OBAMARAMA

“The world is what it is.” Sen. Obama is discussing his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who coined the phrase “audacity of hope.” “The history of this country has been built, to some degree, on that audacity.”

The audacity of the American Revolution — the Declaration of Independence — the Constitutional Convention. The audacity of outlawing slavery. The audacity of women’s suffrage.

At each and every stage, “somebody’s been audacious enough to say, ‘we can do something different.’ And most of the time, it was young people who’ve done it.”

“The same thing is true today,” he says. “We have a war today, which we should have never waged. They don’t know how to m?nage it, but it’s young people who have to go. … It’s not going to change unless young people change it.”

Finally, Sen. Obama poses a question: “What is it that you can do to make this world better?” It’s similar to the question he told Charlie Rose he asks himself on a regular basis, and without a doubt it’s the reason he’s in the race.

Sen. Obama is pacing the stage. The cheers are deafening — he can barely get a word in. “I love you!” yells a woman in the front. “I love you too,” he says, to laughter.

After thanking SFBO, he’s now retracing the steps that led him here. His time as an organizer, in law school, in local politics. After coming back from law school, he says, he was approached to run for a seat in the state senate. “I did what any wise man does,” he says. “I prayed on it, and I talked to my wife.”

The campaign: “Everywhere I went I got the same two questions — where’d you get that funny name, Barack Obama? Except they didn’t always say it right. They’d say ‘Alabama.’ Or ‘Yo mama.’” They’d ask, “Why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty as politics?”

This is his segue into what seems to be the theme of the day: cynicism. “You’ve got a lot of leaders who are long on rhetoric, but short on follow through. So people feel discouraged. They get cynical. … And no one is more cynical about politics than young people.” Young people, he says, have grown up in an era of slash-and-burn, negative politics.

Sen. Obama says he believes that there is a “common thread” in American culture that will allow us to change that trend. He reiterates a favorite Biblical phrase: “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.” He says: “But I can’t do it alone.”

Tobin Van Ostern and Meredith Segal, who head up Students for Barack Obama, are giving an uplifting introduction to Sen. Obama. The crowd is literally poised on the edge of combustion at this point. I’m looking forward to this.

William, 6, is a big fan: