Connecticut State Senate President Donald Willams rallies for Obama

[Flabbergasted]

http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-obama0113.artjan13,0,4869337.story?coll=hc_entertainment_attractions_util">Rallying For Obama

By MARK PAZNIOKAS | Courant Staff Writer
January 13, 2008

NEW HAVEN - Barack Obama won over Sasha "Val" McCall the moment he arrived on the national stage with a speech about the "audacity of hope" at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

"I turned to my husband and said, 'This is the next president,'" said McCall, a retired marketing director for a Hartford law firm. "I went online and started to find out who was Barack Obama."

McCall, 60, of West Hartford, told her story Saturday morning in between greeting 250 new Obama volunteers who filled the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale University.

It was a coming-out party for "Connecticut for Obama," the ad hoc campaign group McCall and others organized at a Starbucks in West Hartford last year while the Obama national campaign focused on the early decision states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

With Iowa and New Hampshire failing to dictate a nominee, the campaigns of Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards now are scrambling to establish organizations in the 22 states that go to the polls Feb. 5.