The New York Times today reports that Barack Obama's style of campaigning has changed quite significantly.
Mr. Obama methodically worked his way across swaths of rural northern Iowa — his tall figure and skin color making him stand out at diners and veterans’ homes, at high schools and community colleges — it was clear that he is not presenting himself, stylistically at least, the way he did two years ago when he gripped Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.
He is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more charged presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
He rarely mentions President Bush, as he disparages the partisan quarrels of Washington, and is, at most, elliptically critical of Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton when he notes that he had opposed the war in Iraq from the start; the two of them voted to authorize the war in 2002.
His audiences are rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd. Yet Iowa is not the Fleet Center, and this appeal — “letting people see how I think,” as Mr. Obama put it in an interview — could clearly go a long way in drawing the support of Iowans who are turning out in huge numbers to see him in the state where the presidential voting process will start.
“He’s low-key; he speaks like a professor,” said Jim Sayer, 51, a farmer from Humboldt. “Maybe I expected more emotion. But the lower key impresses me: He seems to be at the level that we are.”
Mary Margaret Gran, a middle-school teacher who met him when he spoke to 25 Iowans eating breakfast at a tiny diner in Colo on Friday morning, summed up her view the moment Mr. Obama had moved on to the next table.
“Rock star?” Ms. Gran said, offering the description herself. “That’s the national moniker. But dazzle is not what he is about at all. He’s peaceful.”
There's an interesting connection made by the Times reporter: Obama resembles Adlai Stevenson in his intellectual appeal.
But I also see something of the coolness and calculation of John Kennedy which knocked Stevenson right out of the race. Kennedy had a remarkable (one might even say "Bush-like") campaign machine, a group of really good strategists, advisers, and "handlers." Obama may too, but his public persona seems closer to who he is in private. Maybe he's a unbeatable combination of Kennedy and Stevenson... Maybe a lot of people have yet to notice the combination of populism with patrician bearing.
This is nice: "Mr. Obama enters the room to the sounds of 'Think' by Aretha Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and jostling for photographs."
