Movement in Iowa charges up Obama campaign elsewhere

MANCHESTER, NH - Compared to Jersey, it’s edge of the world country.

Snow-capped Monadnock in the distance between Manchester and Keene sends a wordless message that the human hurly burly is but a small piece of the action. A headline in the Union-Leader tells of a hunter who’s still lost after several days and the sense is this is commonplace in New Hampshire. Human star power that blows through on the way to the presidency has nothing on the constancy of the hills, and the mountain.

Today the student center crawls with Secret Service personnel at Keene College, where kids bundled into backpacks and ballcaps trudge from edifice to noble edifice in the dreadful cold.

The students prepare to hear from Michelle Obama, the 43-year old wife of the presidential candidate, who’s leading in Iowa over Sen. Hillary Clinton by a four-point margin, and trailing her by six points in New Hampshire, according to Washington Post/ABC News polls. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1991, he wore out his voice calling for change. Now he’s the institutional old sage and his wife is the political insider, while Obama the upstart calls for change, and his wife amplifies the message.

Sixteen years ago, Bill Clinton said he believed in a place called Hope, a word he invoked tirelessly on the stump, which, consciously or not, fellow Southerner John Edwards has fixed on as he competes just behind Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The Obamas offer a different word, seldom used in the political arena.

"Our greatest challenge is not that we have a deficit of resources, or a deficit of policies and plans," Obama tells the crowd. "We are suffering from a deep deficit of... empathy."

Daughter of a fireman, Michelle Obama grew up on the south side of Chicago and graduated from Princeton University in 1985 with a sociology degree before receiving her law degree from Harvard. Until Americans identify taking care of one another as a first principle of society, she says, the country will continue to fall prey to cynical and powerful special interests.

"We are a nation that has mistaken meanness for toughness," says Obama. "We are a nation that has been led by fear my entire adulthood. Life led by fear cuts us off from one another around this nation and around the world. It desensitizes us to the needs of others and gives us the right to be insular because we’re afraid."

People’s salaries are not keeping up with the cost of living. Workers’ hours are doubling and tripling. Healthcare costs are the major cause of debt in the country. Public education is not the same from one community to the next, but we persist, Obama says, to see only our own children in our own isolated communities, disconnected from the whole.

"When you don’t see yourselves in other people, it becomes difficult to make sacrifices for others because you think they’re different than you and have a different sense of values than you," she says.

As Obama gives her speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday, her husband’s supporters in New Jersey prepare for the grand opening of their headquarters in West Orange. According to N.J. state campaign director Mark Alexander, 75 people would attend the event Wednesday evening, including Assemblyman Neil Cohen, Newark City Council President Mildred Crump, and Newark City Councilman Ron Rice.

Alexander says he has six full-time staffers helping him coordinate statewide support for his presidential candidate. While Clinton remains the favorite in New Jersey, Alexander believes that status can change before the New Jersey primary on Feb. 5th if Obama shows significant campaign muscle in Iowa and New Hampshire. The current numbers in Iowa have NJ for Obama preparing for the after-effects.

"I think our sense here in the last week or two is that we can turn things around and win this," says the state director. "Everyone is getting on their game, and that’s what you’re seeing with Michelle. Under pressure, she’s getting better."

Dr. Peter Woolley, executive director of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll, says the notion of an Obama (or Edwards) victory overall may not be far-fetched. "Whatever happens in Iowa that is not an outright win for Hillary changes the dynamic for everyone else," Woolley says. "Now, Hillary is the candidate New Jerseyans know. All of our polls show her ahead, but that could change if Obama comes out strongly in Iowa."

Woolley says he can’t run his next New Jersey survey until at least after the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3rd. "I can write them, but I have to choose the field dates very carefully," he says.

Blown in out of the cold in New Hampshire from one campaign event to the next, longtime New Englanders schooled over a lifetime in the let-down trade are unwilling to get excited this early. Jeff Herman, an independent who teaches public school in Boston, says, "I went to a Barack Obama event expecting to be greatly moved, and it just left me cold."

A onetime Democrat with an urgent sense of the global warming issue, Herman finds himself on the edge of bewilderment at a John McCain event in Manchester event behind a young conservative brandishing an original Time Magazine with Ronald Reagan’s picture on the cover and next to what look to be founding members of the Live Free or Die club in baseball caps and beards, leaping proudly to their feet when McCain asks all veterans to rise.

"I just really don’t know who to vote for at this point," says Herman, who drove the hour and change up from Boston to see if McCain could provide some answers.

Obama’s supporters say the depiction of their candidate as a bland youth, billed too early as a star attraction does not conform with the man they know.

"I went down to meet with Barack Obama a year ago with our city attorney," says Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy. "He was very warm and very receptive. He’s the same with a few people as he is with 150 people as he is with thousands of people."
Healy believes Obama is a visionary leader. But as mayor of Jersey City, Healy is also alert to what he sees as the Illinois senator’s pragmatic side.

"What I get from him is because he’s a citizen of Chicago he understands urban needs and issues," says Healy. "He knows we need police out there on the streets. He knows we have housing needs. Under Bush, our federal public housing authority cuts have been unprecedented."

As for Obama’s lead in Iowa, Healy says he believes that will translate into a win. "And that win will snowball all the way to the nomination," the mayor says.

Clinton leads Obama in New Jersey 46-15% as of the end of September, and another Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday shows that beyond Iowa, Clinton has "overwhelming leads, especially among women," in Democratic primaries in three states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have all been pivotal in presidential elections since 1964.

"These Democratic primary numbers are a good indication that despite the tight three-way race in Iowa, the fight for the nomination is not very close and that Sen. Clinton's lead remains very large and deep," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

In Florida, Clinton beats Obama 53-17% among all Democrats and 56-13% among women. Edwards stands at 7%, according to the poll. In Ohio, Clinton leads Obama 45-19% among Democrats and 53-15% among women, with 13% for Edwards. In Pennsylvania, it’s Clinton at 43%, followed by Obama at 15% and Edwards at 9%. Woman favor Clinton to Obama by a margin of 47-11%. John F.X. Graham, Clinton’s New Jersey campaign co-chair, says his candidate’s support is not only stronger among women but among African-Americans, and presuming Obama makes it out of Iowa and the north country, Graham says, the candidate won’t be able to keep up in the southern states.

"She’s going to win," Graham says of Clinton. "Big."

The cagey Jersey operator who’s convinced he has the gamer presidential candidate, Graham adds of Clinton and Obama, "She’s the pragmatist and he’s the idealist," figuring the man from Illinois will be run ragged by the time the field makes it to Jersey.

No way, Michelle Obama tells the college students at Keene.

"We cut our teeth on Chicago politics," she says, implying there may be tough political terrain out there but none tougher than Chi, before making one last plea to the underdogs in Obama attire, if they haven’t already, to go out and register to vote at the college’s GOTV fair.

Its bosses snug in their party machinery, New Jersey is several rivers removed, as is Chicago. Right now the candidates contend with Iowa and frigid New Hampshire, and everyone braces for impact.