Prometheus 6

I stole this link from The New Republic. The link is in the next post. 

Douglas Burns :: Why Barack Obama Will Win The Iowa Caucuses

One very much underappreciated dynamic in this race is that among the leading Democratic contenders Obama is the Midwesterner. Hillary is New York slick and Edwards is a Southern-fried pol who delivered a speech so populist in tone Sunday that I suspected he might leave Carroll High School, cross the street and march with a torched mob on the more well-to-do Collison Addition of our town.

Yes, we are a largly white state, and sure, it goes without saying that when Barack Obama is on the television screen or behind the political podium we see a black man.

That is, after all, what he is.

But when you listen to Obama, the substance of thinking, the cadence of his reasoning, his unassuming acceptance of people, you hear a Midwesterner.

"What I see in Iowa are a lot the qualities I love in Illinois," Obama told me in an interview. "I think there's a truth to the idea that there's a Midwestern sensibility and that people don't like a lot of fuss, don't like a lot of pretense, and I think are much more likely to think about things pragmatically and how do you get the job done as opposed to having a lot of ideology driving decision-making. And I think that's what America needs right now."

Obama has shown me something in this race. He fielded some tough questions from me on his admitted past drug use, absorbed a story I wrote that a leading Washington journalist termed "devastating," and kept doing interviews with me. No shut outs. He gamely continued doing an interview as I hounded him with questions about foreign policy experience. As much as I respect Obama I am reminded of the lessons of the early days of the Bush Administration, when a press corps starstruck with its access (I have interviewed Obama six times) didn't ask the hard questions for fear of losing those exclusives, the coin of the realm in this business.

Knowing full well that the national media often builds and then crashes public figures Obama says he views the headlines and hoopla (and to his credit, the criticisms) as transitory.

But even when Obama does take broadsides and carefully crafted insults, the inevitable slings and arrows of politics at the highest level, he will retain a rare connectivity to voters. He understands people, not because, as Bill Clinton, he feels their pain in some abstract Baby Boomerish sense.