But there's also stuff you wouldn't expect. Like an Irish-American mayor of Jersey City supporting an African-American candidate. Like a fair-skinned Jersey City mayor sharing the stage with the African-American mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (For the record, Newark Mayor Cory Booker was pretty much anointed as the next Obama by none other than Obama, who called Booker "a shining star, a rising star -- not just in New Jersey but in the nation." The Jersey City mayor is Jeremiah Healy.)

You see, in New Jersey there are white towns and there are black towns. A black town isn't necessarily all black, but it's a majority-black city that happens to be run by African-American people. Jersey City, while a town where whites comprise only 34 percent of the population, is largely run by white people, and still has a majority-white police force, many with Irish surnames. It is a state harshly divided along racial and class-based lines, and its racial proportionalities -- not just between black and white, but all races -- roughly mirror those of the country as a whole.

Its economy likewise resembles the nation's as whole -- a dwindling mix of industrial and agricultural being overtaken by service, retail and high-tech. It is a state where both the richest rich and poorest poor find homes. So if Obama can win here, it's safe to say he's a better bet for a win in the general election than many might have thought.

At today's Obama rally, the thing that grabbed me the most was not the Kennedys on the stage, sitting behind their candidate, nor the DeNiro hit-job on Hillary Clinton, which the actor said was his first speech ever made at a political rally. (And he actually needs some practice. He's charming, but not so great on the stump.) It wasn't even the candidate's stirring rhetoric, which my colleagues have already recounted with greater erudition than I could summon.

It was seeing an audience, however dwarfed by the many empty chairs in the 20,000-seat arena, in my home state, in which black and white people sat next to each other, united in single cause. I've never seen that here before -- not on this kind of a scale. I asked Mayor Healy to explain his endorsement of Obama. "He's part Irish!" Healy responded, with a Jersey twinkle.

And that's the point. Obama truly is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. He was born to a single, teenage mother whose husband left when Obama was 2, but he grew up middle-class, and rose to the level of elite. He was raised by white people but was made black by a country that can't get past his skin color or his name. As an American voter, there's a piece of your own dream that's represented by Obama, whatever your color or class.

Of all people, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a man known more for his poetry in motion than in speech, said it best at today's event, when he asked the rally-goers to "be aware of how you are feeling when [Obama] is speaking..." Some leaders, when they speak, said Bradley, "begin to swell." Not Obama, said Bradley. "He reflects the light that's shining on him, back onto you."

UPDATE: Clarification added to description of the status of Obama's mother at the time of his birth.

--Adele M. Stan