THE first time she heard Barack Obama speak, it gave Kathy Gillett goose bumps. “Everybody can find a little piece of themselves in Barack. I guess, for me, it was his optimism,” she said.

He reminded her of President John F Kennedy. “I love Kennedy and I’ve often wondered if people understood how great he was when they were in a room with him in 1960. Now I know they did. When I heard Barack I thought, ‘This is a once-in-a-generation leader’.”

Gillett, 48, moved back to her home state of New Hampshire last summer from London, where her husband worked in the City. In Manchester last Thursday night, she watched the Iowa caucus results come in with other volunteers for Obama, before returning to her duties in the morning as a ward organiser.

She now has two days left to turn out the vote on Tuesday, when New Hampshire will decide whether to turn a page on the Clinton era. Gillett has met dozens of Republican and independent voters who say, “I like your guy,” and have promised to support him. His appeal is “beyond Bill Cinton”, she said. “He believes that we are one United States.”

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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As Obama delivered his victory speech in Iowa, surrounded by his wife Michelle and young daughters, the crowded bar fell silent. The tableau of the potential first family presented as stunning a portrait of change as Obama’s message that “just sometimes there are nights like this . . . when the world sees America differently”.

Will America be carried away by his oratory? Hillary Clinton, who came a humiliating third in Iowa, is banking on the pragmatism of voters to reestablish her candidacy. Arriving in New Hampshire the morning after to rally her supporters in an airport hangar, she said that only she had the experience to “produce change”, swiping the leitmotif of Obama’s campaign.

It might have been more persuasive had she not been flanked by figures from a previous era, including her husband and Madeleine Albright, his former secretary of state.

Republicans are counting on Obama’s left-wing record to emerge in the course of a prolonged election battle. As Peter Wehner, a former White House adviser to George W Bush noted, scrutiny of Obama’s positions will increase and “push aside the poetry side of politics”. He conceded, however, that Obama had “tremendous political talents” and would come out of Iowa “like a freight train”.

Ted Sorensen, John F Kennedy’s former speechwriter, believes Obama has found the means to unite America. “His victory speech was inspirational,” he said. “It was especially appealing to young people regardless of race and religion, just like JFK.” He added witheringly: “I’ve never met an independent or Republican who favours Mrs Clinton.”

Kennedy was far more hawkish than the antiIraq war Obama on foreign policy, but they both faced the same obstacles to election. “They were both said to be too young and were from the wrong demographic,” Sorensen said – Kennedy, 43, was an Irish Roman Catholic. However, Sorensen believes that given the chance, Americans will always respond to an appeal to their nobility of spirit after being reared on the philosophy of the founding fathers and Martin Luther King.

“One of Obama’s greatest themes is his appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the ‘better angels of ourselves’.”

Obama, 46, is the son of a single white mother from Kansas and an absentee black father from Kenya, who was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. Some of his ancestors owned slaves and he is a distant cousin of vice-president Dick Cheney, whom he refers to in his stump speech as the “black sheep” of the family. His multi-ethnic Camelot, should it arise, will have a very different composition to that of Kennedy’s quasi-royal dynasty.

“For a man with his roots to have the audacity ever to run for president, when he has to win overwhelmingly white states, shows that Obama is afraid of nothing,” Sorensen said. “His toughness has been tested time and again.”

When Obama’s campaign began to take shape last year, the cheeky unofficial slogan was: “Don’t Tell Mama, I’m for Obama.” Bill and Hillary Clinton let it be known that they would allow Obama to recruit a few leading backers from his home town of Chicago, but that anything more would be regarded as treachery. With Hillary Clinton the “inevitable” Democratic winner, the bulk of White House patronage would naturally go to her allies.

Bit by bit, Obama’s supporters broke out of their establishment straitjacket as the money to rival the Clintons’ machine poured in. He recruited so many former Clinton foreign policy aides that he was able to joke in a televised debate in Iowa last month: “Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.”

Larry Korb, who advises Obama on defence, was a senior Pentagon official in Ronald Reagan’s administration, but the first vote he ever cast as a young man was for Kennedy. “When I was asked if I was willing to join Obama’s campaign, I was reminded of the new spirit that Kennedy brought to the country,” he said.

Korb believes that the Democratic party and Washington think tanks are full of potential Obama supporters who have hitherto been lying low. Just as some primary voters are now peeling their Hillary for President bumper stickers off their cars and replacing them with Obama’s, so they are beginning to emerge as the momentum swings his way.

Democratic congressman Patrick Murphy, a 34-year-old Iraq war veteran, came out for Obama relatively early, in August. “A lot of people told me I was crazy, that he didn’t stand a chance. It was a suicide mission,” he said.

Murphy was in New Hampshire this weekend, where he has been helping out Obama’s campaign. “A lot of my colleagues have been sitting on the sidelines to see if Barack Obama was the real deal. The Iowa results show that he is.”

For long, fallow stretches on the campaign trail, Obama was not always as inspirational as some had predicted. But Murphy said: “He’s found his voice again and has that magic. It’s almost indescribable. I’m from a pretty Republican district and even my wife is a Republican, who says the party has left her – she didn’t leave the party – and she’s enthusiastic about Barack and Michelle Obama.”

Obama described Michelle last week as the “love of my life, the rock of the Obama family, the closer on the campaign trail”. At 5ft 11in, she could be the most glamorous first lady since Jackie Kennedy, with a modern twist. “She went to Princeton, to Harvard Law School, she’s a great mother and a professional, she is the total package,” Murphy said.

Michelle’s father was a municipal worker who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Her modest upbringing on the South Side of Chicago has helped Obama to overcome accusations that he is not “black enough” to impress African-American voters. But the results of the Iowa caucus proved beyond doubt that he can also win support across the board in a state that is 94% white.

The impact on South Carolina, which holds its Democratic primary on January 26, could be huge. Half of voters there are African-American. Chris Rock, the comedian, said at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem last November that black voters would be embarrassed if they voted for Clinton, but Obama won. “You’d say, ‘I had that white lady! What was I thinking?’ ” Conservative columnist David Brooks noted that, “Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory . . . 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?”

It is a dilemma for both the Republicans and the Clintons, although it will not deter them from negative campaigning. Clinton supporters are already whispering about the “Do the Right Thing” factor, a reference to Spike Lee’s 1989 film about inter-ethnic rivalry. Hispanics may not be as ready for a black president as the white voters of Iowa, it is suggested.

Clinton remains a formidable national candidate. The most recent poll of polls shows her leading Obama by 45% to 24%, but is based on surveys taken just before her Iowa meltdown. In New Hampshire, she had been widening the gap with Obama, moving 12 points ahead of him in one poll and six points ahead in another. Her team was confident they had reestablished a firewall in New Hampshire against a setback in Iowa, but her third-place showing last week changed the game plan.

Obama’s left-wing policies remain vulnerable to Republican attacks. His antiIraq war stance – a sign of good judgment, supporters believe – will be used to portray him as weak on national security. He has already been accused of naivety for suggesting he would talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, without preconditions – although President George W Bush may yet make his own diplomatic overtures this year – and warmongering for threatening to attack Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

At a vast rally in a school in Concord, New Hampshire, the day after his Iowa victory, Obama’s speech provided right-wing critics with plenty of ammunition by promising to redistribute some of the tax cuts of the Bush years and introduce universal health care, which some Americans fear will destroy their private health plans.

Conservatives have already compiled a check list of issues where Obama voted with the left as a state senator for Illinois to raise taxes, approve late-term abortion or allow drug addicts to buy 10 syringes without a prescription, an issue that could give rise to more allegations about his own teenage drug habit. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he wrote that he had used marijuana and cocaine – “maybe a little blow when you could afford it”.

Criticisms of his voting record could appear nit-picking when set against the promise of the first African-American president. Wehner writes that Obama is “inexperienced – but he radiates a sense of good judgment . . . and comes across as largely antiideological and certainly as antiradical”.

Obama has already framed the contest with Clinton as “hope versus fear”, a slogan that could turn out to be even more effective against Republican candidates, such as Rudy Giuliani, who is still in with a chance of winning his race, despite a dismal performance in Iowa.

Scandals such as a land deal with Tony Rezko, a disgraced Chicago businessman and long-time donor, to expand his private garden, have bounced off Obama without leaving a mark, even though he admitted his decision to enter into the agreement was “bone-headed”.

Sorensen remembers how Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy’s Democratic rival before becoming his vice-president, wanted to know how to get the better of such a gifted opponent. “Find out his secret,” Johnson urged one of his aides, “his strategy, his weakness, his comings and goings”. It made no difference. Kennedy went on to beat Johnson for the nomination in 1960.

Video: Obama's Iowa election victory speech

Video: Hillary's Iowa concession speech

Video: Morning of the Iowa caucuses: Barack on the Early Show

Video: McCain responds to the query of him possibly running for two terms

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