The disappointingly conventional Obama campaign.

A few weeks ago, Barack Obama added a new coda to his stump speech. In the telling, versions of which I heard about six times earlier this month, Obama wakes up at the crack of dawn. His staff reminds him that, for reasons he can't remember, he has promised to visit a supporter in the tiny town of Greenwood, South Carolina, more than an hour's drive from where he has overnighted. Departure time: six a.m. He opens the morning's paper to find "a bad story" about himself. Tired and cranky, he steps out into a downpour, and his umbrella blows inside out. On the interminable drive, "my staff's not talking to me because they know I'm in a bad mood." Obama arrives at a small building to find a mere 20 supporters. "And they don't look too happy to be there, either." The mood shifts, however, when an elderly woman in the back strikes up a call-and-response cheer. "Fire it up!" she shouts. "Ready to go!" answers the group. Obama describes being baffled at first. But then, he says, "I'm startin' to feel fired up! I'm feeling ready to go!" At big rallies, the recitation of the anecdote culminates with Obama himself leading a spirited call and response with his crowd. "Fire it up!" "Ready to go!" "Fire it up!" "Ready to go!"It's an uplifting story. But it's also, notably, one about a cranky candidate who needs firing up in the first place. I saw hints of this while traveling with Obama in Iowa in September. Before taking questions from an audience, Obama usually seeks to preempt long-winded queries by reminding the crowd of a few ground rules, including that "I'm the only one who gets to make a speech." It's a reasonable request, perhaps, but one most politicians resist. Instead, Obama repeats it. At a riverside rally in Davenport, he teased an African American World War II veteran for "giving such a long speech." It was a light moment, but, the next day, Obama was at it again. At a bucolic Maquoketa park, a woman stood up holding a prewritten question. "I'm very nervous," she said. Obama told her not to be, but, when he saw her holding a handwritten question, he blurted, "I hope that doesn't take up the whole page!" In a quavering voice, the woman offered a rambling account of struggling through economic insecurity. "So, you want me to focus on the economy?" Obama asked. He proceeded to recount his six-point economic plan--bloodlessly skipping past the woman's personal distress. Lip-biting empathy this was not. Obama actually lost his cool a few days later, at a rally in Washington, D.C. The lanky senator was in the middle of charging up a large and enthusiastic crowd with a riff about reforming politics when he suddenly stopped and looked down at a small group of people near the edge of his stage who had been making noise. "I'm sorry--do you guys want to get up here and speak?" Obama scolded sarcastically, his words booming through downtown Washington. After a brief, awkward pause he carried on--but with his concentration broken and at a slightly cooler temperature. To be sure, Obama is hardly some Cheney-esque sourpuss; he's usually pretty chipper--if subdued--on the stump. But it's easy to understand why Obama might often find himself in a bad mood these days. Back when he launched his campaign, he promised it would be something different: an experiment in electoral politics that would discard the cynical tropes of consultantdriven electioneering. In place of slash-and-burn tactics, he would conduct something more rarefied, a mix of inspiring rhetoric and high-level discussion. Obama's February announcement speech in Springfield, Illinois bemoaned "the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems." This critique made for a lyrical book, The Audacity of Hope, and elicited record donations. But it's been little match for the Hillary Clinton machine. Obama trails Hillary by as much as 20 points in national polls--and even more in some New Hampshire surveys. The limitations of Obama's unconventional campaign are now setting him toward a less audacious style of politics. Having failed to sweep Democrats off their collective feet with his message of hope, Obama's fate will hinge less on sunny lyricism than on a cruder brand of politics, one more befitting past paint-by-numbers candidates like John Kerry or Richard Gephardt than any political messiah. By adopting these conventional tactics, the Obama campaign has a plausible, albeit daunting, path to the nomination. But it does raise an important question, one that occurred to me as I watched his flashes of grumpiness: Can he stomach it? When Obama joined the race, there were two basic pillars to his candidacy. One of them was that he presents a young face in contrast to the timeworn Clinton brand (not to mention the coterie of drab white men in the field). The other was that Obama was the only serious candidate to oppose the Iraq war from the very beginning. Back when antiwar liberals constantly heckled Hillary at public appearances, this second factor might have been a silver bullet. But Clinton has repositioned herself as a devoutly antiwar candidate. The number- one item on a list of top "10 Reasons to support Hillary Clinton" on her website is "To end the war in Iraq," and polls now show that Hillary is the top choice of Democratic voters for whom ending the war is the highest priority. Hillary has turned voter fatigue over her checkered 14 years in Washington into an asset, beating Obama in the "experience" debate. And, most recently, the slick rollout of her health care campaign flipped that issue from a black mark on her record into what polls show to be another source of strength. While the press has marveled at the deftness of Clinton's maneuvers, she has had some help. Namely, for many months, her rhetoric has gone largely unchallenged by her closest competitor. Though Obama often snipes at Hillary as a Washington insider who would be a divisive candidate, he rarely does so by name or with a pointed edge that might put her on the defensive. In fact, Obama has carefully distanced himself from his campaign's two significant clashes with Hillary. After David Geffen trashed the Clintons in a Maureen Dowd column last February, the two campaigns scuffled in the press, leading Obama to declare, "We have to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it customarily is played." And, after his campaign sent reporters a ham-fisted opposition-research document linking Clinton ("D-Punjab") to the outsourcing of jobs in India, Obama called the memo "stupid and caustic" and rebuked his staff. "Clinton's baiting Obama into a unilateral nonaggression pact was maybe the single most race-changing event we've seen," says an aide from a third campaign. There's a recent antecedent for this pacifist style: Bill Bradley's campaign against Al Gore. Like Obama, Bradley campaigned on poetic themes of hope and changing the political status quo. And, like Obama, Bradley disdained negative campaigning. Whereas Obama posits the "politics of hope" against the "politics of fear," Bradley spoke of "a contrast between a politics that's nothing but tactics, and a politics that's based on ideals and beliefs." To one veteran of the Bradley campaign, Obama is making a grave mistake. "You cannot, in a competitive Democratic primary, create 'a new kind of politics,'" says Michael Powell, a former senior adviser to Bradley. "It leads to a warped logic that you end up not defending your own positions and you don't challenge the views of your opponents." Bradley, at least, organized his campaign around a universal health care plan that challenged Gore's cautious piecemeal approach; Obama has no contrastdrawing policy equivalent. From the future of Iraq to health care to tax policy, Obama's plans are either similar to or less ambitious than those of his opponents. Obama aides scold the Washington press for obsessing over attack politics. "Folks in Washington get so whipped up about the lack of hand-to-hand combat," chides Obama spokesman Bill Burton. But there's evidence that Obama's poor polling is leading him toward tougher rhetoric. Recently, he noted that "both parties" have failed to enact universal health care or energy independence--a swipe at Bill Clinton's legacy--and took another shot at the Clintonites by bashing "people who think politics is a game." A key question is whether Obama will finally launch a caustic television ad--perhaps aimed at Hillary's war vote. But that line of assault would come with clear perils. "The press keeps saying 'He's got to attack her, he's got to attack her,'" adds Michael Powell. "And, eventually, he may get pushed into that. And, when he finally does, they'll say, 'You said you wanted to create a new kind of politics!'" Recently, I visited Obama's sprawling headquarters, located on the eleventh floor of a downtown Chicago high-rise that offers grand views of the city's skyline. I ran into Obama's wiry campaign manager, David Plouffe, chatting in a doorway. I mentioned to Plouffe that I had just returned from Iowa. "Iowa-- that's the whole shebang!" he said. Then he paused. "I guess I'm not supposed to say that," he added with a grin. "But Iowa is very important." In a recent memo e-mailed to campaign supporters, he all but predicted that an Iowa win would translate to victory in New Hampshire. "Clinton will pay a severe price for not winning Iowa," Plouffe asserts. Although the national press has coronated Hillary Clinton as the field's clear front-runner, the picture is quite different in Iowa, whose early-January caucuses will be the first test of the season. Everyone agrees that the state remains a three-way tie between Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards (who effectively moved to the state after 2004--such is the benefit of not having a real day job), with vast numbers of Iowans saying they haven't made up their minds. It may be Obama's salvation that Iowa is the one place where Clinton's methodical precision hasn't been evident. Some Iowans may have been miffed this spring when a memo leaked from her campaign arguing that she should skip the caucuses altogether. The memo conceded that Hillary "will not have a financial advantage or an organizational advantage over any of our opponents" that would enable a decisive win. Soon after, Clinton shook up her Iowa staff. But that didn't solve all the problems: In a little-noted move last month, Clinton's deputy state director and caucus manager, Angelique Pirozzi, also left the campaign. (It's not clear whether Pirozzi quit or was fired, although, shortly before her departure, The Des Moines Register published a letter to the editor from a walk-in Clinton volunteer saying he decided to support Obama after seeing three Clinton field workers reduced to tears by "the abuse they took" from superiors.) Not only is Hillary vulnerable in Iowa, Obama has an impressive operation there. It includes 31 field offices--nearly double the number for any other campaign, according to the estimate of one Obama aide. The campaign also brags about its performance at the mid-September steak fry hosted by Senator Tom Harkin, where Obama grandly marched in at the head of a throng of supporters that numbered roughly 3,000--perhaps a quarter of the event's overall attendance. This may have amounted to little more than peacock strutting, but everyone had an interest in showing the best feathers. When describing their Iowa strategy, Obama aides inevitably begin to wax enthusiastic about their courtship of younger voters, notorious caucus absentees. One prime target: high school students. "The biggest untold story of the Iowa caucus is that you only have to be eighteen by the general election to participate," says Hans Reimer, former political director of MTV's Rock the Vote and now an Obama organizer. Although Iowa has nearly 40,000 high school seniors, only "a couple hundred" caucused in 2004. Reimer says that online social networking forums like Facebook mean that, "for the first time, we know who these kids are" and can actually organize them. ("Barack Stars," the campaign calls its contingent of students.) This is important given that caucus- goers are generally older--nearly two-thirds in 2004 were at least 50 years old- -a cohort that disproportionately favors Hillary Clinton. "Senator Obama has reached out and excited folks who haven't traditionally caucused," says former Iowa Democratic chairman Gordon Fischer, who recently endorsed Obama. Fischer recalls being amazed at a turnout of 10,000 people at a recent rally in Iowa City: "That was just unheard of! The sixty-four-thousanddollar question is whether he can get them to show up on caucus night." Of course, that was the same question Howard Dean faced four years ago. It seems that Howard Dean has deeply influenced the evolution of Obamaland. The Dean campaign, of course, reveled in its unconventionality. Led by its jocular guru, Joe Trippi, the campaign claimed to break the rules of American politics. And its headquarters reflected this freewheeling spirit. It was packed with rookies, geeks, and offbeat characters like Internet organizer Zephyr Teachout. Obama appears to have studied the Dean model--and run in the other direction, despite the many similarities between the antiwar, anti-Washington messages of the two campaigns. An organizational flow chart tells you everything you need to know. His chief strategist, David Axelrod, is a product of cutthroat Chicago politics who worked for John Edwards in 2004. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, managed Richard Gephardt's 2004 presidential bid and ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before that. Senior strategist and adman Jim Margolis is a top adviser to Senate Democrats and cut spots for John Kerry in the last election. Obama's press aides are drawn from Capitol Hill, including communications director Robert Gibbs, who worked in Obama's Senate office and, before that, on the Kerry campaign. In other words, it's no wonder the campaign has taken such a conventional turn. That's the organization's true character. And, in this case, it might not be such a bad thing. As Obama aides point out, while voters know everything there is to know about Hillary, they're still hardly acquainted with Obama-- beyond the image of "a black guy who gave a great speech," as one of his advisers put it to me. Before his Iowa events, for instance, aides lead an "Obama trivia" quiz, in which supporters are asked his favorite board game (Scrabble) and first real job (community organizer). That means Obama still has a chance to break through with the public. But he'll only have that chance if he wins Iowa. And doing so may require attacking Hillary, as well as deploying old-fashioned methods for dragging voters to the caucuses--a methodology that Axelrod and company know from hoary experience. While these tactics may come naturally to Obama's operatives, they may not come as easily to the candidate. Even as his campaign has launched new offensives against Hillary, he remains curiously unable to utter her name in a harsh context. In mid-September, I attended an address Obama delivered about the Iraq war. The speech was filled with passages, clearly aimed at Clinton, about how politicians with "experience" in Washington "failed to ask hard questions" on the eve of the American invasion. But her name never passed Obama's lips. Instead, Obama seemed to be relying on the location of his speech- -the town of Clinton, Iowa-- to make his point. Yet few Iowa papers gave the Clinton angle much attention, focusing instead on his plan for withdrawal for Iraq, which itself doesn't differ much from Hillary's. Obama is the truest believer in his crusade to transform American politics-- the truest believer in the "audacity of hope." In his book of the same name, Obama writes passionately about the coarsening effect of the political process-- and negative campaigning in particular. He laments the way politicians' "mistakes [are] trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. " He asks, "What happened to make these men and women appear as the grim, uncompromising, insincere and occasionally mean characters that populate our nightly news?" Fear of becoming this stock character courses through his prose. Ultimately, then, the fate of his campaign hinges on his internal monologue. Can he accept running a campaign that doesn't match his high-minded ideals--one that may come down to attack ads and a gritty Iowa ground game? And will he understand that people are trying to get him "fired up" because they're worried he hasn't done it on his own?