Word: speechings
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Sure, a quarter of the people at the packed bar are talking through his speech, with its perfectly calibrated shouting that doesn't feel like shouting, exactly what Howard Dean was attempting when he derailed, the kind that makes you want to totally crush the other football team. But even the talkers like the bits they catch. "Buck, I tell you what we're going to do," Dodd yells from the stage to the bar's owner. "I'm going to need a bartender in the White House...
Tancredo's version of Dodd's Irish bar is anywhere there are guns. In two days in Iowa, he hits up two shooting ranges. His speech is riddled with self-interruption, his anti-immigration venom prefaced by endless apologia about how this isn't about race, guys, seriously. He simply cannot match the intensity of his base; in fact, when he took an online test to see which candidate he would support, Tom Tancredo was only 89% in alignment on the issues with Tom Tancredo. And he's not sure how long he can keep this up--these delayed connecting...
...really hard. A bleak, windy Sunday morning in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The local roads are ice. As John Edwards enters the community-college cafeteria, his campaign workers are picking up rows of chairs--to make sure the media don't shoot the empty seats. Edwards trudges through his stump speech--the least engaged I've ever seen him--and specifically asks the sparse gathering for questions about the issues he considers important: health care, global warming, poverty, the economy. There are none such. The questions are odd, off point. A Native American accuses Hillary Clinton of saying something outrageous about...
...next stop is better, but not much better, and there are several more stops after that. Edwards' passionate, populist stump speech reminds you that his greatest strength as a trial lawyer used to be his closing argument. But this is Iowa, where all closing arguments are being delivered to hung juries. Even the people who support Edwards aren't so sure...
Obama's appearance in Des Moines with Oprah Winfrey was startling, the largest crowd I've ever seen at a precaucus event. The Senator gave a riveting speech--and so did the TV celebrity, who riffed on a line from an old movie about a former slave, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which the protagonist would ask young people, "Are you the one?" Winfrey then proclaimed, "I'm here to tell you, he is the one." That was probably too portentous for anything but daytime television. But the freshness of Obama's personality, the easy elegance...