Salem, New Hampshire
Whatever else there is to be said about Hillary Clinton, she shows up on time. Almost always. Barack Obama is . . . less punctual. We'll leave it at that.
There's a basketball game in the Salem High gymnasium, so Obama's event is in the auditorium next door. It seats 750 and fills up fast. After the auditorium hits capacity, a fire marshal tells me that there are at least 2,500 people still lined up. The campaign has no idea what to do with them. They've been waiting in line for hours, most of them outside.
And there's no sign of the candidate. The Obama campaign has stopped putting start times on their event schedules. They only give "doors open" times, to avoid being charged with tardiness. Or maybe just because they've given up trying to predict when the candidate will show. The Salem event had a doors open time of 3:45. People started lining up before 2:00. And after more than two hours of sitting in school auditorium seating, I'm perilously close to playing World of Warcraft on the campaign's wireless network, just out of spite.
At 5:40, His Hopeness finally arrives. He apologizes for being late, saying that he's normally on time. He's hoarse and low-energy. For the most part, it's his usual stump speech and it's totally flat. The crowd is the same way, the applause scattered and uneven. Maybe they're exhausted from the wait. Or maybe they're just reacting to Obama. Either way, this isn't a top performance for him. He stumbles over words; the crowd doesn't even realize that he's building to his big finish until the final words of the speech. Obama can be a truly great orator. In Salem, he's very average.
It's just one event, no lasting conclusions should be drawn from any of this. Yet for whatever it's worth, Obama had the bigger crowd today. But Clinton had the more energized, receptive audience; and she delivered the better message.
