Can Leah Daughtry Bring Faith to the Party? (DNC)

[groovedaddy]

LEAH DAUGHTRY SLIPPED OFF HER STILETTO-HEEL SHOES at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, stepped from a pastor’s chair to the pulpit and shouted, “I am on the rise!” She wore a long black tunic with gold buttons that ran from her high collar almost to the carpet. Her graying hair was shorn tight to her dark brown scalp. She always preaches in bare feet in order to “de-self,” she had told me, and to let God’s spirit and words rush through her unimpeded. “I am on the rise!” she erupted again.

Dancing down front, in an aisle between pews, was a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.” The woman cried out exultantly, her voice barely audible above the surging of an electronic organ and the thrashing of drums and cymbals played by one of Daughtry’s nephews, with another nephew, a 3-year-old, adding his own ecstatic beats with a set of sticks. “I am on the rise to a place of dependence on the Lord!” Daughtry screamed.

African-American, with little copper-rimmed glasses adorning an unlined round face, Daughtry is a part-time preacher and full-time political operative. She serves as chief of staff to Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the spring of last year, Dean appointed her chief executive of the party’s convention; though she will now be collaborating with Barack Obama’s team, she is in charge of orchestrating the event next month in Denver — of making sure that everything runs right, that buses have enough slots to park in, that people have enough hotel rooms to sleep in and that the millions watching the convention on TV are captivated and inspired by the four-day-long show. She is a mostly self-effacing manager on an immense scale.

But on many Sundays she is a Pentecostal preacher with her toes naked on the floor and her voice filled with a power that she says is not her own. Straight from the start of her sermon on a Sunday afternoon in June, she looked nearly helpless, beyond self-management, truly overcome by a force coursing through her; she wiped tears from her eyes with a small square of white cloth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20minister-t.html