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Barack Obama’s big moment

On the Democratic side, it was not even very close. Barack Obama won going away and he ran a campaign that they will study at campaign school for years to come. He and his advisers had a fantastic sense of timing. I think back to last summer and early autumn, when I thought he was going nowhere — but the Obama campaign was just biding its time.

They pulled out Oprah Winfrey at the right moment, they let the momentum build slowly and in these last three weeks they were very tactically skilful. When polls are breaking your way as caucus day approaches and you win decisively in a huge record turnout of 212,000, you know that you have done just about everything right.

Mr. Obama will now benefit from his Iowa win and the positive media attention — and it will be positive as the media generally are not big fans of his leading opponent — as he moves into New Hampshire, a State where the large independent vote would seem to favour him very strongly. His message turned out to have the greatest resonance. Significant pluralities of Democratic and independent caucus-goers — he won 41 per cent of the latter category — want to believe that someone can lead the U.S. out of the toxic swamp of partisan bitterness.

And that leading opponent? I suspect that once we have a chance to study exit polls and find out why Iowa’s Democrats did what they did, we will learn that some portion of them just concluded that Hillary Clinton was too tied to the past and could not create a new political dynamic.

The experience idea she was trying to sell at first, reminding people of her years in the White House, came with some baggage attached. I would bet that we will learn also that her husband’s presence did not really help her. He just reminded people of the partisan wars of the 1990s. It is not necessarily fair, since the Clintons were victims of a vicious attack machine back then. But such is politics.

She is far from finished here, but she needs to retool fairly dramatically. She needs a stronger message and a better ground game, and she needs to develop them in a matter of days or hours, which is not easy to do.

Clearly, Mr. Obama is the story. He is not inevitable yet. But one more win might get him awfully close to that status. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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