Word: iowa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Iowa's decision was about style, not substance. Obama didn't offer many new ideas and precious few that were different from his opponents'. He offered civility. At one point, Clinton tried "Turn Up The Heat" as her slogan and, throughout, John Edwards' rhetoric was so hot that it eventually burned him to a cinder. Obama's unspoken slogan was "Turn Down the Heat." The blogger Daily Kos endorsed Obama at first then, frustrated by the lack of fire, un-endorsed him. The far left wing of the Democratic Party may have to rethink the value of vitriol...
Barack Obama's first words after winning the Iowa caucus were intended for history and they were gorgeous: "They said this day would never come." Perhaps he was thinking small. Perhaps he was thinking about the long days in July and August and September when he trudged along the trail, well behind Hillary Clinton - who seemed a juggernaut at that point. Perhaps he was thinking back to his childhood, to the father who barely knew him and the mother who let her parents do most of the child rearing. But I suspect he was thinking bigger, back to Martin Luther...
That day has now come, at the highest level of American politics. A black man with a dangerous-sounding foreign name trounced his opponents in the nearly all-white state of Iowa. And he did so because, after spending months getting to know him, the people of Iowa stopped seeing his color and began to admire his character. In an election where the word "change" became an almost meaningless talisman, Iowa's triumph over race is a message to the world about the real nature of America - and a ratification of Obama's belief that this will be an election...
...size of the turnout was driven by young people, who supposedly never turn out - and by independents, and Republicans who crossed over, and by people who never had attended caucuses before but figured that this year political participation was, for once, mandatory. And a very clear message was sent: Iowa, at least, was ready for a new generation of leadership. That had been Obama's intent from the start. In my earliest conversations with him, he had expressed frustration with the perennial, divisive baby boomer political battles - "the dorm fights of the '60s," he called them...
...Iowa's decision was not only pro-Obama, but very clearly anti-Clinton - not so much anti-Hillary, whose solid, steadfast campaign earned the respect of many Iowans, but anti restoration, anti the notion of having a former two-term President elide the Constitution by returning to the White House as a spouse, anti the petty, contentious politics that seems to follow the Clintons - much to their dismay - everywhere they go. (Except, perhaps, the corridors of the Senate, which may ultimately prove to be Senator Clinton's most natural home...