Sunday Before the California Primary: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy, Stevie Wonder, and Maria Shriver at UCLA

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By David Dayen
d-day

Every so often, you go to one of these events and see something special. I'm not talking about Maria Shriver, yet.

One of the first speakers was a woman named Susan, a 93 year-old Korean-American and veteran of the Navy in World War II. She talked about going to basic training in the deep South and seeing segregation up close for the first time. "We've come a long way," she said, and in an auditorium filled with people of all races and ethnicities, uniting around one candidate, it rang true.

After the pre-program, which featured Susan as well as some California legislative leaders (the two highest-ranking woman in the California Legislature, Asm. Majority Leader Karen Bass and Sen. Majority Leader Gloria Romero, are supporting Obama), Buffy Wicks, a field coordinator with the California campaign, took the stage. They instituted an "adopt-a-precinct program" at the event. Each attendee was given a call script and a sheet with a couple dozen names from the Voter Activation Network (VAN) list, which has been developed over the past couple years as a pretty well-scrubbed voter contact database. I'm not sure that this will result in a ton of calls, and certainly the campaign is relying on other sources than people who showed up to a rally. But it gives the people that attended a sense of investment in the campaign, a chance to do more than show up, to really participate in their democracy. And that's really an invaluable sense of empowerment.