Category: Barack Obama

Even a Brit is moved:

The cynicism of Europeans (and yes, Brits, this means you!) is sad and underwhelming. Compare and contrast Obama’s speech (and even Huckabee’s) with any one of Clinton’s (HRC), Blair’s or Merkel’s or Chirac’s or Brown’s or Cameron’s. Try to spot the difference.

Lebanon’s Daily Star:

The very moment [Obama] appears on the world’s television screens, victorious and smiling, America’s image and soft power would experience something like a Copernican revolution.

A German is skeptical:

The Iowa snow king has scant hope of reaching the White House. He’s too young, too inexperienced, too vague, and for many Americans, too black.

From South Africa:

Damn, I love Americans. Just when you’ve written them off as hopeless, as a nation in decline, they turn around and do something extraordinary, which tells you why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on earth.

I think the international response to Obama will shock many Americans. Because it will be so massive. A round-up coming … stay tuned.

A lot of Democrats like Frank Foer were worried about that with Obama. Does he have a killer instinct on the campaign trail? Well, yes. But not in a bad way. And it’s hard to argue with his ability to campaign hard and take down a giant after last night.

Publius is right about the concept, but wrong about the timing:

The media loathes Clinton – and the feeling is mutual. The press has been waiting for this fall from grace moment, and now they have it. And so they’ll pound on her for the next few days, but then they’ll have it out of their system and her coverage might improve. At the least, they’ll want to keep the horse race going.

But it will be an Obama-love fest for a while. The only way for Clinton to survive the pro-Obama wave is to become the grinch. She has to be careful not to go too negative against Obama, but she can hardly leave him alone either. It’s a much tougher road than some seem to think.

After four terms of Southerners in the White House, maybe this is what we’re looking for:

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."

Heh:

An Obama supporter reports that Obama won Tom Vilsack’s Des Moines precinct by a margin of two — and that the former governor and his wife, Christie, a major Clinton backer, didn’t show.

David Brooks:

Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?

Clinton has to in order to win. Hence her very difficult predicament this morning.

"I’ve been an Obama skeptic, but I have to say at the end of his event in Iowa I attended Saturday night, I got out of my chair in the back and stood up and craned my neck to get a good look at him as he finished his speech. He’s an electrifying performer and there was a sense in the room that maybe, just maybe you were witnessing the beginning of something historic," – Rich Lowry, NRO.

From here.