- In the Democrats' first 'cattle call' event of 2015, all five presidential candidates appeared on the same stage
- Clinton spoke of herself while two of her more energetic rivals fed red meat to the lions
- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders trumpeted a populist brand of liberalism meant to appeal to young fans of free college and income redistribution
- Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's voice trembled as he shushed Hillary's partisans with a lengthy list of liberal accomplishments
- Clinton's best lines, about Donald Trump's hair and global warming deniers, couldn't match the energy brought by her two main rivals
Following Clinton, who spoke in sharp cadence about herself and her family's story, the two men wowed a crowd of more than 1,300 with powerful appeals to progressives.
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| HILLARY SPREADING HER GOSPEL |
Friday night marked a first for Democrats in the 2016 race for the presidency: a 'cattle call' audition where every declared candidate spoke to a large audience in an early primary state on the same night.
UNDERWHELMING: Hillary Clinton was bested by two more fiery politicians on Friday night in Iowa who riled up the crowd while she talked about herself and her family history
FIRE AND BRIMSTONE: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders put out the most pure wattage, booming his far-left priorities to an eager audience who cheered and stomped
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley emerged as the night's biggest surprise, establishing himself as a liberal's liberal and a candidate who can boast achievements to ease his march to Hillary's left
CLASH OF THE DEMOCRATS: Chaos ensued in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Friday as supporters of Hillary Clinton (right) crashed through a line of Martin O'Malley backers, each group with its own signs and chants
It's something Republicans have done nearly a dozen times already. But with Clinton expecting a coronation instead of a contest, the Dems have been slow to build a field of challengers.
Now that there are five, Iowa's Democratic Party used its annual 'Hall of Fame' dinner to host on-stage speeches from the whole field.
None of the five politicians on the program for the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Hall of Fame dinner threw any intramural punches; the candidates returned to their tables in front of the stage after speaking, ensuring any insults would be delivered face-to-face.
The trio of clear front-runners hammered Republicans aplenty, but Hillary couldn't match the red-meat liberalism of O'Malley and Sanders.
Her main saving grace was that she spoke before them both – thanks to the coincidence of alphabetical order.
Clinton brought one-liners. Of Republican leader Donald Trump, she cracked: 'Finally! A candidate whose hair gets more attention than mine!'
She blasted the billionaire's rhetoric on violent crimes committed by illegal border-crossers as 'hate that he is spewing toward immigrants and their families.'
'It really is shameful,' she said.
And jabbing the GOP for its collective doubts about global warming, she noted how some Republicans have shrugged off the issue by noting that they're not scientists.
'I'm not a scientist either,'snarked Clinton. 'I'm just a grandmother with two eyeballs and a brain.'
Bernie Sanders officially kicks off presidential campaign
IT'S ON: Hillary Clinton faced new competition on a public stage as she spoke alongside four challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination. Shown are Martin O'Mallley (left) and Lincoln Chafee (right)
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| YUP, IT'S STILL BEATING … THAT'S GOOD BERNIE |
She also mocked the GOP's economic policy as a 1980s-style 'trickle-down' scheme.
'Trickle-down economics has to be one of the worst ideas of the 1980sm,' Clinton boomed.
'It is right up there with New Coke, shoulder pads and big hair. I lived through it and there are photographs, and we're not going back to that.'
Earlier in the day, speaking before a crowd of her own organizers, she quipped that 'we've been trickled on enough.'
But most of her speech's power on Friday came in parables about herself.
She reminded the audience of her mother's demoralizing poverty and the power of personal strength. She waxed about the need to leave her granddaughter Charlotte with a sustainable America.
And she boasted that she has spent her life 'fighting for women [and] children.'
When her supporters had stopped chanting 'HIL-LA-RY' – each candidate controlled the tables in one part of the cavernous banquet hall – the real show began.
Martin O'Malley, the former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland's chief executive, brought a mix of passion and pathos that Clinton appeared to have left on her private jet.
His introduction was met with a standing ovation from his own section, mostly in the back of the hall. By the time he was finished, many tables that had stood for Clinton were on their feet for him.
A bullhorn-blasting organizer and a gaggle of shouting young partisans delivered the point home as Democrats left for the night, shouting slogans about his progressive accomplishments.
At one point 'O-MAL-LEY! O-MAL-LEY!' morphed into 'GO-AWAY HIL-LA-RY!'
Inside, the former governor had lobbed the evening's first earnest bombs at Clinton from her left, ticking off a list of progressive litmus tests he had passed.
On the list were drug treatment programs established, the state's minimum wage hiked, resounding entrepreneurship statistics, an assault weapons ban, nation-leading public schools, the adoption of a DREAM Act law that predated President Obama's own executive actions preventing deportations for millions, a four-year college tuition freeze, and 'drivers licenses for new American immigrants.'
SLAP MAGNET: DOnald Trump, shown at a Republican Party of Arkansas event Friday night, attracted more barbs in the Democrats' speeches than anyone else
'OHHHHHHHH-MALLEY!' The former Maryland governor had supporters out in force on the streets of Cedar Rapids on July 17
By the time he demanded a $15.00/hour minimum wage from coast to coast, people were listening.
This was a different O'Malley, a man confident of his bona fides and unintimidated by the Clinton juggernaut.
Even his fiery critique of Trump and 'his racist, hate-filled comments,' although not new, rang as more authentic.
O'Malley mocked the Republican presidential field for being divided on whether or not Trump's charges about 'rapists' and 'murderers' coming north from Mexico were correct.
'Divided?' he asked. 'As in, "not sure he's wrong?"'
'If Donald Trump wants to run on a platform of demonizing immigrants, he should go back to the 1840s and run for the nomination of the Know-Nothing Party.'
Sanders, too, brought down the house in a way that the more canned, rehearsed, polished, and telepromptered Clinton couldn't manage.
'Please don't think small. Think big!' he urged a crowd, hinting that Clinton's brand of Democratic politics should be seen as too much of a margin-trimming exercise.
'Given the reality of economics and politics in America today,' Sanders began, 'no president, not the best, can bring about the changes we need in this country unless there is a political revolution.'
Sanders, 73, is known for a nakedly populist message rooted in 1960s socialism: He has labeled himself a 'democratic socialist' and is only running for the Democrats' nomination out of convenience.
'The powers that be in Washington,' he barked, 'the billionaire cliques, the Koch brothers, the lobbyists, the corporate interests, are so powerful that nothing will get done unless millions of people stand up and loudly proclaim "Enough is enough! This country belongs to all of us and not a handful of billionaires".'
'Preach!' yelled one man at a table near the back.
POPULAR POPULIST: Bernie Sanders posed for selfies with fans as the evening began
FOUR YEARS: Martin O'Malley made his pitch for a full White House term, speaking after Clinton and making the room forget about her
'Income inequality is the great moral issue of our time,' said Sanders, the aging Vermont senator who has never shied away from class-warfare rhetoric.
'There is something profoundly wrong with the top one-tenth of one per cent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent. ... Enough is enough. That has got to end, and together we will end it.'
At times shouting so loud that he spat, Sanders forcefully demanded a 'Medicare for all single-payer program' that would declare medical care a human right in the United States.
A minimum wage increase to an unspecified 'living wage' was also on his menu, along with a massive government jobs program to rebuild crumbling U.S. bridges, highways, dams and ports.
'There is more than enough work to do. Let's rebuild our infrastructure!' he yelled.
Sanders pledged two things, while saying he would make few promises on the campaign trail.
He would nominate only Supreme Court justices who agreed to strike down a ruling that opened the floodgates of money into American politics, he said.
'"Citizens United" must be overturned,' Sanders boomed, a withered fist shaking.
And he promised to youthful hoots and hollers that he would 'make certain that every public college and university in America is tuition-free.'
To drive the point home, he announced that he had invited 'seven or eight' recent college graduates to sit at his table, each with massive student loan balances hanging over their heads – 'more than $1 million' in all.
Two other hopefuls, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, bookended the evening with paler versions of what came in between.
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| I STILL CAN SUCK YOUR MONEY THROUGH A KEYHOLE AT 30 YARDS |
BOLD: Clinton's crowd marched from her pep rally to the Iowa Democratic Party's annual banquet
Chafee, a mild-mannered and short-winded speaker, ironically drew first blood of a polite sort, pointing out that he voted against a Senate resolution authorizing President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
Left unsaid was that Clinton voted for it when she was a senator from New York.
Praising the Obama administration's nuclear bargain with Iran, Chafee bashed 'bellicose Republicans' for rattling their sabers.
'We need to reject once and for all the belligerent advocates of conflict,' he said. 'Avoiding war is worth every bit of our energy.'
Later, Webb took the opposite tack, saying he wouldn't have inked the deal with Tehran that Obama announced on Tuesday.
'I am still looking with some concern, some great concern,' he said.
'I would not as president sign any executive agreement establishing a long-term relationship with Iran if it in any way tips the balance of power ... and particularly if it accepts Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.'
Webb appeared to be a non-factor, receiving his only genuine cheers when he defended labor unions.
'Organized labor is not the enemy,' Webb said, his calm and analytic tone a tremendous come-down from Sanders' human loudspeaker.
But fewer people heard him: a line of dinner guests streamed to the exits after Sanders had finished.
Webb did draw chuckles by noting that 'I'm the only person ever elected to statewide office with a union card, two Purple Hearts and three tattoos.'
And he expressed great sympathy for immigrants, noting that his third wife escaped Vietnam with her entire extended family when communists rose to power.
But ultimately, he ended his speech before the allotted 15 minutes were up – and spun the remaining 1 minute and 20 seconds as a virtue.
Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders all ignored the red light that signaled they should sit down.
The Republican Party has a far deeper bench for 2016 than the Democrats, fielding three basketball teams' worth of would-be presidents, and it's unclear who will emerge from the scrum next year.
JUGGERNAUT: Hillary Clinton's poll numbers put her far and away ahead of every other Democrat who wants to win the White House, but that could change quickly – at least in Iowa
But the Democrats began the night in America's first primary caucus state with a prayer that it won't much matter.
Ako Abdul-Samad, a Muslim member of the state legislature, delivered an invocation that included a request for the almighty – to show Iowans that Republicans 'don't know what they're talking about.'
The crowd chuckled in mid-prayer.
Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack, speaking at the top of the program, proclaimed: 'I think this is the official kickoff to the Iowa Caucuses.'
Opinion polls have been kind to Clinton. A polling average calculated by Real Clear Politics shows her with more than a 40-point lead over Sanders, her nearest rival. And she has never come close to trailing anyone else in the Democratic field.
Sanders, though, has so far made the biggest splash of any anti-Hillary hopeful in the race, drawing thousands of progressive voters at a time.
Hillary's 'kick off rally' in Cedar Rapids on Friday afternoon drew a loosely-packed crowd of young campaign volunteers wearing t-shirts, waving signs and chanting slogans.
ALSO-RAN: Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee impressed no one as he calmly asked Iowa Democrats to support him in next year's statewide caucuses
ALSO ALSO-RAN: Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb dissed President Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal and lost some of the audience before he even began
Some other voters who weren't attached to Clinton's Iowa machine, though, said they came for the free pizza.
There was also beer and wine available, for a price. Reporters were told to find a water fountain, and kept away from the pizza by steel barriers.
Meanwhile O'Malley's volunteers gathered on street corners waving signs and shouting for cars to honk. As Clinton's supporters walked from her rally to the evening venue, the two crowds clashed.
Shouting matches ensued. Hoots and hollers were heard. Sloganeering devolved into cacophony.
None of Friday's speakers mentioned any of the others by name, likely disappointing some Democrats streaming into the Cedar Rapids Convention Center who said they came to see the candidates challenge each other.
'Especially Hillary,' said Ed from Waterloo, Iowa, who asked DailyMail.com not to publish his last name. 'I really want some of these guys to test her.'
'The last thing we need is a primary that's over before it starts, and then we find out we picked the wrong horse to ride.'
Another attendee, an elderly woman, was overheard talking to a male companion in the long line of ticket-holders leading to metal detectors and Secret Service screening.
'Well, we're gonna see 'em all, ain't we?' she said.
'Maybe there'll be some blood on the floor. We sure need to see some punches flying if we're going to beat the hell out of Jeb Bush.'
