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Last, I told Obama about the importance of keeping his rhetoric positive and high-minded, that it not only set him apart from other candidates but expressed the kind of visionary leadership the country needed. I warned him of the obvious: Detractors will dismiss what you say as empty rhetoric just because it’s inspirational. I shared with him the riff I had developed in my own campaign—“just words”—and invited him to use it if he ever found it helpful. (He did later in the campaign, which produced a minor uproar in the media.)

He listened intently and seriously, with that professorial air he sometimes has. He asked few questions and mostly just nodded. He thanked me warmly. As I started to put my notes away, he took the scrap of paper from me and put it in his own pocket.

As Obama’s candidacy came to be taken more seriously, idealism itself was on trial. “Change you can believe in”—one of his most recognized campaign slogans—was an antidote to the naked fear-mongering of his Republican opponents, but his positive message stood out in the Democratic primary as well. During one debate in New Hampshire, Clinton chided Obama for raising what she called “false hopes.” This was, for me, one of the saddest moments of the campaign. Why exactly were his hopes false? What made his aspirations inauthentic? Indeed, if they were, we were all wrong about our country’s most deeply held values.

Obama, of course, won the Democratic nomination, and just about one year after our quiet dinner on the Vineyard, I was one of eighty-four thousand people to witness his acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver. This vast, modern stadium, built for touchdown passes and bone-crunching sacks, now featured a red, white, and blue stage on the field, adorned with Roman columns puncturing the expanse. The high Colorado sky and warm temperatures made sunglasses and water bottles necessities.

I was both a delegate and a campaign surrogate, so I was asked to arrive well before the evening’s formalities began to be available for the press. The national anthem, which officially launched the program, was about to be sung when Jim Braude, from New England Cable News, asked to interview me. Jim was a familiar reporter and I asked him to wait so I could stand, my hand over my heart, and listen to Jennifer Hudson sing. Radiant in a dark short-sleeved dress, she walked onto the blue-carpeted stage, surrounded by the color guard with their rifles and the flags whipping in the breeze. Then she sang with such power and emotion, holding every note like it was her last, while the half-full stadium watched and listened in silence.

I have sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” many times and have heard it many more. At official state events. Before ball games. On television in the quiet of my living room. But now there was a poignancy to the words different from what I had felt before. I knew all about the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air. But there was something new when she sang, “O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave …” She was singing about enduring American ideals.

The flag symbolized a special kind of triumph that day. If only for a moment, some great divide in our country’s history closed. Not a racial divide or an economic divide but a human divide. For an instant we reconciled. When she finished singing, I stood back, shut my eyes, and sobbed. All the anguish, all the exasperation, all the frustrated hopes of a generation poured out of me.

Braude was gracious. He left me alone until I gathered myself and was ready to be interviewed. As I walked over to him, I bumped into Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and one of the nation’s rising black political stars. I asked him how he was doing.

“I’m not going to make it,” he said.

“Why?”

“I just fell apart listening to the national anthem.”

And both of us burst into tears all over again. By the time I reached Braude, I was laughing and crying at the same time.

Jim’s first question of the interview was: “Why are you crying?”

Why