The Times They A'Changin'

Correction appended.

I-80 Nov. 7-It smells like a mixture of bad breath, chocolate bars, body odor, and diesel fumes. There are about a dozen people crammed into this Ford E350 Econoliner van, and there's a cacophony of people chatting with each other and speaking into cell phones telling mothers they love them and are safe and friends that they'll be home too tired to study tonight. The navigator is fumbling with the radio, struggling to find straight news on the local AM dial.

Suddenly, the five rows of people layered like tinned anchovies tensed. There was news.

"Guys, Britney Spears is getting divorced!" someone yelled from the front.

There were a few groans, some happy exclamations, but within three seconds the buzz had returned to the results of the midterm elections-specifically races in Ohio. A mixture of silent attentiveness and palpable anticipation once again took hold.

Adrenaline was the only thing keeping the people around me awake. Since Friday, they've knocked on over 10,000 doors and called another 10,000 or so voters around Cleveland, making personal contact with well over 1,000 people and urging them to support Congressman Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Lorraine County, in his bid to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine.

"Hey Jimmy, can I ask you something?" the girl behind me, Kirsten Hansen, BC '07, asked. "Where the hell have the last two years gone? Because it feels like we were doing this yesterday."

Hansen and I were part of a similar group, also organized by the Columbia College Democrats, that traveled to Ohio in 2004 to campaign for John Kerry. Some things echoed eerily familiar, others were rumbles portending a different outcome than last time.

For one thing, my perspective has changed. The last trip happened before the journalist hat which prevents me from campaigning was cemented to my head. This trip was marked by the challenge of finding Internet connections and electrical outlets to charge my laptop as I blogged the Democrats' travels-State-to-State, Door-to-Door.

Until my dying day I'll maintain that Kerry lost in '04 because it was raining in Cleveland and sunny in Cincinnati-the Democratic voters we lobbied in the industrial north balked at jumping puddles to get to the polls. It was raining again this Tuesday morning, but something felt different.

I first saw Brown five minutes after stepping off the bus in the rusting mill town of Lorraine. He saw the passion in my eyes for the tray of chicken wings awaiting us and let me cut him in the buffet line. This weekend Brown was headlining campaign rallies-including one we attended Saturday with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. and CC '83-instead of emceeing them. Sherrod never wore a tie then, but that night I noticed polish on his shoes. Something felt different.

But I most of all remember that same feeling of queasiness, a teetering between malaise and ecstasy which permeated the bus in 2004. It was the same as in the van, right down to the smell.

I learned George W. Bush was re-elected that year around 10 a.m., hearing on the radio that Kerry had conceded as we crossed 125th Street in Manhattanville. New York exuded the same sense of loss as when the Red Sox defeated the Yankees a few weeks earlier.

At 8:00, half an hour after the polls closed in Ohio, the van pulled away from the campaign office in suburban Cleveland that had served as a second home all weekend for the student volunteers. We were driving east toward Pennsylvania-three states from home-when the radio locked onto a miraculously strong signal from New York.

Welcome back to WCBS 880 radio election night coverage. We're now projecting that the Democrats have secured two of the six seats needed to regain the majority in the United States Senate; Bob Casey has defeated incumbent Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown has toppled Mike DeWine in Ohio.

The van erupted into instant cheers that became a sustained roar, and for the first time all weekend I knew the truth behind what I felt.

This was the beginning of something different.

Correction: "The Times They Are A'Changin'" (Nov. 8) incorrectly spelled the name of the county the Columbia University College Democrats campaigned in. That county was Lorain County, Ohio.