Sen. Barack Obama drew an enthusiastic crowd of about 20,000 people to Washington Sq. Park last week for a New York rarity – a presidential campaign rally staged prior to the Iowa caucus. “I know Greenwich Village! I know…” he started to say, then tapped the microphone as if it had lost power. “I was going to say, I know some of the bars around here, but I think my communications director was trying to cut that off,” he said to laughter. Later in his speech, Obama pointed toward Lower Manhattan and said: “We remember the world rallying around us after the horrific events just a few miles away. And we said to ourselves, we are going to change, and the world said, we are going to change with you to prevent such a travesty from happening again — and we frittered all that goodwill away.”
