Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Obama draws more than 20,000 in St Louis

Sunday, 3rd February 2008

You know when you’re getting near to an Obama event as the traffic becomes horribly snarled up. The man’s ability to bring the voters out is quite astonishing and today he rounded off a day of impressive crowds with a rally of more than 20,000 people here in St Louis.

Elections are not decided by crowd sizes and a Senator from Illinois should be able to draw a good crowd in the next door state but the huge numbers that Obama attracts attests to the uniqueness of his candidacy. Obama’s warm up speaker, Senator Claire McCaskill who won a tough Senate race here in 2006, asked the crowd to “look at how this room looks and how much it looks like America” before declaring that this is “the sweet spot of democracy” and something that could “only happen in America”.

Obama is clearly feeling the momentum and delivered a confident almost cocky performance. His main aim seemed to be to appeal to the downscale white voters that he has so far failed to break through with. So, there was praise for their departed champion John Edwards who Obama hinted would be a “critical part of the Democratic effort this fall”, and more policy beef on everything from job creation to healthcare to making college more affordable.

Here in a state with a large rural population, Obama also stressed his plans to revive the countryside economically with so-called “green collar jobs”—this is a popular topic here in Missouri with Bill Clinton also talking about it today.

The latest poll here has Obama four points behind Hillary in Missouri. After tonight, one wouldn’t bet against Obama turning this margin around. If he did so, it would likely be enough to ensure that his campaign gets to go on to fight on the more favourable post Super Tuesday terrain. The Clintons clearly realise how important this contest is and are following up Bill’s Saturday visit with a Hillary appearance on Sunday. It appears that Missouri is the bellwether once more.