(Cross-posted at The Field, part of a series reported from Nevada this week.)
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - Zeleny of the New York Times has spared me from having to write all of this up myself. The Timesman took excellent notes. I’ll just declare him our secretary tonight and lift the quotes from his story! It’s strong stuff. And the crowd went wild.
Tonight, at the Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Michelle Obama, who turned 44 today, was greeted by a raucous round of “Happy Birthday” as she introduced her husband to a standing room only crowd, including hundreds hanging over three sides of a long second floor balcony. “I want one thing on my birthday,” she said: “For Barack Obama to take the caucuses on Saturday!”
Obama took the stage and began, “It’s good to be back at Rancho… I want to publicly proclaim my love and admiration for my wife, Michelle… Even though I’m campaigning, ladies, I just got to let you know that I’m takin’ her out for dinner tonight.”
The main course, after the jump...
He then launched into variations of the stump speech he’s been giving since the first of the year, in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Oh well. A good night to take one’s mate out to dinner, I thought, considering an early exit myself. But suddenly Obama top dogs David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs wandered into the press section – 18 television networks, some shooting live, and a Spanish-language translators’ booth doing livecast translation of the event – and the Obama aides were looking like they knew something that we didn’t. So I thought I’d best stick around.
Obama then referenced the debate here in Vegas two nights ago, when moderators asked Clinton, Edwards and him to each state his and her own's “biggest weakness.”
Cue up Zeleny:
“Because I’m like, an ordinary person, I thought that they meant what’s your biggest weakness?” Mr. Obama said. “So I said, ‘Well, I don’t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.’ So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ‘I’m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.”
As the room erupts in laughter, he continues: “If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ‘Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’”
Zeleny continues:
In a tone rich with sarcasm, Mr. Obama launched into a fresh critique about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s answer on how she had voted on a bankruptcy bill in Congress.
“This was a bill she voted for in 2001 and that the credit card companies and the banks had been pushing to make it harder for people to get out of debt and reduce the 30-percent interest on the credit cards and folks had been going bankrupt for it,” he said. “She was asked about it by Tim Russert and she said, ‘Oh I voted for it but I’m glad to see that it didn’t pass.
“What does that mean? No seriously what does that mean? If you, if you want to see a bankruptcy bill then you vote against,” Mr. Obama said. “People don’t say what they mean. You know that it’s true.”
The audience was in absolute stitches. The combination of funny and true and, as Homer Simpson says, “it’s funny because it’s true,” has Obama mining political gold from the Silver State. He took the frustration and anger that regular Americans feel about phoniness among politicians and alchemized it into votes. As the event began, Obama, as he frequently does, polled the audience for a show of hands of undecided voters. In Iowa and New Hampshire sometimes a third or more of the crowd would raise its hands. Here, in Nevada, fewer than ten percent of the assembled were not yet convinced before the speech. And after this show, he seemed to have closed the deal with virtually all of them.
The flap over the proposed Yucca Mountain high level nuclear waste dump also came up (The Field vetted the facts of it earlier today). Here, again, Obama went ballistic on Clinton, but with humor.
Zeleny, again, quoting the candidate:
“I have said over and over again that I’m against Yucca. I’m against Yucca mountain. I’ve never been for it – never said I’m for it,” Mr. Obama said. “Suddenly you got the Clinton campaign saying, ‘He’s for Yucca.” What part of I’m not for Yucca do you not understand?”
Tonight was the roll out not just for the closing argument here in Nevada, but a hint of what's to come next week in South Carolina and on Tsunami Tuesday on February 5. It’s classic political jiu-jitsu: His adversary over reached, and Obama’s new stump speech uses that lunge now against Clinton. For all the talk late last year about “when the fun starts,” tonight had a real sense of fun, unforced, authentic, scathing without being mean, and a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. The candidate clearly enjoyed it, and so did every one else present. Even the often stone-faced national press corps seemed to let its hair down and laugh aloud at these bon bons.
It was probably, also, an exquisite dish, served cold, with which to begin a memorable birthday dinner.