De Niro learns new lines for Obama
Ed Pilkington in East Rutherford, New Jersey
Monday February 4, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
When Robert De Niro steps on stage, you listen.
The presence of the twice Oscar-winning actor at one of Barack Obama's last campaigning rallies before Super Tuesday underlined the scale of what Obama calls his "unlikely journey". Here was a Hollywood star lending his huge fame to someone who six months ago was barely known beyond the political cognoscenti.
De Niro looked strangely over-awed as he stood before about 4,000 Obama supporters at the Izod Centre, the New Jersey home of the Nets basketball team. "I've never made a speech like this at a political event before," he said nervously, and for once you could be fairly certain he wasn't method acting.
He definitely hadn't bothered to learn his lines. He clutched a pad of notes which he fumblingly glanced at from time to time. "Barack Obama does not have the experience to be president of the United States," he began, evoking a pantomime "Boo!" from the crowd. "I can prove it. He wasn't experienced enough to vote to authorise the invasion of Iraq."
Nor is he, De Niro went on, experienced enough to let special interests run the government; or to make secret deals in the back rooms of power; or to leave millions of our friends and neighbours in poverty. "That's the kind of inexperience I could get used to."
The celebrity theme continued with the now regular appearance of Obama's Kennedy endorsers. Caroline Kennedy remained silent, letting her smile do the talking. Teddy Kennedy, by contrast, drove himself hoarse, his fist shaking in the air and his thick mop of white hair flashing like a beacon.
"The next 24 hours is perhaps one of the most important moments in your life," he said with such passion that you wondered whether he was reliving his own long-gone presidential ambitions.
When Obama finally took charge of the microphone he did to the Izod throng what over the past year he has done to crowds from coast to coast, from north to south across America: he made them feel important.
The hunger for change was theirs, he told them. The call for justice after the abuses of the Bush years - from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, the ending of habeus corpus and the use of torture - was their call. The energy to reunite the nation flowed from them.
"After a year criss-crossing the country, after engaging the American people in conversation, my bet has paid off," he said. "The American people are ready to write a new chapter of the American story."
The response was ecstatic. He may be surrounded these days by Oscar-winning actors and the American equivalent of political royalty.
But when Barack Obama steps on stage, nothing else matters to his followers.
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