Back for more at here at Take Back America. It's my second day so I figure I'm over the whole star-struck open-mouthed staring thing. I walk by Ned Lamont and calmly urge him to run again. I check my pulse...still relaxed and good to go. Run into my congresswoman (from September through May minus breaks), Rosa DeLauro. Hey, ain’t no thang. My Old Spice is living up to its guarantee. (I always wondered if they would really "buy me a stick of [my] own" if I was "not satisfied.")

As if one handsome and charismatic presidential candidate making me flutter my hands in front of my face weren't enough, John Edwards takes the stage and hits the issues (probably the only ones) Obama didn't get around to mentioning: Darfur, AIDS, global poverty, and why you should buy his book (I kid because I love the way he does the Bill Clinton thumb thing.) When I tell Edwards how much my mother, a breast cancer survivor, and I admire him and Elizabeth, he looks deep into my eyes, nay, my soul and says, "Thank you. That really means a lot to me." And that really means a lot to me.

I start to regret showing up to work earlier in the morning and missing the other candidates' speeches and not giving each of them a chance to make my knees quiver. Then as I'm walking to my seat on Blogger Boulevard I see Mike Gravel chatting with Al Sharpton. I manage to restrain myself but my fellow registration-fee-skipping intern Sonal Patel can't help but blurt out what we're both thinking: "You're the shit, man!"

I take a break from celeb gawking/senator stalking (or so I think) to head down to the Capitol for the Employee Free Choice Act Rally. But you just can't get away from these guys. When I run from the rally to the Dirksen Senate building to use the facilities, I bump into Dennis Kucinich. I'm not sure he recognized me from our chat at Ralph Nader's Taming the Giant Corporation conference two weeks ago, but I recognized his tie. On the way back I end up strolling alongside Joe Biden. I mimic his senatorial stride and fit in with his entourage so well that I end up getting a dirty look from a young journalist there to heckle the Distinguished Gentleman from Delaware.

But I'm not here to talk about presidential candidates; I'm here to rally in solidarity with the workers “who built America’s middle class.” As my light blue shirt turns navy with my sweat and the activists wearing purple SEIU shirts start to look like Barney, I realize the heat might be getting to me. Then I hear a message from the stage. “We’re feeling the heat standing here in the sun,” Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, shouts, “But that's nothing compared to the heat a worker somewhere feels every 23 seconds when he's punished for trying to organize a union.” I think about a forklift operator I walked over to the rally with who told me she was fired last year after trying to form a union. All of a sudden, the sun beating down on me doesn't feel so hot.