In Iowa, Obama shedding the rock star dazzle

COLO , Iowa -- Senator Barack Obama is not big on what he calls red-meat applause lines when he campaigns in small communities like this one, 45 miles northeast of Des Moines. He does not tell many jokes. He talks in even, measured tones, and at times is so low-key that he lulls his audiences into long, if respectful, silences.

Obama likes to recount the chapters of his unusual life : growing up in Hawaii, living overseas, community organizing in Chicago, working in the Illinois Legislature, though not his years as a US senator.

He talks -- often in broad, general strokes -- about an Obama White House that would provide healthcare to all, attack global warming, improve education, fix Social Security, and end the war in Iraq.

His campaign events end almost as an afterthought, surprising voters used to the big finishes typically served up by the presidential candidates seeking their support.

"Thank you very much, everybody; have a nice day," Obama said pleasantly in Dakota City one afternoon, with a leisurely wave of a hand. He headed over to a table to sign copies of his book brought by audience members.

For most Democrats, Obama is the Illinois senator who riveted the 2004 Democratic National Convention with a keynote speech that marked him as one of the most powerful speakers his party had produced in 50 years.

But as Obama methodically worked his way across swaths of rural northern Iowa last week -- visiting diners and veterans' homes, high schools, community colleges -- it was clear that he does not want to present himself, stylistically at least, the way he did in July 2004 when he gripped Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.

He is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more-charged presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

He rarely mentions President Bush, as he disparages the partisan quarrels of Washington, and is, at most, elliptically critical of Edwards and Clinton when he notes that he had opposed the war in Iraq from the start; his two Democratic opponents voted to authorize the war in 2002.

His audiences are rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd. Yet Iowa is not the Fleet Center, and this appeal -- "letting people see how I think," as Obama put it in an interview -- could clearly go a long way in drawing the support of Iowans who are turning out in huge numbers to see him in the state where the presidential voting process will start.

"He's low-key; he speaks like a professor," said Jim Sayer, 51, a farmer from Humboldt . "Maybe I expected more emotion. But the lower key impresses me: He seems to be at the level that we are."

Mary Margaret Gran, a middle-school teacher , summed up her view the moment Obama had moved on to the next table.

"Rock star?" Gran said, offering the description herself. "That's the national moniker. But dazzle is not what he is about at all. He's peaceful."

Obama, wearing sunglasses as he sat in the back of a car that was taking him to a charter plane and then on to his home in Chicago for the Easter weekend, nodded when told what Sayer and Gran had said about him.

"I use a different style if I'm speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up folks pretty well," he said. "But when I'm in these town hall settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat. I want to give them a sense of my thought process."

Obama's reception in Iowa has certainly changed since he came here after announcing his presidential bid in February. Then, he was nearly suffocated at every campaign event with people craning for a look or a handshake or an autograph, or television crews shouting out a question.

Last week, far from the bigger cities of Iowa, there was much less press and staff, and the crowds, while still big, were manageable.