Barack Obama's positive approach has a crossover appeal, while Hillary Clinton complains of 'false hopes', writes Denis Stauntonin Lebanon, New Hampshire.
By the time Barack Obama arrived yesterday morning at Lebanon Opera House in New Hampshire's North Valley, the auditorium was already full and more than 400 people were left standing outside.
"There's something going on out there, Lebanon. There's something stirring in the air. You can feel it," Obama declared.
If anyone is feeling what's going on in New Hampshire, it is Hillary Clinton, who has seen a clear poll lead collapse into a double-digit deficit that could doom her hopes of returning to the White House. Obama looks set to repeat in New Hampshire today his remarkable success in Iowa last week, making him the favourite to win the Democratic presidential nomination and the presidency itself.
Both candidates have drawn huge crowds in New Hampshire this week but the atmosphere at their events couldn't be more different. Clinton offers a serious, exhaustive rundown on her policies, taking questions from the floor and even talking to reporters - something she has mostly avoided until now.
Obama's rallies are almost festive, as the candidate jokes with the audience, fires them up to vote and gives them an inspiring message about the potential of ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things.
Long before last week's victory in Iowa, Obama had been attracting record crowds throughout the United States, including a rally of 20,000 people in Atlanta last summer. Until Iowa, however, nobody was sure if these crowds would translate into real electoral numbers and most political analysts clung to the conventional wisdom that young people are unreliable supporters because they don't vote.
After all, Howard Dean raised millions over the internet and led in most polls before his 2004 candidacy immolated in Iowa while the dull, establishment figure of John Kerry walked off with the Democratic nomination.
What distinguishes Obama's campaign from Dean's, however, is that he has married the old politics with the new, using websites like Facebook and MySpace and texting young supporters to remind them to vote but also knocking on doors and organising local groups months in advance of the primaries.
For months, Obama avoided specific policy pledges, focusing instead on his core messages of hope and change, even producing campaign posters bearing only the word Hope, without the candidate's name. Under the influence of campaign strategist David Axelrod, Obama made his own biography a central part of his message, suggesting that as the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, he could bring a new perspective to the White House.
At a candidates' debate last Saturday, Clinton accused Obama of raising "false hopes" among voters without showing a record of legislative achievement to back up his promises. In Lebanon yesterday, Obama responded with a comic riff about John F Kennedy looking at the moon and deciding it was too far and Martin Luther King telling crowds to go home and dream another day.
"If anything crystallised what this campaign is about, it was that right there," Obama said. "Some are thinking in terms of our constraints and some are thinking about our limitless possibilities and the American people are tired of hearing about how we have to be divided and how we have to shout at each other and why children have to be poor and why folks can't have enough health care and why we have to live in the politics of fear all the time and why we have to be afraid of each other. They're tired of that."
Obama owes his success in Iowa to attracting the support of independents and Republicans and many more are expected to cross over to support him in New Hampshire. Unlike Clinton, who is almost universally loathed among Republicans, Obama attracts little hostility and he claimed yesterday that his conciliatory approach will help him to make real change in Washington.
"If you start off with an agreeable manner, you might be able to pick off some folks, you might be able to recruit independents into the fold, recruit even some Republicans into the fold. That's how you form a working majority for change. That's how you change the electoral map. That's the politics of addition, not the politics of division," he said.
Clinton's campaign team, led by pollster Mark Penn, have long argued that her high negatives are unimportant because to win the Democratic candidate only needs to win one more state than Kerry did in 2004. According to this analysis, 45 per cent of Americans will inevitably vote for the Democrat, 40 per cent will vote for the Republican and the election is about winning over the 10 per cent in between.
Obama wants to tear up this electoral map by appealing across party lines and winning support even in traditional Republican strongholds.
"We're on the cusp of creating a new majority in American politics, a new majority that will not just win a nomination, that won't just win a general election but more importantly will allow us to govern, so that we can actually start tackling problems that George W Bush may have made far worse but had been festering long before George Bush ever took office," he said.
Until last week, Obama's plan looked, in his own words, like an "improbable journey" but as New Hampshire votes today, it seems ever more likely that this "skinny guy with a funny name" is on course to become the first AfricanAmerican US president.
"That's what hope is," he said yesterday, "imagining and then working for and fighting for what didn't seem possible before."