At around 7:30 p.m., we were in the backseat of a friend’s car driving to the Iowa Events Center, where we expected to watch the results trickle in on the big screen over the course of a long evening. To our surprise, we heard on the radio that MSNBC had already projected Barack Obama as the winner. Some 240,000 people had turned out to caucus, nearly double the number from 2004. Cass and I could hardly process what we were hearing, but we embraced and raced inside to wait for Obama to appear. I emailed him from my BlackBerry, “Um, congratulations on changing everything forever.”
