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"  When I was 18, having been born and raised in Manhattan, it was normal. When I was 25, it was odd but still acceptable. Now, at the ripe old age of you&amp;#039;ll-have-to-guess-&amp;#039;cause -I&amp;#039;m-not-telling, it&amp;#039;s just strange. I&amp;#039;m talking about not knowing how to drive and never having had a license. The driving instructor at last week&amp;#039;s five-hour class said that driving is a privilege. I have to say I&amp;#039;ve always disagreed. Not driving, in my former worldview, is a privilege. So why was I in that class\u2014the very one I had put off while two learner&amp;#039;s permits had expired and driving schools had closed in the time it took me to show up for lessons?  Camp Obama. Up until now I have been perfectly happy to be the passenger, to take a train, or to hire a professional to get me to and fro. But finally the leverage I have been waiting for literally all my adult life came in an email from Dave Pollak, New York State Director for the Obama campaign.  Camp Obama is a two-day intensive training session, where those who have passed muster through an application process and who for various reasons can leave their regular lives for 2-to-5 week stints are able to take their support for this movement to the next level by learning community organizing principles directly from the campaign. Once you graduate from the program, you can become a deputy field organizer deployed in one of the crucial battleground states around the country. Primary duties include organizing supporters and helping lead the grassroots get-out-the-vote operation. The premise: Real change happens from the bottom up Why am I considering this? Because after successfully working on fundraising efforts 24/7 and preaching to the choir (always with my offering plate in hand), I am astonished that this race is so darn close. How come 99 percent of the people I know thought the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain&amp;#039;s running mate and the subsequent &amp;quot;couldn&amp;#039;t make it up if you tried&amp;quot; knocked-up teen daughter news read like an inevitable Obama victory? Only for us all to be stunned by the real, although possibly temporary result: rising McCain poll numbers and stunning support for Palin. What?!?! My friend Ellen sent me the most genius e-mail that captures my astonishment perfectly. A few highlights: I&amp;#039;m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.... * If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you&amp;#039;re &amp;quot;exotic, different&amp;quot;; grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, and you&amp;#039;re a quintessential American story. * If your name is Barack, you&amp;#039;re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim; name your kids Willow, Trig, and Track, and you&amp;#039;re a maverick. * Graduate from Harvard law School, and you are unstable; attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, and you&amp;#039;re well grounded.  * If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate&amp;#039;s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran&amp;#039;s Affairs committees, you don&amp;#039;t have any real leadership experience. * If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, and 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you&amp;#039;re qualified to become the country&amp;#039;s second highest ranking executive. * If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you&amp;#039;re not a real Christian; if you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married heiress Cindy the next month, you&amp;#039;re a Christian. * If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society. * If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state&amp;#039;s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you&amp;#039;re very responsible. * If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family&amp;#039;s values don&amp;#039;t represent America&amp;#039;s. * If your husband is nicknamed &amp;quot;First Dude&amp;quot;, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn&amp;#039;t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable. So my friends, to bring this full circle, the outrageousness of the past two weeks coupled with the fact that I will have three successful fund-raisers completed soon means that if they&amp;#039;ll have me, I am going on the road. Ohio, Pennsylvania, who knows? God help me. I actually looked into getting a town car with a driver for day jobs, like we&amp;#039;d do in ad sales if we had a full day of sales calls. Just give the driver a list of addresses, and he does the rest. Turns out that&amp;#039;s not exactly plausible. Go figure. So after my record attempt to go from &amp;quot;which is the stop and which is the go&amp;quot; non-driving status to road-test ready in less than three weeks, I hope to be battleground state\u2013ready by mid-October.  And although my friend Steve says I&amp;#039;ll get teased mercilessly, I see a custom T-shirt in the works for my journey: Raise the Money. Get the Votes. Win the Race. Save the World.  For more information on how you can get involved, go to http://www.barackobama.com "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a835/shifting-gears-3647/>