Calendar, calendar, on the wall...

"What are you doing?" I asked Lainey Schumaker on our first day working together in the summer of 2000 in rural eastern North Carolina.

"I'm planning the campaign from Election Day backwards on my calendar."

I learned very quickly to follow Lainey's lead. She had run campaigns before, came from a political family and understood the ebb and flow of campaign work intimately. So, in short order, I too put together my political calendar working from Election Day backwards.

To this end, I picked up a weekly calendar the other day specifically for the trajectory of events in the book; working from Election Day 2008 back to the day the Batswana arrive in the U.S. in August 2008.