Posted by student JAMES MITCHELL- On a day when Hillary Clinton spoke three hours earlier and just a few miles away, Barack Obama drew the largest crowd I have seen so far when he spoke at the Veterans War Memorial in Cedar Rapids yesterday.
Obama spoke in the rhetorical cadence of a southern minister as he railed against the ineptitude and negativity of Washington politics: “It’s easy to be against something. You want to be for something. The same old politics just will not do. We can’t afford it.”
Obama preached his message of hope for a brighter future, jokingly referring to himself as a “hopemonger.”
He told the crowd that “the size of the challenges faced by our country have outpaced the capacity of our broken politics to solve them.” He went on to say that he is ready to take on these challenges and will lead “not by polls but by principles.”
Obama took a quote from former President Bill Clinton, saying “We must have the courage to change. Bill Clinton said that in 1992. He was right then and Barack Obama is right now.”
The senator from Illinois told the crowd in Cedar Rapids that “change you can believe in is how we’ll win in November.”
He discounted the attacks on his relative lack of inexperience by telling his audience that “the real gamble is to let the same old folks do the same old things. We need to write a new chapter.”
Obama closed by imploring the crowd to caucus for him on Thursday and reminding them that “everything worthwhile about this country came about because somebody hoped.”
James Mitchell is a Clinton School student covering the Iowa Caucuses for the Clinton School Blog.
