Barack Obama Captures Lightning In a Bottle, But Can He Keep the Lid On?

This feels good. It’s just like I imagined it when I was talking to my kindergarten teacher. —Obama on his front runner status

Barack Obama may be the leader of the moment, but he faces an uphill fight over the next four weeks as a six-candidate Democratic field is winnowed down in an breakneck series of primaries and caucuses in no fewer than 29 states.

This frenzy concludes with the expanded 20-state Super Tuesday primaries on February 5 that include media-heavy California, New Jersey and New York and would seem to favor Hillary Clinton, whose pockets are deeper and campaign organization larger. In any event, there is the tantalizing prospect that we may know who the Democratic nominee is likely to be by the end of this marathon while the hapless Republicans continue to duke it out.

But for at least a shining moment – perhaps as brief as when the polls close Tuesday night in New Hampshire – the focus is on a 47-year-old African-American senator from Illinois who has captured lightning in a bottle in disrupting what had been billed as Clinton’s inevitable march to the White House.

Obama has done so through a clever strategy of marketing himself as the agent of change for voters desperate for change, a goodly number of whom are downright scared about their precarious financial situation and the direction in which the country has been headed under the disastrous stewardship of George Bush.

This emphasis on change attracted a new wave of young and independent voters last Thursday night in an overwhelmingly white Midwestern state where Democratic politics have long been dominated by middle-aged and elderly Iowans whose plain vanilla votes were as predictable as the January snows.

It was the weekend before the 1960 election and several thousand people were waiting in front of the tiny passenger terminal at the airport outside of Wilmington, Delaware. It didn’t matter that the candidate was over an hour late when the Caroline, his powder-puff blue and white campaign plane, finally dropped out of the sky and taxied toward the chain-link fence that stood between us and the next president of the United States.

The moment that John F. Kennedy walked toward the crowd and held out his hand to me is indelible: His steely yet warm gaze, those incredible greenish-gray eyes, every hair on his head catching and reflecting the sun just right. Gleaming teeth. The kind of smile you would save for an old friend.

I wondered why he was alone. Where was Jackie? But the thought quickly passed as he grasped my hand and squeezed it ever so slightly. I expected his hand to feel rough and calloused, but in the instant we touched before he moved on through the crowd, it seemed soft and warm.

Obama does that to people, too. He inspires, projecting the feeling that you are in the presence of greatness, that history is being made before your very eyes. These are intangibles that Clinton is unable to come close to matching.

Obama sells himself as the “unlikely” candidate. His message of optimism – compared to Clinton’s subtle fear mongering — at a time when a significant majority of Americans are anything but optimistic makes for good sound bites. But it will be Obama’s ability to continue to reach out beyond the traditional Democratic base as he was so successful in doing in Iowa that will determine who wins New Hampshire and whether he can gain enough momentum to beat back Clinton in the big-state primaries where the party machines will turn out Hillary supporters in droves.

Like Obama, Clinton has campaign organizations in all 50 states. Unlike Obama, she has had to revamp her game plan since running as Ms. Inevitable flopped in Iowa.

In a widely quoted remark to reporters on the Clinton campaign’s chartered jet to New Hampshire following the Iowa debacle, chief strategist Mark Penn said that “We’ve got to start holding him to the standard people hold her to.”

This was a reference the campaign’s view that compared to Obama, Clinton has far more experience, although that claim does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Penn also was telegraphing a warning that the campaign is prepared to go negative, something it has done previously with an embarrassing ham-handedness that resulted in clarifications, apologies, resignations and dismissals and a goose to Clinton’s already sky-high negative poll numbers.

If Obama has a bimbette problem or other skeleton of consequence in his closet, we’ll probably know soon enough. Because he does not suffer by comparison to Clinton given his own experience, I don’t see her getting traction there.

This leaves Clinton to pick at Obama’s inconsistencies and assert that he has little to offer beyond an engaging personality and radiant smile. In what, on its face, is a slap at Obama but is more of an acknowledgment that she herself is anything but an agent of change, she urges voters not to buy into his “false hopes.”

Obama’s only weakness of note — and it is a serious one — is that he has been unable to articulate in tangible terms what he means when he speaks of change, moving beyond partisanship and building coalitions to fix what ails America. Although the issues that Americans tell pollsters they most care about would seem to favor Obama and he may be the most attractive candidate to lead many of those all-important independents out of the wilderness, merely blaming politicians and the system as he has done will not be nearly enough.

The Clinton campaign is fighting another perceived opponent as well — its own fixation with what it sees as a vast news media conspiracy.

It believes that Hillary Clinton is being unfairly victimized for every mis-step while Obama is getting a free ride. Bill Clinton has said that reporters will be complicit if Obama is the nominee and loses in November. Harsh words from a man who conveniently fails to recognize that it is the responsibility of the media to call out his wife when events warrant doing so, a man who had assumed that his ticket would be punched automatically for a return trip to the White House.

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Let’s put off for the moment whether an African-American can be elected president of the United States in 2008. There will be time enough to discuss that – and it will be discussed ad nauseam — if Obama survives Super Tuesday.

What matters for the moment is that the words excitement and politics are appearing in the same sentence for the first time in a long time.

JFK was four years younger than Obama when he shook my hand. Like Obama he represented a new generation that believed it had new solutions to old problems. Never mind that while Kennedy’s presidency was cut short it never really was a dramatic departure from the past; I suspect that an Obama presidency might not be either, but let’s see whether we even have a chance to find out. (Let’s also motor on by the fact that George Bush has been an extraordinary agent for change — all of it bad.)

Clinton, as well as the rest of the Democratic and all of the Republican field, are the standard bearers of an older generation. My generation. And to say that we and they have made a mess of things is a profound understatement.

I’m more than willing to give Obama an opportunity to make good on his promises, and end with an excerpt from his rousing victory speech in Iowa:

“They said this day would never come.

“They said our sights were set too high.

“They said this country was too divided; too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.

“But on this January night – at this defining moment in history – you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do; what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days; what America can do in this New Year. In schools and churches; small towns and big cities; you came together as Democrats, Republicans and Independents to stand up and say that we are one nation; we are one people; and our time for change has come.

“You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that’s been all about division and make it about addition – to build a coalition for change that stretches through Red States and Blue States. Because that’s how we’ll win in November, and that’s how we’ll finally meet the challenges we face.

“The time has come to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don’t own this government, we do; and we’re here to take it back.

“The time has come for a President who’ll be honest about the choices and the challenges we face; who’ll listen to you even when we disagree; who won’t just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know. And New Hampshire, if you give me the same chance that Iowa did tonight, I will be that President for America.”

(This post is based in part on commentary by Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington, Ed Morrissey, Nathan Newman, Andrew Sullivan, Steve Teles and Matthew Yglesias, and reporting from the The Guardian, The Independent, New York Daily News, Newsweek magazine, The New York Times and Time magazine.)