Two observations, after watching Barack Obama’s first post-election press conference:

• It is, as others have noted, a genuine pleasure — after eight long painful years — to hear our new President speaking in complete sentences and giving intelligent answers to unscripted questions.
• My expectations for Obama have always been realistic: I thought he was the right candidate at the right time,1 and I supported him from day one, but I didn’t think he would lead us to the Promised Land or anything.

  That said, I’m starting to get the impression that we’ve all misunderstood — or underestimated — what Obama meant when he called himself a community organizer. At first I thought this meant merely that Obama had done hard yards in urban neighborhoods, had worked to bring jobs to communities, pull together voter registration drives, and so on: Good work, necessary work, but not an unusual activity or a sign of exceptional talent.

  Now I’m starting to think Obama meant community organizer as “a person who organizes communities” — that is, a person who recognizes (or creates) a shared purpose, and then organizes a community to achieve it. And, I’m starting to think, Obama has Einstein-level talent at this type of organizing: He’s rolling straight from the best-organized presidential campaign we’ve ever seen to the best-organized transition team we’ve ever seen, and shows no signs of stopping there.

  And this is Obama’s hidden talent. When all is said and done, Obama’s speech-making skills will be measured against Churchill and King and Lincoln — and I think people underestimate Obama because they pigeonhole him as a great public speaker, and assume his organizing skills are a secondary talent. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama’s soaring speeches are a gateway talent, and Obama’s real strength is that he’s devastatingly efficient at turning inspiration into action.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

1. Specifically, I thought he was the first vote-with-your-heart candidate the Democrats had put forward in a long time, as opposed to vote-with-your-head candidates like John Kerry and the 2000 edition of Al Gore. [↩]

Ever wonder what would have happened if Luke had said yes when Vader offered to make him co-Emperor?

I think John McCain is finding out this week. I’m not sure where Obama fits into this analogy (though I suspect Obama’s Star Wars name actually is “Barack Obama”), but my impression of McCain has gone this route.

In 2004 I got off the sidelines and volunteered for the Howard Dean presidential campaign, and then for Democrats Abroad in Australia. I spent a lot of time volunteering, but kept my employer and my co-workers in the dark about what I did after hours. 1

In 2006 I did a little volunteering for Steve Young‘s congressional campaign, in California’s 48th District (which, unfortunately, was an hour’s drive from where I lived), and did some phone-banking against anti-union propositions on the California ballot that year. I didn’t do enough to attract anyone’s attention, so my politicking passed unnoticed by my colleagues. (Some of them found out later, after the company shut down our project and we all parted ways, but they didn’t know at the time.)

This year I was a delegate to the Washington State Democratic Convention in Spokane, so I took a day off work to attend; I didn’t really keep secret where I was going and why, and so — for the first time in my career — some of the co-workers around me became aware that I’m politically active.

And then this happened.

I happened to be volunteering at Darcy Burner‘s campaign office the day she was shooting “stock footage” for commercials — Darcy sitting with a crowd, Darcy walking down the street, etc. — so there are now several ads, airing on local television, in which Darcy Burner is walking down the street talking to… me. (I’m the guy walking next to her at the 0:16 mark.)

This did not escape the attention of my co-workers.

So, for better or worse, it’s now common knowledge at work that I’m a Democrat, and that I do Democratic things during the off hours. I’ve always tried to separate work and politics, in part because I don’t want to make any co-workers uncomfortable,2 and in part because of horror stories about people who find out their CEO is a vindictive McCain bundler or something, but this year I’m a Democrat even at the office.

1. My Australian employer barely noticed what I did during work hours, much less afterwards, which was one of the reasons why we parted ways in 2005. [↩]
2. …which hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know, since my colleagues are all passing around Palin jokes (is that a redundant phrase?) and if anything seem supportive. [↩]