"Take a Dean sticker?" the people in the Howard Dean booth asked my wife and I when we arrived with our son at Saturday's caucuses. I was off-duty, there as a participant.
"Well, we like him, but we don't think he can beat Bush," my wife said.
"You know," the Dean supporter confided, "they're selling ABB T-shirts upstairs in the gym." Anybody But Bush.
Minutes before Kerry's arrival, a man stood in the cleared-away path with a sign denouncing Kerry for supporting the Patriot Act, for giving Bush his vote to go to war, for his support of the underfunded No Child Left Behind Act. He was obnoxious. Loud. But he had a right to say whatever the hell he wanted. He was booed. Finally, a 60-ish woman ripped the poster from the man's hand and tore it into fourths. People cheered.
When the Massachussets senator arrived, our personal agenda merged with our political one: We wanted a photo of Kerry with our infant son, driven by the hope of getting a Clinton-Kennedy shot of our son 40 years before he might run for president himself.
"Stay there! Don't move from that spot!" my wife yelled. "Cute baby here! Cute baby here!"
A step away from our son, Kerry turned to shake someone's hand, then moved on. No picture!
I took the baby carriage to the fringes of the crowd while Kate took our son and surged through the line. "We have a baby! We have a baby who wants a picture with Kerry!"
People happily obliged and let her through. She was two people away. While waiting, she'd convinced a dozen people surrounding her to chant "Mr. President, we have a baby for you to kiss!"
Then he waved and started the walk to his car.
Undaunted, she surged again. Standing between her, our son and Kerry was a man in a black leather coat and "some chintzy camera, so he wasn't the press," as my wife later put it.
"Could you move?" she asked him. "We want to get a picture of our baby with the president."
The man turned. And pushed them. My wife and my baby.
She told me the story minutes later, after failing to get the shot. I forgot Kerry and became obsessed with finding Leather Jacket and thrashing him, tearing the film from his camera and tossing it into the sunlight. "Happy now, Big Man?" I screamed at him in my imagination before smearing a freshly soiled diaper in his face.
I couldn't remain angry, though, and gave up the search. So some guy refuses to move, even with the cutest baby in the world behind him. So an old woman denigrates a man's right to free speech and gets cheered. The bigger point is that they were there in the first place, among the unprecedented crowd. They want to see, because seeing is believing, and they wanted to believe: That this JFK can also win the hearts and minds of America and change the country.
John Kerry may be the luckiest man in the world. Because without the polarizing policies of the current administration, it's hard to believe that so many people would have stood out here on a beautiful Saturday morning, doing their part to make that T-shirt's slogan a reality.