Barack Obama is nearly two hours late when he takes the stage, flashes that smile, and says in that instantly recognisable baritone: ”Good afternoon, believers.”
And they do believe: teenage girls pressing against the crowd control barricades to take pictures with their cellphones; middle-aged couples carrying copies of Obama’s memoir for signing; fathers with children perched on their shoulders, getting an early lesson in politics.
Everybody wants to say they have seen Obama — up close — before New Hampshire holds its primary on Tuesday. It’s hard to define exactly what his supporters believe in when they see Obama, but this much is indisputable: they do believe.
”Something is in the air in New Hampshire. Something is going on,” Obama began and the crowd roared.
Behind the terracing, David Axelrod, the man who helped make it all happen, looks almost ready to be swept away himself. Axelrod, a political activist from Obama’s home town of Chicago, has been working with the senator for 15 years.
With his slightly hangdog expression, Obama’s chief strategist has been the anxious presence at the back of the room at hundreds of rallies. But with new polls showing the further collapse of support for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Axelrod is willing to suspend the consultant’s caution.
”I think it would be arrogant and unwise to say nothing can be turned around,” he begins, but he can’t help himself. ”I just think there is something larger going on in the country,” he said. ”I don’t think we have seen this in a generation. Idealism has been very much dormant in our politics for a long time. It’s been beaten out of us. Regardless of what happens in this campaign the regeneration of a sense of possibility is a very valuable thing.”
In truth, Obama does not have a monopoly on excitement in these elections. It’s impossible to drive anywhere without coming across candidates’ signs planted in the snow banks that line the roads. Clinton, though fighting for her political survival, can still attract a crowd.
But Clinton stopped being the default Democrat on January 3. In the Republican debate at the weekend, candidates were asked to weigh their strengths against Obama as their Democratic opponent — not Clinton. Obama was the target of the Republican National Committee attack that was emailed to party supporters yesterday morning. ”Obama is still the presidential contender with a one-page résumé,” the email began.
Like Clinton, the Republicans seem to have miscalculated the right line of attack to take against the Democratic frontrunner. Nobody is talking about résumés when they are queueing to see Obama.
”The Democratic field has a lot of intelligent hardworking people, and a lot of Democrats are talking about experience. But experience also carries a lot of baggage,” said Paula Chessin, a school librarian who queued for hours to see Obama speak. ”I think Obama brings something the people with experience don’t bring and that is the need to move on.”
The volunteers who have turned up at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Manchester for this final push seem infused with that sense of mission.
”There’s a certain bigness that Obama has,” says Patrick Hidalgo (28) a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has been tracking Obama’s career since 2004 when he made a now famous speech to the Democratic convention. ”The second I saw him I thought to myself, this is going to be one of our great leaders — the Kennedy or Churchill of our generation,” he said.
The campaign, which set up operations in New Hampshire last March, says it has recruited 2 000 volunteers. By Wednesday morning, volunteers will have made two million telephone calls to potential voters — this in a state where 287 000 turned out to vote in the Democratic primary in 2004.
”Ronald Reagan took 48 states. I don’t think we have heard anything like that for years, and now we are going to have Obama Republicans,” said David Ian Lee, an actor from New York. ”There is something historically important happening.” – Guardian Unlimited Â