CONCORD, N.H.  Senator Barack Obama hops up to the stage in that hip-mod gray suit of his, clapping along with the audience on Friday, clapping for himself, clapping for this moment. He gazes at 1,200 people in overcoats and woolen hats and snow boots and asks for a show of hands.

Be honest. How many of you are undecided about who you will support? A sea of arms shoots up.

This is for a presidential candidate a golden sight. He is talking to those who yearn to be converted. He turns to two young aides and offers a stage whisper: “See that? We got a lot of live ones.”

Then he takes off at a rhetorical gallop, pulling the crowd behind him, lifting it, then slowing down. He is recruiting followers, yes, and his Democratic primary race here with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton could not be tighter. But the moment is suffused, so as almost not to require that he make it explicit, with a sense of historical moment. I, you, we can make history, he says, by turning the nation’s sorrowful racial narrative into something radiant and hopeful.

Partisan divisions, racial divisions, blur in his telling.

He rarely hits the bass pedal on race. He talks of Selma and Montgomery and of the Revolutionary War and the Battle of the Bulge. But as he tells his own primal tale, heads nod in the audience.