One of the biggest kick-offs in Caucus history
Wow. One good thing Yepson points out is that there was a good cross-section of Iowans there. A big mistake in Iowa is to bring in people from your home state to do the door knocking and such. Your organizers and such can be operatives and such, but it’s far better to have neighbors doing it in Iowa where the personal relationship means far more.
I’m an Edwards partisan, and I am just blown away by all these statistics about Obama. What’s the One Million Strong facebook group at … 250,000? All because some dude just decided it’d be fun. Can any other campaign come within an order of magnitude of that sort of spontaneous reaction? 19,000 at his announcement … again, that’s larger than other announcements by a factor of 10. I suspect his first IA event was not 10x larger than Edwards or Hillary’s. But otherwise, this is real Bobby Kennedy type, game-changing type stuff.
To be sure, Obama has hurdles; polls in Michigan, South Carolina, and North Carolina show HRC leading among African-American Democrats in those states. And the Iowa press and Democratic electorate loves John Edwards. But it’s all very impressive.
Adding. Oh, Yepson has stats: 5,000. I watched video of Edwards’ first Iowa event; the crowd had to be measured at least 1,000. Still, larger by a factor of 2 or 3.
Nicholas, a ways back Archpundit remarked that Alan Keyes’ first polls (I think in the high 30s during summer of 2004) would be a ceiling in that Senate race.
He was right.
I say this because you list current polling as a main obstacle to Obama. It’s a short hurdle (really a speed bump).
Sen. Clinton is at a ceiling. She got a boost from her announcement that has already evaporated. She’ll get some more boosts here and there, but she essentially has nowhere to go but down. She’s a known quantity (Edwards is also to an extent) with high name recognition.
Obama, Clark, Biden, Richardson, Gravel, et al are unknown quantities to one degree or another. Each of them will gain at the expense of Clinton and Edwards.
And, so far, the only one able to demonstrate a continuous climb in the polls has been Obama.
(And I don’t have a horse in this race yet; though I’m starting to lean the more I see of these initials stages.)
FYI – It’s spelled Yepsen not Yepson.