The New Yorker on Barack Obama: The Relaunch by Ryan Lizza

[flpoljunkie]

The Relaunch
by Ryan Lizza

Iowans have developed many sophisticated ways to squeeze dollars out o Presidential candidates, who are compelled practically to live in their state fo four years. The Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, whose chances of winnin are negligible, recently relocated his family to Des Moines and enrolled his six-year-old daughter in kindergarten. For the Iowa Democratic Party, the annua Jefferson Jackson Dinner is the biggest and most profitable enterprise of the cycle Candidates are encouraged to buy tickets for thousands of their supporters, wh perform cheering and sign-waving ballets when their candidate speaks. In 1999 the event marked the turnaround of the Al Gore campaign, and in 2003 i launched John Kerry’s revival. At this year’s dinner, held on November 10th, i Des Moines’s main entertainment arena, Veterans Memorial Auditorium Obama’s people wore red T-shirts and were split into two sections facing eac other. When Obama entered the arena, his supporters launched into a raucous call-and-response of “Fired up! Ready to go!”—a cheer that Obama first heard las summer in South Carolina, when he was talking to a small group and an elderl woman in the room began to shout, “Fired up!” prompting the “Ready to go! reply. Since then, these words have become his campaign’s signature refrain.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters wore Iowa yellow and green, and the rafters were dotted with what had just become her new campaign slogan: “Turn up the heat. Turn America around.” It wasn’t until she spoke that it became clear what she meant about turning up the heat. Clinton went on to deliver a series of anti-Republican one-liners, posed as questions, such as “When the Republicans cut Head Start, and refuse to fix No Child Left Behind, what do we do?” Her yellow-and-green army responded after each riff, “Turn up the heat!” Clinton’s emphasis on the fall of 2008 rather than on the caucuses of January may prove to be a mistake. The vulnerability that Obama is exploiting is precisely Clinton’s presumptuous turn toward the general election. Since the Philadelphia debate, polls have shown Obama narrowing the gap between him and Clinton in New Hampshire, and in Iowa polls have consistently shown a close race.

What was notable about Obama’s speech at the dinner—one of his finest and most passionate—was not just the roaring choreography from his red-clad supporters but the way that, at 11:30 P.M., he galvanized the entire auditorium, with a succinct description of the difference between his campaign and Clinton’s: “If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it.” Even many of Clinton’s troops could be seen beating yellow thunder sticks together in appreciation. Obama seemed to be making an argument about the connection between boldness and electability. With Hillary Clinton, he suggested, there is an inverse relationship between the two: she is so polarizing that she is forced to be a milquetoast candidate in order to become an electable one.

Obama is not the most liberal candidate in the race, so he’s not defining his boldness strictly in ideological terms but, rather, as a sort of anti-politics that prizes truthtelling above calculation. When I asked him about this new tack, he seemed supremely confident. “I’ve been an observer of politics for two and a half decades, and what I’ve seen is that Democrats have not been able to move their agenda through Washington,” he said. “They have not been able to get the American people to embrace their domestic agenda, and they have been constantly on the defensive when it comes to their foreign-policy agenda. And it seems to me that, you know, if you’re not getting the outcomes you want, you might want to try something different.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/26/071126fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=4