She should have felt optimistic as summer turned to fall. Bill, too, has found his groove in Nevada, pressed into cleaning up and maintaining the state’s precinct lists, a data-mining skill he’d developed working with patchy patient records at his old start-up. Obama leads McCain in the national polls, and she needn’t pay much attention to the campaign itself. Even Prop 8 seems poised to fail. Support for the ban on gay marriage is polling in the low forties, according to Fiaz who’s begun volunteering for No-On-Prop-8.

And yet Seema can’t deny her own swelling malaise.

“I know there are differences on same-sex marriage,” Obama says, accepting his nomination at the Democratic convention at the end of August. “But surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.”

“No nominee has probably even dared to speak so openly in their acceptance speech before,” Bill says. “Why are you so upset?”

Only the previous day Del Martin had died at eighty-eight. The campaign issued a statement commending Del’s “lifelong commitment to promoting equality” and offering condolences to her “spouse,” and Fiaz had ignited a hope in her that Obama was perhaps ready to come out in favor of gay marriage. But clearly Obama is still too much of a cautious politician for that.

She’s agitated: If she’s so upset, why doesn’t she stop fundraising? If polls are to be believed, Obama is expected to trounce a hapless McCain anyway. Why can’t she join Fiaz in volunteering for No-On-Prop-8?

She’s railroaded, however, by unfolding events: McCain startles America by selecting the virtually unknown governor of Alaska as his running mate. At first it seems a desperate but futile choice, pandering to small-town America and the evangelical Right. Sarah Palin has clearly been chosen less for her credentials in governance or foreign policy and more for her anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage stances and her rifle-toting hunting prowess.

But at the Republican Convention, Palin manages to single-handedly revive the comatose McCain campaign with an electrifying performance that leaves Seema openmouthed with disbelief. Dressed in a stylish beige jacket, pearls, and rimless glasses, her figure accentuated by her black pencil skirt and frilly peep-toe high heels—“Hot mama!” Seema murmurs—Palin plays the hockey mom and pit bull equally and exceptionally, reassuring with her folksy command and guileless delivery, while snapping and tearing at Obama with a smile and a sneer. America needs more than dramatic speeches before devoted followers, Palin swears, and more than promises to turn back the waters and heal the planet—America needs someone who can be counted on to serve and defend it, someone who can inspire with a lifetime of deeds and not just a season of speeches, and that person is not Obama.