Obama's Historic Victory
By Joe Klein/Des Moines

Barack Obama's first words after winning the Iowa caucus were intended for history and they were gorgeous: "They said this day would never come." Perhaps he was thinking small. Perhaps he was thinking about the long days in July and August and September when he trudged along the trail, well behind Hillary Clinton — who seemed a juggernaut at that point. Perhaps he was thinking back to his childhood, to the father who barely knew him and the mother who let her parents do most of the child rearing. But I suspect he was thinking bigger, back to Martin Luther King — and King's dream that someday his children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

That day has now come, at the highest level of American politics. A black man with a dangerous-sounding foreign name trounced his opponents in the nearly all-white state of Iowa. And he did so because, after spending months getting to know him, the people of Iowa stopped seeing his color and began to admire his character. In an election where the word "change" became an almost meaningless talisman, Iowa's triumph over race is a message to the world about the real nature of America — and a ratification of Obama's belief that this will be an election year where everything is on the table, where all the conventional wisdom can be tossed aside, where anything, including decency, is possible.

It was a night that was historic in ways large and small. The sheer size of the Democratic turnout — 236,000 people, nearly twice as many as 2004 — distorted the caucus process.

The second-tier candidates, who need 15% of the total at each caucus to win delegates, found themselves overwhelmed by armies — the very well run organizations of Obama, Clinton and Edwards. Forced to make second choices, the overwhelming majority chose Obama.
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