A Baltimore woman, all set to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's Patapsco Drainage Basin Primary - because Clinton is a woman and because she is older and more experienced in government than Barack Obama - switched and voted for Obama because "he's very positive about everything."
And there it is.
And imagine that - the power of positive thinking and speaking, the audacity of hope, delivered with a straight face by a politician over and over again - and no one giggling or mocking the concept, except maybe Rush Limbaugh. The cynics be damned.
There it is, right in front of us - hope, idealism, youth, energy - and the new promise of coalition politics in a nation that has suffered from a steady diet of high-acid partisanship.
Here are white faces and black faces in the same crowd, cheering for the same candidate - and young people getting pumped about politics for the first time in forever (or since their lives were on the line, because of the draft, during the Vietnam War).
We're seeing white male voters, some of them Republicans who likely voted for Ronald Reagan, announcing support for Barack Obama.
Obama now has eight straight primary wins, the result of what appears to be an organic, grass-roots network built on the Internet, Oprah and old-fashioned progressive activism. He's getting bucks in his treasury and boots on the ground.
"Where did this guy come from?" a wise elder from Towson asked on primary day, amazed at the Obama phenomenon but still not convinced that the nation could elect a black man president.
Now we have pundits and pollsters saying the son of a Kenyan man and a Kansas woman is more electable in a national election than Hillary Clinton.
There's hope for this country after all. We're not totally color-blind, but maybe more so than ever.
And there it is.
And imagine that.
In Maryland, Obama took 42 percent of the overall white vote, The Sun reported. He pulled between 40 percent and 50 percent of the vote in Eastern Shore counties. He split Harford County with Clinton. With most of the precincts counted, he had won 57 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Baltimore County.
A political junkie who corresponds with me sees that as social progress: "I was pleased to see Obama win Baltimore County. I think it says a lot about where we are as a state. I have to look at the precinct numbers more closely, but I'd say that Baltimore County is ready and may soon elect its first black county executive."
