http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/oh-bam-a-fires-it-up/#more-3666Oh-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.
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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.”
He derides the “politics of fear” and says voters are “fed up with spin and P.R., they want straight talk,” co-opting John McCain’s signature phrase in a big move to capture the independents in the state who can vote on either side.
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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