After a win, Obama has no time to lose

“We’re being blocked by another candidate’s motorcade,” an Obama aide said into his radio, as Secret Service agents tried to negotiate an end to the standoff. “We’re trying to go around, but it doesn’t look good.”

No, it doesn’t.

Just four days separate the Iowa caucuses from the New Hampshire primary, causing an accelerated sprint from one state to the next, and the candidates and staffs—already exhausted because of Iow—are in for a gruelling weekend.

When Obama finally made it past the Clinton blockade at the Des Moines airport, the new front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination climbed aboard his campaign plane, a lumbering, old DC-9 with the dubious name “USA Jet” on it. For a man who had just pulled off a stunning victory in Iowa, he looked neither fired up nor ready to go; mostly, he looked as if he needed to see his pillow. “My throat is hoarse, but my spirits are good,” the tired candidate announced to reporters on the plane.

Senator, how is the race different now?

“Um,” said the usually loquacious leader, “We won the first caucus.”

Any changes to the campaign planned?

“It’s not broken… why fix it?” Obama parried, with his newfound economy of words.

Reporters continued to call out questions until Obama broke it off: “All right, let me go to sleep.”

But not for long. His plane touched down in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, giving him just a couple of hours of downtime before a full day of campaign events and three more days like it to follow.

The fatigued synapses are already showing. At a rally in an airport hangar in Portsmouth, Obama apologised to the crowd because “my throat’s a little sore.”

Then the famously silver-tongued candidate read his way through a new stump speech and nearly stumbled into what, coming from the current President’s mouth, would be called a Bushism. America needs “a president who,” Obama says, “will be (pause) willing to (pause) be disagree (pause).” He tried again: —Will… will be willing to disagree with you without being disagreeable.”

Whew.

Clinton, knocked from her front-runner perch on Thursday night, seemed in an even worse state of weariness. She began her trip through New Hampshire by disparaging Iowa, the state she had been wooing for the past year, for a caucus system that doesn’t allow for voters who simply can’t show up. “This is a new state,” she said at a diner in Manchester. “You’re not disenfranchised if you work at night. You’re not disenfranchised if you’re not in the state.”

At the moment, Clinton seems to be the one in danger of disenfranchisement. She had only a couple hundred people at her arrival rally in an airport hangar. At Obama’s arrival rally, 1,000 people or more filled the old Pan Am hangar.