http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/oh-bam-a-fires-it-up/Oh-ba-ma Fires It Up
By Katharine Q. Seelye
MILFORD, N.H. — Spontaneous combustion! We’re here at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s big dinner and out of the masses of 3,000 people, who have been listening politely to Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson, comes a huge surge of people toward the stage for the next speaker — Barack Obama.
An announcer tries to get them back to their seats. “For safety concerns, before we can proceed, please take your seats,” says a disembodied voice. A mild buzz kill. The crowd moans but doesn’t really disperse. Then Mr. Obama strides to the podium, the crowd remains packed around the stage and the room is electrified.
“O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma,” they roar.
If you had listened to Mrs. Clinton, you wouldn’t really know that a seismic political event had occurred last night in Iowa. She could have delivered this particular speech almost any time in the last few weeks, and only those (like reporters) who pay attention to word changes on the margins would have noticed the difference. The biggest applause for Mrs. Clinton seemed to be at the end, when her husband and daughter joined her on stage.
But Mr. Obama gets right to it. In four days, he says, “you can do what Iowa did last night.” He doesn’t just talk about “change,” he talks about New Hampshire’s ability to “fundamentally transform this country.” His speech is interrupted repeatedly by chants of “O-ba-ma!”
“Our time for change has come,” he declares. He talks about having brought more young people to the caucuses in Iowa. Women too. “Across America, a fire is burning,” he says, “and folks are ready to go.”
/snip/
He gets a great chuckle when he says that his critics think he hasn’t spent enough time in Washington: “He needs to be seasoned and stewed. We need to boil all the hope out of him and you know what? That argument didn’t work in iowa and it isn’t going to work in New Hampshire because you know that the real gamble would be to have the same old game plan in Washington with the same old players and somehow expect the same old result,” he says. “That is a gamble we cannot take.” The crowd erupts with chants at the push-back on Bill Clinton’s argument that voting for Mr. Obama would be a “roll of the dice.”
Either he really means it or this is one gigantic book tour to promote his memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.”
Mr. Obama is now linking the civil rights struggle with the inclusion of new voters who came out for him in Iowa. “That is what is possible in four days time, that is the challenge before you, New Hampshire,” he says, picking up the preacher cadence and clearly responding to the crowd. “If you believe we cannot be stopped, there is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, where that spirit, that faith, has to break through. This is our moment. This is our time.”
The crowd goes absolutely berserk. And in his crescendo moment, he says that if New Hampshire votes for him on Tuesday, “you and I will heal this nation and repair the world and finally have an America that we can believe in again _ in four days time.”
One tiny anecdote will tell you how this went over here. We were seated next to supporters of Mrs. Clinton. They applauded throughout Mr. Obama’s speech. Said one: “He almost changed my mind.”
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