Sheila Cherizard kept her eyes on the flat-panel television in north Tampa's Hip Hop Soda Shop as Barack Obama gave one of the best speeches of his life, affirming the nation's hunger for change as demonstrated by his victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Less than nine hours later, the 34-year-old medical school graduate on sabbatical from her hospital residency caught an 8:15 a.m. Southwest Airlines flight to Manchester, N.H., her first stop on a journey that ended in the Obama campaign field office in the capital city of Concord, where she volunteered for her candidate for the short five days before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.
The temperature in Concord by late morning was 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
So much for knocking on doors for votes. "The weather might be too harsh for any of that," the daughter of Haitian immigrants conceded.
With Florida off-limits to Democratic candidates who pledged to stand by the national party's decision to strip the state of its convention delegates as punishment for moving the state's presidential primary to Jan. 29, Tampa Bay campaign volunteers find themselves needing to go north if they want to get into the action.
"If he can't come here," Cherizard said, "we'll go to Barack."
Last Thursday night was a joy for Tampa Bay Democrats, regardless of who their candidates were. Bitterly shut out of the White House for two terms of George W. Bush and feeling their oats since the 2006 midterm elections gave them control of Congress, local Democrats watched Iowans turn out in near-record numbers for the caucuses, excited about their top three candidates: Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
In Tampa Bay, Democrats held two big caucus-watching parties as a way of translating the frigid energy of the Iowa vote into action here. About 150 Pinellas Democrats gathered for a movie-screen-sized watching party at the Beach Theatre in St. Pete Beach; another 100 Democrats who support Obama met at a USF-area bar and restaurant with Cherizard, part of the Tampa Bay O-Train volunteer group.
In contrast, local Republicans held no events commemorating the Iowa Caucuses.
That discrepancy mirrored the turnout and interest level in Iowa. Nearly 230,000 Iowa Democrats caucused last week; about half that number of Republicans turned out at one of the roughly 1,800 precincts to express their preferences.
"The Democratic base is energized and active," said Kent Bailey, a Dennis Kucinich supporter from Tampa who made the trek over to the Beach Theatre. "I was pleasantly surprised to see this many people here."
So was Toni Molinaro, the chairwoman of the Pinellas Democratic Executive Committee. For her, the opportunity for activists to bond over a night of watching cold Iowa returns was a godsend, as she tries to marshal volunteers for local races that the party expects to be more competitive than they have been in years. "We really can get some gains in 2008," Molinaro said.
The optimism spread through the movie theater like a boy crying "Fire!"
"Tonight, as we gather in this place, we see the changing face of politics," said Charles McKenzie, a candidate for the Florida Legislature who gave a fiery speech reminiscent of the early civil rights years.
The changing face is not a demographic alteration; it is the hope on the visage of local Democrats, who have lived through losses in Congress and the White House and who've also seen formerly Democratic Hillsborough County become one of the state's strongholds for conservative Republican politics.
It's no great surprise, however, that Pinellas Republicans didn't match the Democrats' event. Pinellas GOP Chairman Tony Dimatteo is publicly pledged to Rudy Giuliani, who gave up on Iowa weeks ago and finished a dismal sixth. Having a party to point that out would be foolish.
So how do Iowa's results change the landscape for what will happen in Florida in three weeks?
The easy answer is that we will see a smaller field on each side of the ballot. The night of the Iowa caucus, Sens. Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden dropped out after finishing way out of the money. Others could follow after New Hampshire's vote on Tuesday (which came too late for our press deadlines for this issue).
But let's put Iowa in better perspective, something more realistic than the breathless cable news coverage last week that featured the words "dramatic" in every other sentence and treated the caucuses as the most important political decision since John Hancock and his buddies signed the Declaration of Independence.
Iowa is, after all, really small, really rural, and really white. Not exactly representative of the United States as a whole. Republican Mike Huckabee won his upset victory there because apparently 60 percent of the people who turned out to caucus on the Republican side were evangelical Christians.
As the New York Times wrote just before the Iowa caucus, "the caucuses, held in the early evening, do not allow absentee voting, … tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have baby sitters, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty."
But the Old Grey Lady was wrong in part of its assessment: "… if these caucuses are anything like prior ones, only a tiny percentage of Iowans will participate. In 2000, the last year in which both parties held caucuses, 59,000 Democrats and 87,000 Republicans voted, in a state with 2.9 million people. In 2004, when the Republicans did not caucus, 124,000 people turned out for the Democratic caucuses."
Last week's returns blew those numbers away. That, my friends, is Democratic excitement about their candidates. That is a very, very powerful thing. And that is why people like Sheila Cherizard and dozens of others from Tampa Bay will travel to New Hampshire and South Carolina over the next two weeks, bunk with strangers, answer telephones, lick envelopes, fetch coffee and knock on doors — and be happy to do it.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.