DANIEL SCHORR: Not everybody was surprised by the emergence of a Barack Obama coalition of the young and the independent rallying around the magical word, change.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
NPR senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr.
SCHORR: As long ago as last February, a Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, wrote in the student newspaper, The Crimson, that Democrats and some Republicans would respond to Obama's political message that he had the great potential to unify this divided nation. Obama doesn't have a lock on the word change; "it's time for a change" is a staple of political campaigns.
And Senator Hillary Clinton has responded to Obama by citing her 35 years of fighting for change. But that was still looking backward. The 70 percent of Americans who tell pollsters that America's on the wrong track seem to be demanding a break with the corrupt and partisan past and a new set of names, faces and ideas.
It may or may not be relevant that Senator Obama, at 46, is the youngest of the candidates on both sides. It's commonplace to say that Iowa is oddball and atypical. It tells you nothing about what will happen in subsequent contests, starting with New Hampshire. But if that was ever true, it is no longer true. The networks, which have been giving unprecedented time to this political spectator sport, have helped to nationalize these state-by-state primaries.
And there seems to be no doubt about a spillover effect from Iowa in New Hampshire and beyond. Obama is probably justified in saying, as he did in his Iowa victory speech, that this is a defining moment in history. He's reaching for the high ground with a unifying theme of moving on from the bitterness and pettiness and anger that have consumed Washington. This campaign, as few would have foreseen, may be turning into a transforming event.
This is Daniel Schorr.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is NPR, National Public Radio.