Obama Confronts the Base

A welcome development reported by Joe Klein:

At his very first Iowa town meeting, [Obama] showed the courage to tell his Democratic audience things it didn't want to hear. Asked if he would cut the Pentagon budget, he said, "Actually, you'll probably see an initial bump in military spending in an Obama Administration" in order to add troops and replace the equipment lost in Iraq. Then he told a teachers' union member that he supported higher pay for teachers but also--the union's anathema--greater accountability. The crowd was silent as he said these things. But there are different sorts of silence, and in this case, they were hanging on his every word.

He's drawing huge crowds in South Carolina as well.