The last time I was at the Universal Amphitheatre here in Los Angeles earlier this year was actually the first time I'd seen a crowd at a concert wave their illuminated cellphones in the air back and forth as people used to do their lighters. Last night I went to a small donor Barack Obama fundraiser there and witnessed an entirely new use for the crowd's cellphones.

As the 5,000 or so attendees filed into the arena, campaign workers handed them three small sheets of paper: a contact information card, a sheet with 4 or 5 (first) names and phone numbers and a phonebanking script. As they did at the Oprah event in South Carolina on Sunday, the campaign used the massive crowd, aka fish in a barrel, to serve as a ginormous phonebank and for 5 or 10 minutes, people all throughout the amphitheatre called the California Obama supporters listed on their sheets. The crowd was mostly young, new, you got the sense, to political activism and slightly taken aback at the request to call strangers out of the blue, but after a couple minutes, people seemed to warm to the idea and soon people everywhere had begun to make calls, earnestly repeating the script word for word.

The ultimate goal of both the calls and the contact info cards, beyond identifying supporters (although if you were there, you were presumed to be already on board) was to recruit volunteers, both to be precinct captains on February 5th and to travel to Las Vegas for Barack in advance of the caucus there on January 19th. The Obama campaign knows full well that e-mail addresses, just like MySpace and Facebook friends, are useless if you don't activate them, not only to vote, but to volunteer and serve as peer to peer ambassadors. Last night was about entertaining the crowd, but it was also a mini campaign bootcamp.

The show itself was certainly entertaining, if a bit heavy on the preaching to the choir evangelizing. Minor celebrity after minor celebrity came out and spoke passionately about the need for change and about the man that gave them hope that they could actually bring it about. Some local pols were in the house as well, including gubernatorial also ran Steve Westly and the president of the LA City Council Eric Garcetti. While their impassioned advocacy for Obama seemed redundant -- people paid to see him ($50 general, $25 student) after all -- it became clear that they were also disseminating talking points. For example, both of them addressed the experience question head on, Garcetti reminding us that Martin Luther King was just 26 when he changed the world, and Westly repeating the Obama line about not having "the experience Washington wants, but having the experience Washington needs." Their speeches were less designed to convince than to empower the attendees to be Barack Obama surrogates in their own lives.

Ultimately, Obama's speech was somewhat beside the point, except that it was, of course, what the whole place had waited patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) to see and by the sound of it, the crowd was not disappointed. The cheers for him as he entered were uproarious and throughout what seemed like the extended remix of his stump speech, he had the whole place in the palm of his hand; they hung on every word, standing as they sensed a rise in his voice and silent as his tone grew solemn. In April, Barack seemed to be more flash over substance, here he seemed a master of both; in September he seemed to be going through the motions, but here he seemed to revel in every word. It really does seem that, as far as his stump speech anyway, a more crucial tool in Iowa and New Hampshire than in California to be sure, Obama does appear to be peaking at just the right time. Whether or not he can manifest the excitement he genuinely generates into activism and actual votes is the central question of Obama's candidacy and to its credit, his campaign seems to be doing all it can to ensure the answer is yes.