Barack Obama on Caucus Day: Betting on His Troops

NYT: Barack Obama
Betting on His Troops
By JEFF ZELENY
Published: January 3, 2008

DAVENPORT, Iowa

Before Senator Barack Obama of Illinois settled into his airplane seat to fly around Iowa one last time this week, he smiled when asked about his chances in the caucuses, saying, “I’m putting my money on my organization.” As he has reminded audiences here for nearly a year, Mr. Obama was once a community organizer in Chicago. And he begins most every campaign stop in Iowa by introducing his local organizers — a practice rooted in practicality as much as symbolism — who have the task of building a network of supporters across the state.

Long before his rivals, Mr. Obama opened storefront campaign offices on town squares and main streets throughout Iowa. The idea? Make his young workers a part of the community while his candidacy became familiar enough that people who had never participated in the caucuses might be inclined to do so. “Lately, some of the pundits have been skeptical that you folks who say you’re going to caucus for the first time are actually going to caucus,” Mr. Obama told an audience here on Wednesday. “The question is, Are we going to prove them wrong?”

So as Mr. Obama completes his campaign here after visiting 73 counties and racking up 89 days in Iowa, the themes of his closing argument harked back to the opening pitch he made back on Feb. 10 when he flew to Iowa after formally announcing his candidacy on the steps of the Illinois Capitol. “We’ve been talking about change since the beginning of this campaign. We talked about it when we were down, we’ve been talking about it since we’ve been up,” Mr. Obama said. “Suddenly everybody is talking about change. The question now is, Who is best equipped to actually deliver on change?”

“There have been people who say, you know: ‘Obama may be inspiring, he may have good ideas, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough. We need to stew him and season him a little bit more, boil all the hope out of him so he sounds like everybody else, then he’ll be ready.’ ... The real gamble would be to have us do the same old things with the same old folks over and over and over again and expect the same result. That’s a risk we cannot take.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/us/politics/03obama.html