair of the board of the Chicago Stock Exchange, and former head of the Chicago Transit Authority, Jarrett already had plenty on her plate.