See this from New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney:
Iowa, with its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, has been celebrated for 30 years for its intimate campaigns where future presidents would perch on living room couches or sit at kitchen tables and take questions from 20 or 30 people late into the night.
But it was standing room only on Sunday afternoon at the Grand River Center here, where hundreds of people showed up for a forum with John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president. When Mr. Edwards asked for questions, dozens of hands shot up. Many were still up when he called an end to the meeting.
Mr. Edwards’s experience has been shared by most of the major candidates on recent visits to Iowa, almost a year before the caucuses. It is evidence of what appears to be the demise of the living room campaign, signaling a potentially profound change in the way presidential campaigns are conducted here, and to a lesser extent in New Hampshire.
A chapter in American political history that began in 1976 when Jimmy Carter rose from obscurity by working the living rooms and kitchens of Iowa may be drawing to a end. It is, at least for this election cycle, the victim of an era of celebrity candidates tracked by busloads of reporters, and of intense interest in the 2008 race among voters, who are turning out in numbers that would fill many, many living rooms.
“Perhaps it’s time to write the obit to the living room,” David Yepsen, the state’s premier political columnist, wrote in The Des Moines Register after Senator Barack Obama drew thousands of people to a gym in Ames. “They are now relics of past campaigns, as ancient as the torchlight parade. Rock-star candidates need room for their fans and the gawkers.”
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