Obama’s refrain: Change the world with me

By J. Patrick Coolican

Monday, Jan. 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

By the time Sen. Barack Obama reaches a high school auditorium in this mid-size Boston suburb, he’s late and drag tired.

Carolyn Sheehan and Jo Mednick, two very different women in different political parties, had been standing on opposite sides of the overflow cafeteria for more than two hours waiting to see the first-term senator and sudden frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Both seemed skeptical.

Before Obama arrived, Sheehan, a social worker, said she was committed to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the long-shot Cleveland congressman known as the most liberal candidate in the field. Mednick is a homemaker and registered Republican who arrived at the event committed to Arizona Sen. John McCain, a fellow Republican.

They’d each seen other candidates this season, but not Obama.

He begins, as he often does, languidly, this time with an apology for his lateness. He says he is “ashamed,” not a word often uttered by politicians.

What follows is the closing argument he’s been making across New Hampshire four times on Sunday alone to packed gymnasiums and concert halls that can’t accommodate everyone.

His throat is raw, like President Clinton’s was here in 1992.

He calls to the stage and thanks two of his local organizers, as he does at every appearance, reminding the crowd that he began as they did, as a community organizer in Chicago helping laid-off steelworkers find job training and new work.

He asks for applause. The organizers, as always, look embarrassed.

What then follows is a coherent argument, though it unfurls subtly and with asides and jokes, like about being embarrassed to be a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney. “I wish I could be related to somebody cool,” he says, in his biggest laugh line.

Only through unity, he says, can the country provide health care for all Americans, reach energy independence and a fair economy, and achieve a new foreign policy that ends the Iraq war.

It happened in Iowa when independents and some Republicans came out for me, he says, and it can happen again if you stand with me, “in two days’ time,” which is a refrain throughout the speech.

“We will create a new majority that will help us win and help us govern. In two days’ time.”

He then explains his reason for running, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s “fierce urgency of now.”

“People are hungering for a politics of our common values,” he says.

He then rhetorically wraps his arms around the audience: “I was betting on you as the true agents of change.”

Then he tells them how great they are: “There’s no problem we can’t solve and no destiny we cannot fulfill together.”

He then addresses the argument that he’s not experienced enough to be president by turning it on its head, mocking the conventional wisdom of Washington: “We need to season him, to stew him, to boil the hope out of him.” Translation: It’s now or never. You have an opportunity, but the window is closing.

Iowans, he says, recognized that last week. “My faith has been vindicated!”

(Now, though still clearly tired, he’s getting a second wind, like a boxer who’s been jarred alert.)

He tells the audience they mustn’t be driven by anger, even though, he acknowledges, they have every right to be angry.

“We don’t need more heat, we need more light,” he says, a subtle but direct attack on the now forgotten Hillary Clinton slogan “Turn up the heat.”

Yes, he acknowledges, the Washington lobbyists and tough-guy Republicans will come after us. But guess what? I’m appealing to people like you: independents and Republicans outside Washington.

And here’s the crux of it: He’s not preaching a luke-warm centrism of negotiation and compromise, even if it sounds like that. What he’s really trying to do is create a new liberal coalition by convincing people, in speeches just like this one, to come over to his view of things. In a shrewd way, he’s hoodwinking them, but they feel so good about themselves they don’t know it.

It’s about 20 minutes in now and he’s fully wound up. He makes his close: Hope isn’t being a shrinking violet, it’s “a belief in things not seen.”

It was that belief, that hope, that liberated the colonies from the king, freed the slaves, gave women the vote and ended American apartheid.

“It was because of hope that men and women went to Selma and Montgomery,” he says, invoking the civil rights movement.

By this point in his speeches, the crowd is in a frenzy. Today in Salem is no exception.

And then he closes: “Let’s go change the world.”

His staff and the Secret Service had begun moving things around in the overflow cafeteria so Obama could make a quick appearance, and once the crowd realized what was going on, they moved to the spot like kids to a swimming hole on a hot day. They held up their cameras and camera phones.

Jo Mednick rushed up.

Carolyn Sheehan stayed back.

Both said they’ll vote for Obama in two days’ time.