Bexley, Ohio: During his three-minute chat on Tuesday with the
man introducing him to 3,300 supporters at a campaign rally here,
President Obama achieved four must-dos in every politician's instruction
manual.Display Familiarity: "Steven!" Mr Obama called out, striding into the holding room where a nervous Steven DeBusk, 26, awaited, clutching his opening remarks. "You're a BMX cyclist? I've been watching those guys on TV during the Olympics."
Display Arcane Knowledge: After Mr DeBusk said that he does not race around the track like in the Olympics (although he has, he said, learned to fall on his shoulder instead of his rump), Mr. Obama nodded. "Yeah, you ride freestyle," he said, stunning the Capital University senior with his apparent knowledge of the difference between street BMX and the track runs.
Use Available Prop: Seconds later, Mr Obama turned to his body man, Marvin Nicholson. During the Olympics, "they were falling all over the place, weren't they?" Mr Obama said. Mr Nicholson nodded vigorously.
Show You've Paid Attention: Exactly 2 minutes and 53 seconds into the interchange, Mr Obama was patting Mr DeBusk on the back and showing him out the door. "Break a shoulder!" Mr Obama said.
It is campaign season, and Barack Obama is on. He is relaxed. His squeamishness about edgy partisanship is long gone. And he does not start late or run over.
In Bexley, he jogged onstage exactly on schedule with "City of Blinding Lights" by U2 playing and the ecstatic crowd cheering. "Hello, Crusaders!" he shouted, using the name of the university's sports team. If his remarks are supposed to start at 1 pm, then at 1 pm they will start. A week ago in New Hampshire, he even started 54 minutes early.
In a re-election campaign in which his mostly multiracial crowds are smaller than in 2008 (he is no longer the fresh new face, and the Secret Service frowns on those 100,000-plus throngs), Mr Obama is a scheduler's dream, a walking, talking, handshaking, baby-hugging prototype of campaign efficiency. He takes less than a second to shake a hand and in 10 seconds can polish off seven greetings.
For the woman with a blond wig, false eyelashes and bright pink lipstick? A pat on the shoulder. Excited tween in a pink Obama T-shirt? A smile. Two giggling, beaming women, waving a camera phone? The president put an arm around each and flashed a grin at the lens.
Sometimes that efficiency punctures a crowd's euphoria. After waiting for hours to see Mr Obama, crowds almost always greet him with fever-pitch cheers. And, every time, instead of riding the mood with a big opener, Mr Obama lets out some air with a long list of acknowledgments of local politicians in the hall.
"You've got your own attorney general, Tom Miller, in the house," he said in Waterloo, Iowa, two weeks ago, immediately quieting the crowd, which had been hooting and hollering. "Congressman Bruce Braley is here," he said as the applause got even more tepid.
After deflating the crowd, Mr Obama starts cranking it up again. He begins by assuming the persona of wherever he happens to be, inserting place-specific asides.
In New Hampshire last weekend, he was suddenly Mr New England. "Thank you for returning Malia and Sasha safe and sound," Mr Obama said. "They were up here for camp for a month."
In Iowa two weeks ago, the president became Joe Six-Pack, talking about beer at every stop. "Pork chop and beer," he reported proudly to the crowd in Dubuque when asked by the first lady, Michelle Obama, what he had eaten at the Iowa State Fair. At a coffee shop in Knoxville, the president chatted with a man about how he had installed a brewery at the White House, and, oh, just happened to have a few bottles of the home-brew back on his bus. Then he sent someone to Ground Force One to get the man a bottle.
On the Capital University campus in Bexley on Tuesday, the president of the most powerful country on earth transformed into the graduate plagued by student loans. "We did not finish paying off our student loans until about eight years ago," he told the crowd of students, talking about how he and Mrs Obama graduated from college with "a mountain of debt."
Anyone who follows politics could see what was coming from a mile away, and Mr Obama delivered. "Governor Romney said, if you want to go to college or start a business, you can just - and I'm quoting here - 'borrow money if you have to from your parents.' " The audience, of course, booed. Mr Obama was not done. "Not everybody has parents who have the money to lend. That may be news to some folks, but it's the truth."
By the speech's end, he was emoting into the microphone like a preacher. "If you're willing to stand with me, and vote for me, and organize with me, and knock on doors and make phone calls with me, we will finish what we started. We will win Ohio. We will win this election. And we will remind the world why the United States of America is the greatest nation on earth!"
He's done. Right on schedule, at 1:27 p.m. The Bruce Springsteen song "We Take Care of Our Own" is playing, and Mr Obama is plunging into the rope line, grabbing the frantic hands stretched his way. He will shake hands and kiss babies and pose for photos for precisely six and a half minutes, through the Springsteen anthem and halfway into the Brooks & Dunn tune "Only in America."
By the time the country duo sing about the "sun going down on an LA freeway," Mr Obama is headed out the door.
On to the next event.
© 2012, The New York Times News Service
