Jon Ralston finds Obama retargeting ‘change’ mantra from GOP foes to Clinton

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Amid Barack Obama’s invocations of JFK and MLK, nestled inside his soaring rhetoric that energized the crowds at the Culinary Union headquarters and Del Sol High School, were words indicating a change of a very different kind.

This election, at least for the moment, is not as much about “bringing jobs to the jobless, hope to the hopeless” or engaging people who “are hungry for a new kind of politics” as it is about Obama putting aside or at least putting in perspective his gauzy idealism and focusing on only one change that matters in the short run: demonizing Hillary Clinton as an impediment to change, as a relic of the past.

You have heard strains of it before. But as the music thrummed through that gym Friday night, the signs bobbing with the beat clearly had a double meaning.

“Change We Can Believe In.” The slogan may seem upbeat and hopeful, but what it signifies now for the Obama campaign is that Clinton is change that can’t be believed and now Obama is not afraid to amplify it. Just listen to what he said and the Illinois senator has an uncanny ability to contrast without seeming to criticize, to thrust deftly like a swordsman with a lightning-quick epee that draws blood before you know a blow has been struck.

For many Democrats, George W. Bush and the Republicans running for president are a “they” to be reviled. But for now and when the political archaeologists excavate this presidential race for clues, they will find the change in the Obama campaign began in Nevada his “they” is Hillary Clinton.

“They say, ‘Obama may have good ideas, he may be inspiring, but he hasn’t been in Washington long enough,’” Obama told the Culinary members. “They want to season and stew me and boil all the hope out of me.”

They. He’s not talking about John McCain. He’s talking about Hillary Clinton.

“The real gamble is having the same old folks doing the same old thing over and over again,” Obama declared a few moments later.

The same old folks. He’s not talking about Mitt Romney. He’s talking about Hillary Clinton.

“I talk about hope a lot,” he said a couple of hours later at the high school. “Some people say, ‘He’s so naive, his head’s in the clouds, he’s a hope-monger.”

Some people. He’s not talking about Rudy Giuliani. He’s talking about Hillary Clinton.

There was more, too. Consider Obama’s offhand ridiculing of that attempt weeks ago by the Clinton campaign to bring up Obama’s childhood ambitions to be president. And you know whom he was referring to when he proximately declared, “I’m not running because I thought somehow this was owed to me or that it was my turn.”

The candidate of the heart is now using his head to directly confront a campaign train that is similarly recasting itself after going off the tracks in Iowa, morphing from The Inevitability Express to The Sensitivity Tour.

The day before Obama was issuing his thinly veiled broadsides, Clinton was emoting in a Las Vegas neighborhood, and people were responding. As he tries to become less real for political reasons, she is trying to become more real for political reasons.

In so doing, though, he will have to confront very real issues about his candidacy that have mostly been overwhelmed by his nonpareil oratorical abilities. When I write that the presidential hopeful was a state senator a state senator! just more than three years ago, it’s hard not to include the exclamation point in that sentence. And when he talks about words mattering, as they do, he also has to confront the reality that deeds and experience do, too.

But more than anything, whatever the Obama phenomenon is, no matter how real it palpably has become at Nevada venues and elsewhere, winning is about more than hope and change.

And in less than a week, in the caucus that could change the course of this race, winning will be as much about grass-roots politics and confrontational, bitter trench warfare. A lawsuit that threatens to undermine the Culinary’s influence for Obama could do more damage to his chances than anything.

That is change Obama cannot afford, but it is now more real than any of his words that resonated Friday.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program “Face to Face With Jon Ralston” on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the daily e-mail newsletter “RalstonFlash.com.” His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or at [email protected].