The campaign of his life

BARACK OBAMA HAS INSPIRED A RECORD NUMBER OF YOUNG VOTERS. LAMONT CAROLINA IS ONE OF THEM, BUT IN HIS CASE THE FIGHT FOR HIS CANDIDATE IS A FIGHT FOR HIS OWN FUTURE

In the retelling, all inevitable love affairs come close to never happening at all. If I hadn't gone back to the bar to pick up my change...if my parents hadn't moved to Oklahoma, where I got in-state tuition...if I hadn't been dragged out of the house that night by my roommate, who was trying to cheer me up. From the perspective of the securely coupled, the very possibility of never having met is thrill­ing torture indeed.

Political love affairs are no exception.

These days Lamont Carolina dares to imagine what his life would be like if he hadn't been stroll­ing through downtown Manhattan one afternoon in September of last year. He was idling away a few hours after work, "studying human interaction." which he likes to do; sometimes he even watches people meet and takes notes "on how to create a relationship out of nothing." His life so far—growing up poor in Brownsville. Brooklyn, and navigating new terrains ever since—has made him watchful. Even though he's a charmer, a good talker, he subscribes to the maxim "Better to keep one's mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt." So walking and watching were what he was doing until he met and bantered with a woman handing out tickets for the Barack Obama rally being held later that afternoon in Washington Square Park.

He followed the crowds converging on the park from all directions, so many people, at least 24.000 of them, that he couldn't see anything, so he climbed atop the foundation of a lamppost on the edge of the square to watch Obama speak. Lamont remembers an old woman—well, "a wise woman." he says, correcting himself now that he has become more politically savvy—trying to bump him off his perch so she could climb up and watch the proceedings.

The crowd was hungry, a single organism roiling with excitement, a sense of its own life, its appoint­ment with history.

And then, as Lamont Carolina clung to his lamppost. Barack Obama began to speak.

Before, whenever Lamont conceived of politics, he envisioned "old, bland, bald guys." Even in regard to Obama, Lamont had not yet "drunk the Kool-Aid," as he puts it. There might have been uncanny similarities between the candidate and himself—both had grown up without a fa­ther, both were black, both were ambitious, both had moved easefully through alien worlds, both were gifted at inspiring peo­ple, yet behind the beguiling scrim of their charisma both kept watch on their sur­roundings with a cool neutrality. But at 23, despite the affinities, Lamont still viewed the electoral process with deep skepti­cism. He'd seen candidates come and go, but nothing much ever changed in Browns­ville, regardless of who held office. Politics appeared to have as much to do with him as the Dow Jones Industrial Average did with a man who owned no stock.

And yet as Obama delivered a standard stump speech in which his voice turned as honeyed as the late September light pouring over the park that afternoon, a psychic channel ripped open within Lamont as surely as if a faith healer had passed hands over him. He fell in politi­cal love for the first time in his life.

The speech featured all the usual Obama trademarks—phrases such as "a time for change" and "we the people." His oratory merged the wonkish and the preacherly in a way that thrilled blacks and whites alike. He inveighed against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. But Obama, a for­mer student at Columbia University in New York back in the early 1980s, also divulged how he used to drink at a nearby bar, and at just that moment, the microphone cut off and Obama laughed and said, "Some­one doesn't want people to know about that," and he repeated the story.

Lamont got a kick out of that.

As he listened to Obama, Lamont heard a candidate "whose thinking was off-the-charts different." Obama struck him as "a motivational speaker for our entire country" rather than a deal-cutting politician. Until that afternoon Lamont Carolina had not put much faith in "the system." But suddenly he ventured to believe; the entire political sphere struck him as rich with potential in exactly the way a man newly in love sees surround­ing him a world lit up with promise.

He knew right away that he was get­ting involved in the campaign. In the course of an hour or so, Obama had allowed Lamont to see the hardships of his Brooklyn upbringing as produc­tive of new possibilities. "Lots of people who grew up with challenges relate to Obama on a personal basis," he says. "His campaign enables me to be part of something greater than myself. If Barack Obama gets to office, I know I will be able to look at the seal of the president and know that it means us."

He doesn't mean that "us" to be only black people; he means as "us" every­body who had been spiritually disen­franchised from contemporary Ameri­can politics. Obama made it plausible for Democrats in particular to be ideal­ists again, to refuse to settle any longer for the soul-deadening geometries of triangulation.

Leaving the rally in Washington Square Park, Lamont came across a flyer that led him to a meeting several days later of Downtown East for Obama, a Manhattan group aiming to make sure, among other aims, that Obama was included on the ballot in every congressional district in the state when the primary arrived that Feb­ruary. One of Downtown East's leaders is Howard Hemsley, a delegate at large

to this year's Democratic convention, a party organizer since George McGovern's campaign in 1972 and a manager of New York City races for local office. "Lamont stood up, asked questions and wanted to do something right then," Hemsley says. "I said to my fellow coordinators, 'Who is this guy? Let's invite him to our smaller meetings.'"

"I had to do something, I had to!" Lamont says. Within days he had helped organize a march of Obama supporters across the Brooklyn Bridge.

In falling for Barack Obama, it seemed Lamont Carolina had fallen in love with his own potential.

On this Wednesday morning in the sum­mer, one of his days off, Lamont is driv­ing to Brownsville to visit his barber. He wants to get a touch-up before speaking at an Obama event in Manhattan's East Village on Saturday. "They call me a rally leader," he says with a mixture of pride and self-deprecation. Since the fall, he has jump-started many campaign functions with the same let's-get-this-party-started energy he radiated his last year of high school, back in 2003, when he was hired by well-off families as a party motivator to raise the roof at bar mitzvahs and birth­day parties with a little Brooklyn flavor and the latest dance steps.

A few days before, for instance, he led the cheers for New York's Obama cam­paign volunteers at Dewey's Flatiron bar and grill in Manhattan on the night their candidate declared himself the presump­tive nominee. Lamont is clearly a favorite among the workers, somewhere between a mascot and a rising leader, though clearly not as privileged as many, like the girl ordering a bottle of champagne for her table, who will be taking the fall semes­ter off from Sarah Lawrence to help run the Obama operation in Pittsburgh. She appears typical of many of the kids pres­ent that night, fortunate that their political passion can be subsidized by understand­ing parents. By contrast, Lamont had dickered for the best deal with a man sell­ing Obama buttons at the door. His activ­ism comes at his own expense. Before speaking he waited for Hillary Clinton to finish her non-concession speech. "It's been a long road," Lamont finally told the volunteers, many, like him, veterans of get-out-the-vote drives in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. "Give yourself a round of applause!" The roar was fright­ening in its intensity.

In recognition of his rhetorical gifts, Lamont is beginning to receive frequent invitations to give motivational talks to Democrats around the city. Not long ago he addressed an open forum on the Democratic platform, opening his speech by exclaiming, "Friends, Romans, coun­trymen." When the laughter subsided, he spoke passionately and off-the-cuff about developing leadership in urban communi­ties. He asked the assembled, many of them

local notables, including Ronnie Eldridge, leader of die city council, to recall die days before they got into politics, before their futures were assured. "If you'd known more about leadership before you went into politics," he told diem, "consider how much further along you would have been."

Based on their encounters with him, some longtime activists in New York City Democratic circles suspect Lamont Carolina has what it takes to eventually run for office himself. Howard Hemsley says, "Lamont is a natural leader. He's charismatic. People are drawn to him. If he's prepared to do the unglamorous work of sitting through boring meetings, of making an endless number of phone calls and of suffering fools, his political future is unlimited."

That notion is beginning to occur to Lamont himself. Having once aspired to a career in stand-up comedy, he's thinking instead of one day running for the New York State Assembly and, maybe even in the more distant future, the U.S. Senate. Of course, as is usually the case with love affairs after the initial euphoria subsides, he must puzzle out what is now required of him in his new role as committed partner. He must understand how much his talents, his history, his hopes, even his shortcomings will allow him. This can be a litde confus­ing when you're still a young man, but as Lamont has said whenever he has faced hardship, like the time he had to apply for work at McDonald's because he couldn't find a job elsewhere, "There's no shame in my game." He'll do what he has to do.

"A black man has to be careful about his line," Lamont says this afternoon, tracing the contour of his hairline with his finger. "Without the right line, you're nothing. And you've got to go to a barber who knows your line, who won't push it back too far. You get a bad shape-up, you're in for a bad two weeks. Did you see Obama's line when he was campaigning in Pennsylvania? You could tell some barber messed it up."

As he rolls past the West Indian enclaves just off Flatbush, he confesses he's having second thoughts about his job in manage­ment training for a large company that makes baked goods in New Jersey. The cor­porate life seems to offer security but only in exchange for freedom; he has already been warned about wearing an Obama button at work. On the other hand, the pay is pretty good, and Lamont is being groomed for high-level management. At a gathering in Manhattan, a VP announced, "Lamont Carolina is the future of this com­pany." In order to familiarize Lamont with every aspect of the trade, senior manage­ment has assigned him to ride the delivery routes with the bread-truck drivers every morning, starting at 3:45.

This means he should be going to bed by seven every night in the apartment in Hawthorne, New Jersey that he shares with his girlfriend, Vicki, whom he met at Keystone College, near Scranton, Pennsyl­vania. But instead, he is often working for

Obama until midnight. He has been offered an important volunteer position with the campaign in Atlanta, but he's not sure he should take it. For one thing, Vicki isn't too keen on it. "What are we going to do about money?" she asks. She keeps wondering when they're going to get married.

There's also the problem of where he should establish residence if he plans to run for office. He likes the idea of Brownsville as his potential base. He'd also like to be closer to his mother, who lives there and seems to be suffering from a mysterious malady that he believes, among other things, is making her hair fall out. But then Lamont says, "Vicki's a white girl from Pennsylvania. She grew up on a farm with pigs and horses. Brownsville? No way!" Mournfully, he says, "Once I was dying to get out of Brooklyn. Now I'm dying to get back."

In the past year, while working full-time, Lamont has canvassed voters, registered them and helped get them to the polls in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. At least twice a week through the fall, he participated in petition drives to ensure Obama's place on the ballot for the New York primary. (Even now he sees the green petition forms in his nightmares; he hates the clerical side of campaigning.) In Pennsylvania he traveled back to Keystone College, his alma mater, to rouse student interest in Obama.

Not long ago he talked to the woman in HR at his company to tell her he was not sure that managing baked goods was all he wanted out of life. He might want to work for the Obama campaign, for instance, if the opportunity presented itself. She thanked him for his honesty and said she would get back to him.

At the barbershop in Brownsville two older men shooting the breeze say Lamont walked to the beat of his own drum. Always did. He was deep. Then they tease him about appearing in playboy as the sub­ject of this profile. "Whose lap he gonna be on?" They burst out laughing. They say, "Did he tell you about the time he ran around the block in a rainstorm for $7?"

"I collected," Lamont says.

"He collected, but he was wet." They burst out laughing again.

One of the gents says, "He used to tell me, "I can't rap, I can't play ball.' I told him, 'You funny, just do that. Because it's funny when you try to play basketball!'" The men laugh again, knocking into each other and Lamont.

Lamont gestures at the two gents. "These guys are respected in the commu­nity," he says. "They kept me in check, and they gave me a chance."

Inside, a young barber ushers Lamont into a chair. El, the old hand at the shop, says, "We solve the world's problems here."

As the young barber moves around Lamont's head, stopping and squinting as if contemplating a prime piece of mar­ble, El and Lamont discuss rap. "Soulja (continued on page 142)

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(continued from page 70) Boy is just a little boy," he says disdainfully. Like a merchant in a border town, he keeps switching languages as he passes from one segment of New York to another. "At times I have to portray a certain demeanor," he says. "I'm not just a black kid from the ghetto. 1 can speak properly."

His hair sheened and his line precise, he strolls through his Brownsville neighbor­hood, a native son faithful to the etiquette of his streets, greeting with hugs and waves and hand slaps everybody from a con returned from Rikers Island to dread-locked Jamaicans selling bootlegged CDs to former schoolmates and teachers.

The way Lamont figures it now at the venerable age of 24 (24 in Brownsville years being equivalent to somewhere around 50 in Manhattan's more elegant precincts), his current trajectory from political apathy to Obama activist actually began a lifetime ago. Someday he may spin a myth out of his hard-scrabble origins and retail it to voters (the log cabin of the 19th century = today's two-bedroom apartment in the projects), but he hasn't yet, not in his public life. The idea that such a background may be an asset is a nov­elty to him. He still feels the disgrace of pov­erty, remembering how he once pretended to find his own food stamps on the floor of a candy store when a friend entered. As was the custom, he had to split the proceeds of the discovered stamps with his buddy.

Lamont was born in Brownsville in 1983 during a snowstorm. The ambulance didn't make it in time, so he was delivered in the apartment. He never knew his father, only that he suffered from seizures and died in Pitts­burgh in 1997. "I cried when I found out," he says. He carried around a much-crumpled photograph of his father until one day he lost it—he never knew where—and now he

has forgotten what his father looked like.

His three brothers all have different fathers. Eric, one of his two younger brothers, has a Jamaican father who sometimes came over to cook oxtail stew for Lamont's mother and all the brothers and take them for rides in his car. Because Lamont didn't have a father of his own, he loved it when Eric's father would visit, but then one day he stopped coming by regularly. Maybe Lamont's mother had told him to stay away, maybe Eric's father had another family. In the years to come Lamont would always say that in his neighborhood, it was easy to be a son to a mother, but nobody knew how to be a son to a father.

Lamont didn't have many friends, mainly just Rogelio, who had moved to Brooklyn from Panama and lived down the block and kept mainly to himself. Vying for attention, Lamont used to get his ass kicked every day. But in sixth grade he finally figured out a good way to get some friends.

He told everybody at P.S. 165 that Magic Johnson was his cousin and that he was com­ing to visit on Friday. Even the teachers at the school got excited. Mrs. Brown, the mean­est teacher there ("I breathe fire," she said), asked Lamont, "Magic's coming, right?"

"He's coming," Lamont said.

For a week Lamont had more friends than he'd ever dreamed. Then Friday arrived. "Where's Magic?" all the teachers and students wanted to know. As this was not a sitcom, there was no happy ending. Lamont hid in the bathroom and learned at least one lesson: If he drank a lot of Pepto-Bismol, it would keep the vomit down.

In the neighborhood they call him Larry to this day. Larry never had the latest stuff. He told everyone he'd left his Air Jor-dans in the house. Pearl and Simeon and Jonny and all the other kids just laughed. They knew he didn't have any Jordans. Jonny said Larry's shoes looked like Cheez Doodles. And Jonny was his friend.

1 le didn't have the money for brand-name clothes until the summer of 1998 when he worked for the parks department at Lincoln Terrace Park for $5.15 an hour, raking leaves, picking up trash, sweeping dirt from here to there. He took his first paycheck, around $200, to Jamaica Avenue in Queens to buy new clothes, and he came across a game that men were playing atop boxes stacked up on the sidewalk; the object was to identify under which of three cups a pea remained after a man shuffled the cups around. Rigged to take advantage of the gullible, the game proved alluring to young Lamont. He watched a man win money by pointing at the cup the pea was hidden under and it looked easy and the men there invited Lamont to put his money down and play and so he did, and to his amazement, he lost. Then he lost again, until nearly all his money was gone.

"That was a good lesson for you," his mother told him.

In 2000 he had to check his mom into the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital. He had been coming home from school at the end of the day and finding her sitting in the same spot he'd left her that morning. She didn't check the mail, she didn't pay the bills, she didn't get the paperwork done that a family on welfare needed to keep the services coming. The lights kept getting turned off. The hospital kept her two or three weeks for observation. Lamont and his brothers begged for her to be released, which she was eventually.

His life wasn't all hard, however. He was always welcome for a meal at Jonny and Simeon's grandmother's house just down the block. The Telfords were a West Indian family, and they had rules—they had to do book reports in the summer, not for school but for the family! Alert to the signs of a fellow's propensity for mischief, Auntie Vivian used to ask the local boys, "Is that an earring you wearing?" The family knew Larry didn't have much, and they were as generous as they could be. Even now, when he comes back to the neighborhood, Lamont must visit Granny, which he does today, parking his car in front of the stoop and running in to pay his respects.

Everything turned for Lamont one sum­mer night when he was 15 or 16. For weeks the tension had been festering between teenage boys from abutting Brownsville neighborhoods, and on this night it had been decided that their leaders were going to fight—"the last scuffle," Lamont calls it. This meant that Lamont's friend, Rogelio, known as Machine, their big guy, would battle the fearsome Justin.

The fight went down in the middle of Amboy, a one-way street. Rogelio and Justin were slugging it out, and Rogelio was start­ing to prevail when from out of nowhere more boys from the other side rounded the corner, on foot and on bikes, and headed toward the fight, and suddenly there was the sound of pop! pop! pop! And Lamont and his buddies saw that the oncom­ing boys, running and riding their bikes, were firing at them with pistols. Many a Brownsville teen's life had been lost in just (continued on page 145)

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(continued from page 142) this sort of lake movie known as real life.

I'op! Pop! Pop! Everybody bolted, giddy with their own mortality, Lamont cutting down a side street to get help from his neighborhood, the other guys fleeing for the safety of the train tracks. Lamont wasn't a gangbanger or a fighter or any of that stuff, he wasn't a tough guy, the status he had gained had come from being the funny guy. He earned his legend­ary status during a blackout in 2000 when he dyed his hair silver like the rapper Sisqo and performed for all comers in front of the co-ops at Hegamen Avenue. But he wasn't a coward, either, and of his friends in those days, he says, "We bled together, we wept together. They were my boys.'

And that night he feared the worst until his boys, every last one of them, began slip­ping back to the familiar stoops of home, hav­ing hidden from the shooters by the gravel pit next to the train tracks. After that night everyone got closer for a while. They had seen the face of death, and it looked remark­ably like their own young faces, just boys who would have been their brothers had they lived a block or two closer. "Are they gonna come around again?" Lamont and his friends wondered for the rest of the summer.

In time Lamont started to distance him­self from his buddies. "Sometimes people overembellish stuff, what they see growing up. Like a white kid might see all of this and say, 'This is the hood!' Like it was glam­orous. But a black kid from the hood says, 'How is real life supposed to be?'"

He couldn't stop asking himself that question. "I knew there was more to life," he says. He'd always thought he was meant for something special, though he didn't know what it was and though his circum­stances often told him otherwise.

"I'm humble, but I'm not an average joe," he says now, contemplating the mystery of why he manages to rise while so many around him have not. "I have this drive. And I have skills that attract people. I want to help people. People helped us out when my mom was sick. But if I can be on the giving end, even better. This may sound stupid, but not getting a lot during Christmas taught me not to depend on being a getter."

On summer nights when it rained and everyone else in Brownsville went inside, Lamont Carolina would leave his brothers in the apartment and head out into the empty streets to walk and think and clear his head. One of his escapes was to climb to the top of the parking garage at the corner of Hegamen and Amboy and stare across the rooftops of Brooklyn at the skyline of Manhattan. The Twin lowers were still standing then. Man­hattan was another world, and he imagined somewhere within it was the kind of life he wanted. He had no male role models, his cous­ins were in jail, he'd seen way too much. But he stared anyway, as if he could decipher the scrambled puzzle pieces of all those rooftops stretching out unsolvably toward a borough that was even farther away than it looked.

on Seventh Street in the East Village for Saturday's meeting with prospective volun­teers for the Obama campaign. While wait­ing to speak, he teases a fellow volunteer, Sara Halle-Miriam, a student at NYU. "You cry every time!" he tells her. "You cried when he"—he being Obama—"won North Carolina. You cried when he sneezed!"

"I did not," she says, blushing.

The Obama campaign has arguably pro­duced more volunteers than any other in American history. Energized by the candi­date himself and issues like the Iraq war, they're pouring into the system like floodwa-ters through a New Orleans levee—by some counts, there are as many as a million. The breadth of this grassroots movement is also attested to by the more than 2 million individ­ual donors to the campaign thus far. "Lamont's political gifts are unusual," Hemsley says, "but the story of his involvement is not."

Richie Fife, a New York organizer for the Obama campaign who worked for many years on political campaigns with David Garth, the pioneer in media consulting for elections, is buoyed by the fresh energy entering the sys­tem, something he hasn't witnessed to this degree since Bobby Kennedy ran for presi­dent in 1968. "It had gotten to the point where you often had to ask unions to bus their people in to fill up a room," he says. "There were no real people diere! Now peo­ple turn up at meetings and we're not giving away anything, no entertainment, nothing."

The use of the Internet pioneered most successfully by Howard Dean's organization in 2004 has allowed the Obama campaign to "communicate with large numbers of people at low cost," says Fife. "People who have been activists for decades don't neces­sarily understand how it's done now and sometimes find it frustrating," says Janice Caswell, a member of the Downtown East steering committee, "but the political pro-

cess has been opened up like never before." Able to consult online templates for action, local groups have taken responsibility for running their own shows, providing a neo­phyte like Lamont the chance to make an impact perhaps sooner than in elections past. This has its benefits. "He's not encum­bered with the cynicism of people who have been doing politics for a long time," Fife says. "He believes he can bring change, and he is able to make the people around him also believe."

Running the meeting today is Susan Jennings, an artist and a member of the steering committee for Downtown East for Obama. She met Lamont back in the win­ter, while they both petitioned for Obama to be on the ballot in New Vork. She loved how, in the iciest weather, he would stop even harried, seen-it-all New Yorkers in their tracks with his stand-up routines for Obama. He would tell them, "You smell like a Democrat," and they would usually laugh and stop and sign. His attention-getting tricks were borrowed from nights as a fledgling comic in the clubs of New York, back in his late teens and early 20s, when he was trying to break into the busi­ness. Once he had even shared a stage with Chris Rock, who had stared right through Lamont as if he were a nobody.

In fact, somewhere out there are 15 or 20 tapes of a crotch-grabbing, sometimes bril­liant but always uncensored show Lamont performed in a dorm basement at Keystone College. "You know it's some black mutha-fuckas livin' in that dorm," he says on the video, "because the Kool-Aid's so sweet!" Now that he is pursuing a political career, Lamont wonders whether he should be worried about who may have a tape.

Comedy was going to be one ticket out of Brownsville. After being shot at, after hospitalizing his mother, he had decided it

was time to move on. The other route out was through education. At the last of the three high schools he bumbled through, he experienced what he calls "a divine intervention" in the person of an English teacher named Laura Ryan, who, in a year that nearly burned her out as a teacher, taught him, he says, "the fundamentals of being a young man." "The miracle," says Lamont, "is that as she was losing her faith, she gave me mine."

That faith led him to move in with the Rings, a white family in New Jersey, for his senior year of high school. It is one of Lamont's gifts that he has rarely lacked for benefactors. He had met them through another white family who took him in sum­mers when he was a child, under the aus­pices of the Fresh Air Fund, a program that

affords inner-city kids the chance to spend summers outside of their neighborhoods. The school principal in New Jersey told him, "One fuckup and you're gone." But he passed all his classes, and instead of signing up for the Marines, as he had expected, he astonished himself by getting into col­lege. Then, when he earned his degree from Keystone, he gave the diploma to his cousin, Junior, who had always encouraged Lamont to get an education but had missed one himself and had a hard time finding a job after getting out of prison. The diploma hangs on Junior's wall.

Now Jennings invites the potential volunteers to explain what brought them here today. One by one, as if giving tes­timonies at a gospel service, 30 or 40 men

and women break into tongues of political fire. Obama has somehow made people believe again in the notion of America as an ongoing experiment.

A Trinidadian woman says, "This is America's last chance to stand! Her last chance! This is the first time I've ever been involved with American politics. I'm not a citizen, so I can't even vote. But something is about to happen in America. And I want to be involved. I don't even see Obama as a colored person."

This spectacle suggests how Obama has quickened America's spirit life, how he has tapped into electrical undercurrents crackling off the grid that no Democrat has touched or transmitted in 40 years. Still fresh to the political scene and rela­tively undefined, he is a dream-catcher for

all varieties of dreamer. In the face of that, even the East Village activists at the church this afternoon, no matter how hungry to repossess the White House, must feel a little sorry for John McCain, confronted by an opponent seemingly in synch with forces greater than himself. The discrepancy is summed up in the image ofBarack Obama in Berlin, speaking to 200,000 people who are "waving American flags that aren't burning," as Lamont says, versus McCain visiting a German restaurant in Ohio, tuck­ing into a bratwurst.

Obama appears to be the first black politician to benefit from a series of tec­tonic shifts on race that have been quietly occurring under our feet for at least a gen­eration. He refuses to blame racism for his campaign's difficulties, in stark contrast to

the way Hillary Clinton and her support­ers regard sexism as responsible for fail­ures stemming largely from arrogance and mismanagement. He makes many whites feel good about themselves by feeling good about him. And blacks feel good, if a little surprised, that whites feel so good about feeling good about a black man.

Now it is Lamont's turn this afternoon to benefit from and embellish all of this era's good feeling, here in front of an audience of whites, blacks, West Indians, Europeans and even an East Village woman with a spectacular lower-back tattoo who hopes to stage a "graffiti event" for Obama.

He starts out with a confession. "What brought me to the campaign?" he asks. "As a starving college student, I actually worked for Bush." Quite an admission. A comedian, and

compulsively honest as well, Lamont wonders whether he'll have to censor himself a little more when he becomes a politician.

"I didn't know that!" Jennings roars. The room breaks into laughter.

"Well, the Bush people were paying $100 a day for students to make phone calls for the campaign," he says. "And I needed the money. But I encouraged people to vote their hearts."

A couple of years later Lamont actually met George W. Bush when the president visited his college. As a student leader, Lamont was selected to greet him, but first he was called lo the dean's office and asked whether he had "any felonies or priors." When he shook Bush's hand, he considered bringing up Hurricane Katrina but thought better of it. The meeting galvanized him. "I knew then,

if George Bush could do it, so could I. But not only as a public speaker—I also had the skills to bring people together, to help build a commu­nity, if not as a presi­dent, as a senator."

Lamont tells them about leading his march of Obamaphiles across the Brooklyn Bridge. "That's the kind of magic I want to bring to the cam­paign," he tells the prospective volunteers. "I want to electrify you. I'm a motivator. I believe that if you don't like what you see out there, you go make up your own plate of food."

They cheer. Everybody wants to make up their own plate of food.

Soon afterward, on a sticky summer morning, Lamont's employers call him into a conference room at the bakery rnmnanv in New ler-

sey where he has worked since November. They ask him how the Obama campaign is going. That's when Lamont knows some­thing is up, because they generally don't like anyone to talk politics at work.

Then they tell him, "We're not trying to keep you here if you're not happy," and so they have decided to let him go, effective immediately. They ask him to return the company car; they've hired a car service to take him home. They like him, he could have done well in the company, so this isn't easy.

At the end of the meeting, one of the executives jokes with Lamont, saying, "I hear Barack Obama has a vice-presidential spot open."

The driver, an old guy, taking him back to his apartment, says, "You probably should have had another job lined up first."

"Not necessarily," Lamont says. "Better to be happy."

He sends an e-mail entitled 'Jobless in Seattle" to the steering committee of Down­town East. It reads, "It's official, I am cur­rently unemployed! It just happened today. The company was really great about it. It was a mutual agreement, effective today. Any ideas? Lamont."

Vicki is surprised when he tells her. Not long after that, they have a big fight. Vicki takes the car and goes home to Pennsylvania for the weekend. She's considering moving back there. Lamont asks her to think about what she really wants while she's away. As he walks the streets of Hawthorne, he prays, asking God to let him help other people, to show him how best to do that.

By legend, the back rooms of New York City politics used to feature corpulent, tough-talking Boss Tweeds. They smoked cigars, they sold influence, they cut deals. You take Manhattan, I'll take the Bronx. But after his inspiring performance at the church on Seventh Street last Saturday, Lamont has been invited to Manhattan's Upper West Side to brave a new back room—that of a Cosi restaurant on Broad­way between 77th and 78th, sprinkled with local Democrats, men and women, old and young, nearly all white, noshing on bread, sipping coffee. You take Manhat­tan, I'll take a double latte.

The evening's host, an earnest, unflap­pable woman with her blonde hair pulled back tightly as if to keep any unruly thoughts bound inside her skull as hos­tages to good manners, introduces Lamont, who bounds to the front of the crowd wearing a vote FOR pedro T-shirt and his off-work standard of baggy jeans, belt dangling down the front like a cord to pull in case of emergency.

"You make me proud to be a Democrat," Lamont tells the assembled liberals, many of whom first came together in support of How­ard Dean back in 2004. The Upper West Sid-ers beam at this young black man. He beams back. It looks for a moment as if this will be a lovefest, the polarities of race and class dis­solved like a shot of hazelnut syrup into an iced Frappuccino. He starts out with a trib­ute to the diversity of the Obama campaign. "Through working on this campaign, I've seen so many races, ages, sexes...." He waits a beat. "Well, only two sexes."

"In New York it's hard to say just two sexes," a woman in the audience inter­jects. This being the Upper West Side, her remark may be a sympathetic attempt at humor, or it may be a righteous attempt to be inclusive. She may be suggesting thai we can't forget the transgendered, the hermaphroditic, the eunuchs and the just plain freaky-deaky. The Democratic Party should not reject any form of the human organism. If a man has a penis on top of his head or a vagina in his feet, don't stare. Just be sure he's registered to vote, prefer­ably as a Democrat.

Lamont goes on to tell the activists how he had written a college paper about Obama back in 2006. "We had to choose a leader," he says. "It could have been Sta-

lin, it could have been Hitler, it could have been Martin Luther King. But since all the good people were gone—I wrote about Barack Obama."

A few twitters.

"So 1 researched him, I looked him up, but I didn't feel him up," Lamont says. This might go over well down in Browns­ville or in a local comedy club, but the sensitivities are different here. A slight uneasiness pervades the bread-nibblers at Cosi. A few of the women are starting to look at each other, as if asking, Who did they say this guy was?

"Anyway, I got an A-minus on the paper." A few people clap. The goodwill is holding by a thread through Lamont's impromptu stand-up routine. Then he admits—that compulsive honesty again—that what with a full-time job and all of his organizing work, he hasn't had time to read Obama's two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. A silence equal to a gasp fills the room. He'll read them, he promises, if Obama somehow' loses the election. As consola­tion, penance.

The room appears unsettled by this scenario.

A white-haired lady interrupts Lamont to ask, "When can we ask you questions about the campaign?"

Lamont spins 360 degrees, showing his dance skills, and starts again. He's getting a rapid-fire lesson in gauging his audi­ence. "I'm Lamont Carolina," he says with a laugh. "What's great about the Obama campaign," he tells the lady, "is that you can do things on your own. Create groups, events, go to the website and so on." He speaks of the 50-state strategy, how Obama will battle McCain in every state.

"Howard Dean invented that," the host says.

"Howard Dean invented it, but Barack Obama perfected it," Lamont parries.

The white-haired lady says, "Where is the Obama headquarters in New York?"

"There isn't one," Lamont tells her, deadpan. "There is actually only a 49-state strategy."

The white-haired lady stares incredulously.

"That was a joke," Lamont says.

A younger woman sitting next to the white-haired lady says, "We want to go to a physical place. We don't want to phone-bank at home."

The white-haired lady says, "We want to know when someone is going to come and lead us."

"He's an organizer, not a spokesman for the campaign," a young man shouts at the women.

The white-haired lady says, "Where can we go to get the answers to why Obama voted the way he did on FISA?" She's referring to the Foreign Intelligence Sur­veillance Act, a modified version of which Obama recently voted in the Senate to sup­port, upsetting many civil libertarians.

"I find it disturbing that he's a constitu­tional lawyer," the host chimes in.

Lamont, again tilted off message, can feel it: The meeting now verges on anarchy. It's a particularly Upper West Side kind of chaos. One of the virtues of the neighborhood is

that it's a place where people get into a tizzy about wiretapping. One of the defects of the neighborhood is that it's a place where people get into a tizzy about wiretapping. They like their politicians as pure as a plastic bottle full of artisanal springwater.

Recently Lamont has been poring over ihe intricate, stultifying language of legis­lation. He's heard Bill Clinton is a master of the small print of bills, and he'd like to become the same. But he's not quite ready to explain the byzantine dimensions of Obama's vote on FISA.

So Lamont answers the chorus of kvetch-ing with enthusiasm, as if sheer gusto will make superfluous the thorny complexi­ties of the wiretapping bill. It's a reflex of his when confronted by difficulty. His path to this room has been much longer than the 10 miles between the Upper West Side and Brownsville. Along the way, he has endured doubts and setbacks more grueling than these cranky Democrats have raised, and he has always overcome them by dogged persistence. Sometimes he feels lonely in his new worlds, but he can't see an alternative. "Knowing where I came from," he has said, "I don't want to go back empty-handed."

With the fervor of a preacher he describes to the audience how at a rally in Union Square on the day of the Nevada primary, he brought coffee and doughnuts over to a forlorn cluster of Hillary Clinton supporters.

"They were drained after trying to match us chanting, 'Fired up, ready to go!'" he says. Eventually he had organized the Clinton and Obama factions into a mutual chant of "Democrats '08, Democrats '08!"

"Do you have anything written?" the white-haired lady asks. She wants to know where people can go for answers to give to Hillary Clinton supporters who have their doubts about Obama. Another woman exclaims, "Obama's website sucks for that!"

Lamont holds out his cell phone to the group. "I'll even give you my cell phone number if you're not computer savvy and you need to ask questions about the cam­paign. Our way may seem unconventional, but it's working."

And then he proceeds to tell the group about his plans for an Obama scavenger hunt in Central Park.

At this point the white-haired lady has had enough. She gathers her bundles and briskly exits the back room, yelling at Lamont as she goes, "By the way, you should read Obama's books. They're fabulous."

Lamont looks stunned. He makes his way to the lady who has been bitching about Obama's website, bends down and begins whispering into her ear. She smiles. As he departs Cosi, Lamont makes sure to thank the staff for their efforts. "Carlos, thanks!" he yells. "We'll do it again." They smile. They like Lamont. They seem to think he's somebody important; they're just not yet sure who.

In the relative safety of the street (only oncoming cars, no sideswipes about FISA), he finally cracks—-just a little. He wipes his brow. "Whew. I had a tougher time there than 1 did doing stand-up comedy around the corner." he says. The only remark that really made him mad was the white-haired woman telling him he should read Obama's books. "I've had a job," he says, "and all of this volunteering." He punches the air in disgust.

On Amsterdam Avenue he spots a beau­tiful blonde dressed in green, making her way south. "Excuse me, miss?" he asks. "Do you live on the Upper West Side?"

She does. "What do you know about FISA?" he inquires.

"The drug company?" she asks in a rich Southern accent. She wonders if he means Pfizer.

"No, the bill. Wiretapping. All that. But don't worry about it," I.amont says, relieved that he's not the only one in this neighbor­hood insufficiently conversant on the issue.

"One more thing, miss, if I may. Who are you going to vote for?"

"Obama," she says sweetly, smiling.

"Yes!" Lamont Carolina says, slapping hands with her and punching the air, this time in victory. In the coming weeks, he will land a position as a field organizer for Obama in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The campaign will go on.