I already mentioned how stirring I found Super Tuesday, that chilly day when all of New York was debating the merits of these two superlative candidates. It snowed that day; I handed out Obama leaflets at my local train station in the morning and saw William T. Vollmann speak at the Chelsea Barnes and Noble in the evening (our campaigns are so long that that branch has since closed). As I got my book inscribed, I asked Vollmann if he was supporting a candidate this year (halfway expecting a loony answer like Ron Paul or something); he said he was for Obama.

My other favorite moment was hands down, Saturday, January 26, date of the South Carolina primary. I had spent the previous two months in Austria and I was traveling back home to the tri-state area. I had a two-night layover in Madrid, where I was going to meet up with a good friend flying in from London. I had experienced a trying few weeks and was relishing the rare opportunity for a little drunken revelry. My friend and I stumbled all over central Madrid that night, I think we hit 5 different places—if you don’t know me, it’s difficult to express how out of character this sort of evening is for me. We enjoyed ample beer and tapas and engaged in conversation with each other about the primaries and the economy, and talked up a number of our fellow bar patrons (those who could speak English) about Spain and Europe. It was a grand night all around.

Between 2 and 3 am, we staggered into our hotel room and switched on the TV, which of course was showing CNN. We’d forgotten that all of South Carolina had voted that day, and the result—a mammoth Obama victory—was just breaking. We watched Obama give an utterly electric acceptance speech, and drifted off to sleep knowing that the race had just changed significantly.

A couple of days ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a YouTube clip of that speech, calling it “the moment [he] went all in.” I was already all in, but it’s really instructive to watch that speech again. We’ve all become accustomed to the power of Obama’s rhetoric, but repetition has rubbed the edges off it a bit. On this night, the difference was the audience, going completely bonkers at every pause or cue. They knew that they had upended the entire primaries. I’ll be honest, Obama’s loss in New Hampshire shook me (although it apparently didn’t shake Obama’s team much, as Ryan Lizza would discover), and I was getting dispirited by the rough tactics of the Clinton team. But to watch this speaker speak to this audience, you’d never know that there was anything to worry about.