The new American dream

IOWA voter Kathy Matthews saw America's hunger for change up close and personal last week when she turned up to vote in the state primary – to find double the number of expected voters, all hoping to be part of history.

A school gym in North Liberty, a commuter town outside the capital Des Moines, had been set aside for Democrat voters, with 300 expected. Instead, 600 showed up, cramming the hall and overflowing into the corridors. Matthews, a doctor, was not surprised. "There's a very strong sense among those I know that we are interested in change," she said.

In Iowa on Thursday it was Barack Obama, a senator of just three years experience, who found himself the beneficiary of the country's hunger for a new future – although his supporters prefer to believe Obama himself is the inspiration for this mood. In Iowa City, the state capital, Obama also won a symbolic victory – this one in coffee beans.

For the second primary in a row, the Hamburg Inn coffee house held its 'Coffee Bean Election', in which each customer votes by dropping a coffee bean in a jar. The tradition, which featured on an episode of The West Wing in 2005, made the cafe a stopping-off point for most of the leading candidates.

And the result was thunderous with 1,733 beans for Obama, while his rivals did not even get half that amount. Hamburg Inn manager Noah Hudson, 26, put his bean in the Obama jar. "He was really popular, especially among the young," Hudson said yesterday. "I think he's the most progressive; he seems to have a lot of spirit."

Obama is now riding a wave of support into the next primary, in New Hampshire on Tuesday, with his party's presidential candidacy in his sights. But Iowa was not all just about Obama: Dr Matthews voted for John Edwards, the most left-wing of the candidates, whose own message for radical change in healthcare saw him snatch a surprise second place, bundling the former front-runner Hillary Clinton into third.

Dr Matthews is not surprised. "Many people would be for Obama or Edwards," she said. "Clinton is a little too much a part of the big business – a bit too much bought and sold."

America is looking for someone it can believe in, at an uncertain time. That Obama is the recipient of this yearning for change has caught the political establishment by surprise – and none more so than the Clinton campaign.

Obama's presidential ambitions became clear only 14 months ago with the publication of his book The Audacity of Hope. Time magazine put him on its cover and a speech he gave in Seattle was promptly sold out with the appearance of ticket touts – unheard of in most political events.

In January last year the Clinton campaign, which had focused on John Edwards as the key opponent, was shocked when four leading Democratic Party fund-raisers gave Obama their support.

Obama's campaign picked up momentum in the summer as funds poured in, and, while he never matched the Clinton war chest, he boasted of having more individual donations, and less corporate ones.

Obama's tone also surprised many. While he speaks the language of hope and change, his style is sober rather than rabble-rousing, often disappointing his young audiences, preferring talk of consensus to that of confrontation.

Joe Klein, author of Primary Colours, is one of his many fans. After Obama said in his victory speech that "some said this day would never come", Klein wrote in Time magazine: "I suspect he was thinking back to Martin Luther King – and King's dream that some day his children would not be judged by the colour 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."

Obama is being embraced by a public gripped by a sense of crisis. It is there in the thousands of empty homes, built in a housing boom that has gone flat, and in the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is threatening to tip the entire economy into recession.

The middle classes are being squeezed from all sides: the economic slowdown and negative equity are eating away at their savings, while the costs of health care, most of which is private, are spiralling.

The much trumped tax cut turned out to benefit only the very rich. Blue collar workers are, meanwhile, anxious about the rising tide of illegal immigration.

And then there is Iraq. While the "troop surge" has lessened the violence, Americans see no sign of an end to the conflict. Voters have grown tired of the circular logic of the Bush generals who claim that only by keeping troops in the country can the violence be quelled.

Above all, perhaps, is the feeling of drift: key members of the Bush administration, including the former election guru Karl Rove, have quit, and the White House seems almost to have given up trying to justify its actions.

The failures of the Bush White House are only part of the disillusionment: Bush's 28% approval ratings look positively rosy compared to that of the Democrat-controlled Congress which hovers at an all-time low of 14%.

What has stunned the Democratic political establishment in the wake of Iowa is that voters have opted for the more radical candidates at the expense of Hillary Clinton, the self-styled "safe pair of hands". Her message in the run-up to the primaries was that in times of trouble she was the person who knew her way around the corridors of power; being part of the machine was an asset.

Instead, Iowa Democrats rejected the safe option: put together, the Obama-Edwards vote counted for 58% of voters, including a huge majority of young people. Obama's victory speech, in which he praised voters for "choosing hope over fear", was a truth in more ways than one.

For Democrats at North Liberty, the result mattered less than the numbers game: in a pattern repeated across the state, Democrats outnumbered Republican voters, corralled in another part of the school, by two-to-one. "We all felt that any of the (Democrat] candidates would be better than the other (Republican] candidates," Dr Matthews said.

If Obama carries New Hampshire on Tuesday – and the latest polls suggest he is closing fast on front-runner Clinton – his problem will then become deciding just what change should involve. For now, voters are content with vagueness: on Iraq, a draw-down of troops; on health care, more funding by the state; on the economy, an attempt to cut America's record national debt.

These are not easy choices. Insurance companies will fight tooth-and-nail against health reform, and transforming it at a stroke from a private system to one funded by taxes defeated the best efforts of Bill Clinton's presidency.

Likewise on Iraq, any pull-out of US troops without progress on democracy may see Iraq implode into the kind of terrorist haven that would pose long-term problems for America.

As for the spiralling national debt, Americans are saddled with it. Democrats will find cuts in government spending politically unacceptable, while a tax increase will make the middle classes shudder.

But for Obama, there is relief that the problems predicted to hold him back appear to have evaporated. The race issue was no problem for him in Iowa – and this in a country where racial tension remains a burning issue, four decades after the civil rights movement. Nor does his "inexperience", with just three years in the Senate, appear to count against him – possibly because the huge amount of experience in the current government has produced so many disasters.

For Hillary Clinton, the result is a humiliation. Having cast herself as the "old hand" she will find it difficult to retool her campaign message in time for the New Hampshire primary.

A victory there might yet rescue her fortunes, but she remains a hugely divisive candidate. Polls show Clinton has none of the "crossover" support from independents and moderate Republicans that Obama and Edwards could both command and which was the key to the success of her husband's election in 1992.

Her years in the White House saw criticism that she was acting as an unelected double to her husband, criticism sharpened by her famous remark: "We are the president." Nor will she shake off her reputation for being a pawn of lobbyists.

And then there is the problem of the dynasty: America prides itself on being a republic, having fought a war to be independent of a monarchy. Yet if Clinton wins in November, the country will have been governed for 24 years by members of either the Bush or the Clinton family – hardly an advertisement for the power of democracy.

Few voters think Hillary alone, without her husband's backing, would have won this tilt at power, any more than they think George W Bush would have been anointed a candidate without his father's influence.

For voters like Dr Matthews, the priority is to put someone in the White House who will rebuild America's battered reputation abroad, undoing the bad feeling left over from the high-handedness that characterised the invasion of Iraq.

"It is important to chase out the heirs of the Bush administration and rebuild the nation's prestige abroad," she said. "There's a feeling of embarrassment at what our country has turned into."