For the next few minutes, Edith led the room in hollering Fired up! Ready to go! back and forth, again and again. I was confused at first, but figured it would be impolite of me not to join in. And pretty soon, I started to feel kinda fired up! I started to feel like I was ready to go! I noticed everybody at the meeting suddenly was smiling too, and after the chanting was done we settled down and talked for the next hour about the community and the country and what we could do to make it better. Even after I left Greenwood, for the rest of the day, every so often, Id point to someone on my staff and ask, You fired up? Eventually it became a campaign rallying cry. And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldnt be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaignand by extension a democracyproved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama