Neither Convention spell-binder nor rock star, lower-key Obama draws huge crowds across Iowa

NYT: 2 Years After Big Speech, a Lower Key for Obama
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: April 8, 2007

COLO, Iowa, April 6 — Senator Barack Obama is not big on what he calls red-meat applause lines when he campaigns in small communities like this one, 45 miles northeast of Des Moines. He does not tell many jokes. He talks in even, measured tones, and at times is so low-key that he lulls his audiences into long, if respectful, silences.

Mr. Obama likes to recount the chapters of his unusual life: growing up in Hawaii, living overseas, community organizing in Chicago, working in the Illinois legislature, though not his years as a United States senator. He talks — more often than not in broad, general strokes — about an Obama White House that would provide health care to all, attack global warming, improve education, fix Social Security and end the war in Iraq. His campaign events end almost as an afterthought, surprising voters used to the big finishes typically served up by the presidential candidates seeking their support....

For most Democrats, Mr. Obama is the Illinois senator who riveted the Democratic National Convention with a keynote speech that marked him as one of the most powerful speakers his party had produced in 50 years. But as Mr. Obama methodically worked his way across swaths of rural northern Iowa — his towering figure and skin color making him stand out at out diners and veteran’s homes, at high schools and community colleges — it was clear that he is not presenting himself, stylistically at least, the way he did two years ago when he gripped Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.

He is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more charged presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

He rarely mentions President Bush, as he disparages the partisan quarrels of Washington, and is, at most, elliptically critical of Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton when he notes that he had opposed the war in Iraq from the start; the two of them voted to authorize the war in 2002.

His audiences are rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd. Yet Iowa is not the Fleet Center, and this appeal — “letting people see how I think,” as Mr. Obama put it in an interview — could clearly go a long way in drawing the support of Iowans who are turning out in huge numbers to see him in the state where the presidential voting process will start....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/us/politics/08obama.html?hp

are just down the road where my mom grew up during the 19-20`s and i traveled out there for years to visit our kin. my grandfather was a member of the populist movement in the 20`s and i have several of his speeches he delivered. if the people out there on the plain can feel that obama is for real than he`ll get their vote. a lot of the coasters think that the folks out there are rubes but just as jessie jackson found out when he ran for president those folks don`t give a shit what color a man might be they want to know if they`re going to fix what ails them..

with his message of Truth,Hope and Compassion for others.


We need a Real President this time. One with a Brain and the abily to have the respect of the World.

<Mary Margaret Gran, a middle-school teacher who met him when he spoke to 25 Iowans eating breakfast at a tiny diner in Colo on Friday morning, summed up her view the moment Mr. Obama had moved on to the next table.

“Rock star?” Ms. Gran said, offering the description herself. “That’s the national moniker. But dazzle is not what he is about at all. He’s peaceful.”>

because the more people get to know him, the more they like him -- his support is cross-generational and eclectic