Obama Finds His Moment

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: Obama Finds His Moment
Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007
Obama Finds His Moment
By Karen Tumulty


U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama holds a town hall meeting in Muscatine, Iowa.
(Callie Shell/Aurora for TIME)

Barack Obama's Iowa head-quarters near the State Capitol in downtown Des Moines has the unmistakable décor of an insurgent operation: thinning, mildewed carpet; litter from sign-painting parties; recycling boxes full of canvassing tally sheets and empty Miller Lite cartons. But the deepening clutter hasn't covered up all the traces of what the building used to be: a hockey rink, which could hardly be a more fitting metaphor for a political contest that is suddenly getting a lot rougher. The old Dr Pepper scoreboard is still on the wall, but the largely twentysomething crew at Obama Central has another way of measuring the team's progress. Staffers ring a silver bellhop bell whenever an organizer signs up a new precinct captain who has agreed to stand up and argue the candidate's case before friends and neighbors at one of the 1,784 caucuses that will be held across Iowa on Jan. 3. Since Obama's speech at the Iowa Democratic Party's Nov. 10 Jefferson-Jackson dinner — his most acclaimed performance since the 2004 National Convention address that made him a celebrity — the bell has dinged more than 233 times.

As the contest for the Democratic nomination moves into the last weeks of exhibition season, it appears that Obama is turning this into a race. "This summer he seemed to still be finding himself," says John Norris, an Obama adviser who ran John Kerry's Iowa operation in 2004. "But he turned the corner and realized, 'This is going to work out if I make it work out.'"

For months — which can be several life-cycles on the campaign trail — it looked as if that turning point might not happen. Despite the record amounts of money he had raised, the organization he had built and the crowds he had drawn, the freshman Senator from Illinois with a message of conciliation and righteousness had seemed for most of the year to be unable — unwilling, actually — to put much of a dent in Hillary Clinton's trajectory of preordination and inevitability. He appeared destined for the same fate that had met a long line of Democratic insurgents — Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean among them — whose promises of a new kind of politics had briefly enjoyed a vogue, only to be crushed into dust by a front runner who was using the standard playbook....

***

Not until Clinton turned in a couple of unsteady debate performances of her own in October, after having dominated the forums up to that point, did it seem as though someone had thrown a switch in Obama. Suddenly for Obama, as Lincoln wrote of his own presidential aspirations in 1860, "the taste is in my mouth." Voters began to see that he really wanted the job he was campaigning for. "There's a certain joy to it that I see in him now," says his strategist David Axelrod. "I just sensed from that point on that sort of incredible focus, energy, acuity, joy. He's into it."...

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1688931,00.html

[TwilightGardener]

1. Good article, thanks. This is it, it's do-or-die time for him, and he

really seems to be relishing the fight now. I'm so afraid that if he or Edwards loses Iowa to Hillary, it's all over.

[mtnsnake]

2. The more exposure Obama gets, the more that people are liable to be impressed with him

The longer this race goes on, the better it is for Obama.

[AtomicKitten]

3. I'm impressed by Obama's timing.

He's pulling out the stops bringing this campaign home.

Bravo!

[Colobo]

4. Gobama! Gobama!

[Catherine Vincent]

5. Yobama!

[TeamJordan23]

6. Great Cover story. nm