THE TASTE OF OBAMA; THE FACT OF MCCAIN
I’m back in Boston after
spending a couple of hours in Manchester,
New Hampshire and must say that
I’ve never encountered anything like the surge of interest in Barack Obama’s
presidential campaign.
Topic B was
would McCain beat Romney? Although the men and the women in the street and at
the polls seemed to think that the Republican race would be tight, their sense
was that McCain would win.
That’s
telling because, as David Bernstein has reported in his Talking Politics Blog, Hillsborough County is ground zero for the Romney
Campaign. There were more Romney signs in evidence than for any other
candidate, Republican or Democrat.
Topic A was
Obama.
Talking to
Democrats and Independents at the Red Arrow Diner and on the streets downtown
the interest -- and excitement -- about Obama was so real that you felt like
you could touch it, taste it.
In all my
years of writing about politics I’ve never encountered anything like this
before. When I was in high school I volunteered for Gene McCarthy. He was
greeted as a breath of fresh air when LBJ’s war in Vietnam was sucking the life of
national politics. But he never touched the emotional cords that Obama seems to
strum.
Howard Dean
came a bit closer. But Dean’s support was limited to college students and those
with an activist frame of mind. He too was greated as a new breeze and
certainly had more emotional appeal than the sometimes chilly and cerebral
McCarthy.
Obama’s
appeal seems akin to Bobby Kennedy’s. It is charismatic. It transcends the
ordinary and cuts across the divides of age, income, and gender.
I mention
gender because I was struck by the number of people I spoke with who were
voting FOR Obama, not AGAINST Hillary Clinton. In fact, a number of people said
they hoped that the press wouldn’t be too hard of Hillary. It seems that
however ClintonNew Hampshire
voters. does, she won the respect of a
sizable number of
Obama,
however, seems to have won their heads and their hearts.