This diary is a personal story I've been meaning to tell for a long time. It's about what one childhood game of touch football several decades ago had in common the strategy that just won Barack Obama the Democratic presidential nomination. So I hope you'll bear with my tale for a little while, because it does have an important lesson at the end...
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One afternoon when I was 12 and my brother was 11, we went over to the Knutsen's for a cookout. Mrs. Knutsen was a close friend of our mother. But her two boys were a good deal older than us, more like 16 and 15. While the adults grilled burgers and talked, her boys challenged us to a game of touch football -- two against two -- expecting to trounce us.
A couple of big teenagers against two scrawny prepubescents? It should have been no contest.
Yet my brother and I stunned the two older boys with a hard-fought but resounding victory... one which reminds me a lot, in retrospect, of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton. How we pulled it off -- and what it can tell us about the Obama victory -- after the jump.