When Ashley Baia tells her own story, it’s compelling, although somewhat less dramatic than Sen. Barack Obama’s recitation.
Her version also differs slightly from his.
“Ashley had set up a meeting, sort of a house meeting,” Obama told a congregation at an evangelical church in Macon, Ga., in late January. “She had about 20 people.”
Baia, however, said the meeting to organize Obama supporters was at a public library in Myrtle Beach, S.C., with 50 to 60 people, not in a house.
Although the listener could assume Obama was there, it was actually Valerie Jarrett, one of his closest advisers, who was the top campaign representative in the room.
In Macon, where he was telling the story for the second time, Obama went on to explain how a single mother who was “very poor” raised Baia and lost her job and health insurance after getting sick in the early 1990s. “For a year, she just ate relish sandwiches and mustard sandwiches,” he said.
In what was an abbreviated version of Baia’s story, Obama was closer to the truth when he told her story again last week in Philadelphia.
Baia said she actually did eat other foods. “I don’t know if it was every night, but for lunch for quite a while there, and for dinner sometimes,” she said.
The seminal moment of the story comes when a black man seemingly with very little in common with Baia speaks up at the meeting to say he is backing Obama because of her compelling story.
“That was a moment of grace,” Obama said. “That was a moment that Bobby Kennedy once called a ripple of hope.”
Obama described the man as being “old enough to maybe be her great-grandfather, certainly old enough to be her grandfather.” Baia said he works construction and is in his late 40s, although Jarrett recalls his being much older.
Whatever his age, Baia said there was a spark in the room when he said she had won his vote for Obama. “It was definitely moving,” she said. “Change had happened.”
