The Road to History

Indelible images from the longest, costliest and, quite possibly, most surprising presidential campaign of all time

Just another politician.

All over America, the phrase rolls out and hangs there with fiery contempt. There goes just another politician dragging us all down some financial sinkhole, through some sex scandal, into some rocking-and-rolling hell of a war where the math doesn't add up and the living keep dying.

So what happens when a significant portion of the populace decides that someone isn't just another politician? It has happened before, often in times of desperation. The whirl of emotion can be so strong, so sudden, that it seems to almost magically magnify both the hunger of the electorate and the gifts of the politician.

Even potential opponents, or those who watch the ever-growing crowds without finding the magic, don't see just another politician. They see a sorcerer who has the unnerving ability to lift folk up out of their sleep and send them marching, probably to no good end.

But savior or pretender or something in between, his appearances fill the hollow valleys and crowd the city squares. Neither the ice in Iowa nor the heat in Florida comes to bother. The hills of West Virginia pose no challenge, nor the infinite landscape of Montana. The devoted and the curious will stand through drifting snow, pelting rain, wilting heat, as season becomes season, and history nears.

Turn the clock back 17 months or so. That's about the time those phone calls started -- because there were a lot of college kids out there, hunkered down in field offices, nibbling pizza till 2 a.m., maturing by the minute. Imagine them in the beginning, calling from the campus and saying to Mom: I'm leaving school, right now, because I've found something. In a world of unpredictability, something is to be treasured. That something being a cause. A cause that might also propel a retiree from her love seat down to the rec center, there to start recruiting more souls, just like herself.

Barack who?

He wasn't just another politician. But who was he? Defining Barack Obama would become the subtext, then the context, of the long campaign. The smoothly shrewd Obama operatives knew the one indelible issue -- the very color of his skin -- was always there, but they wanted to dim the light on that angle of the narrative. Then a fiery preacher with the name of a prophet, Jeremiah Wright, rose up. His anger played on clip after clip. Many -- black and white -- were repulsed. The '60s, in Wright's mind at least, were back, with all their attendant paranoia and broken-apart promises. Could the candidate be post-racial if his pastor, a man as close as family, was so decidedly . . . not?

It felt, for an instant, that the ground might shift, that the Illinois senator might slip off balance. Then he went to Philly and gave an unusual speech about race. Complicated. Personal. Destined, it seemed, to put either the race issue, or his candidacy, to rest. Turned out neither would go away. History tugged from both ends. America -- land of the slave, land of the free, land of the martyr -- could not forget; nor could it ignore this new sight on the landscape. A black man running, and leading, the race for president. Some narratives will never lack potency.

As the weeks and months unfolded, it seemed that every scene out there -- Michigan to Mississippi, Nevada to Ohio -- offered another angle of a fantastical picture, a grand, multidimensional electoral epic filled with unforgettable images and unforgettable characters at every turn. John McCain, visibly hobbled by his long-ago sacrifice, paced the stage and gestured with almost inhuman endurance, running from behind. Sarah Palin lit up the Republican convention with her hockey mom cred and guaranteed, one way or another, that the look of presidential politics would forever change. There were men of words, sometimes way too many of them, such as Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson. And characters who could have populated storybooks or fables, such as Bill Ayers, the not-very-repentant former terrorist, and Joe the Plumber, who became symbolic of nothing so much as political symbolism.

But the most compelling characters were the ones who would decide this. The people in their swooping numbers (100,000 right there in St. Louis, rising as if they had popped from the earth). The teenagers in the rain in Fredericksburg, faces lit as if a window had sprung open on the Promised Land, looking barely old enough to vote. Fanny English in Sumter, S.C., is no teenager, and that expression on her face is no uncomplicated joy. Maybe she's seen some of that history-book pain of the Deep South.

History kept popping up like that. Obama stirred the bones of the dead -- of Frederick Douglass and Abe Lincoln and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and the young preacher from Georgia and the four little Birmingham girls and JFK and LBJ and A. Philip Randolph. No less than he stirred the living: Here's DeShawn McCoy, in that hard, hard city of Newark, N.J. She looks as if every trouble in her life came to bear on this moment, this candidate in her presence. There's that spiffy and inch-thick 1960s Afro; she's retro and of the moment. This seems like a lady who gets up early. Here's Dorothy Baltrusch, 89 years old, of Billings, Mont. A friend made her a T-shirt -- "Old White Women for Obama" -- and she wears it underneath what looks like a fly-fishing jacket. Maybe she bagged a couple of trout earlier in the day.

They will all talk about these moments in the years to come, of how the auditoriums felt, of how the rain slashed, the cold numbed, the heat burned. But mostly they will talk about the amazing texture of it all, the sense that with every chant, every cheer and every tear the country, their country, moved closer to something almost unimaginable.

"We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote," said Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 45 years to the day before Obama accepted the nomination. Always the meaning of the moment -- reflected in the faces of so many -- seemed chased by the past, even as it projected the future.

So here, 10 days before the election, stands a boy, D'Andre Little, of Las Vegas. His mom hovers nearby. Maybe that thumb poking out is the thumb he sucks in the middle of the night. He's only 2, but he looks as if he knows something important is happening. He rests a tired arm on the poster-board image of the politician who stands before him. Not just another politician -- but the man who this week will become the 44th president of the United States. The very first who looks like him.

Wil Haygood is a reporter in The Post's Style section. He can be reached at haygoodw@washpost.com.