President Obama

A friend emailed to say that he was worried about Obama's victory speech. It sounded too messianic. Some people like this sort of thing: Andrew Sullivan knows hope and was assumed straight into heaven last night. But as against Howard Dean's primal scream, the Chicago boy went in the orotund, let-my-people-go direction. The air of election was upon him, as Harold Bloom might have put it if Harold Bloom were trying to sleep with Obama.

One might easily write this off as the fervor of a hard-won first victory in a long campaign. But the wisecracks have already started:

Obama did work a new joke into his speech. Referring to his new status as the Democratic front-runner, he said: "This feels good. It's just like I imagined it when I was talking to my Kindergarten teacher."

The problem is, he's still not the Democratic front-runner. He's behind Hillary in all the national polls by a substantial margin and, as I noted earlier, he cleared what was a potentially dealbreaking obstacle for him only. Hillary could afford to lose Iowa; Obama could not.

The press has unsurprisingly focused on his race as the starkest factor in the Iowa win: A Lillywhite state goes head over heels for a black man. No doubt that is historic, but more significant is Obama's religiosity to a deeply Christian, Midwestern polity. Sixty percent of the Republican caucus-goers identified as evangelical, to which fact we can attribute almost entirely Mike Huckabee's win. (Were we hearing so much about "breaking the mold" and defying the "conventional wisdom" when Pat Robertson convinced a sizable number of field of dreamers he was the man for the White House in 1988?) How many Democrats are equally faith-minded? And doesn't Obama make a more convincing person of God than Hillary does?