DATELINE: Iowa City, Iowa

As the vital hour approaches, the clamour of candidates hoping that Iowa will kick-start their push for the White House has reached new levels of intensity. In Iowa City, or ‘Berkeley on the prairie’ as a local politics professor describes it to me, the final two days before the caucus have witnessed a frenetic last-minute rush of Democratic candidates hoping to shore up their votes and sway those still undecided caucus-goers.

Tuesday night was Hillary Clinton, sequestered furtively in the basement of the 14-storey Sheraton Hotel before 2-300 people, and this afternoon (Wednesday) Barack Obama came to the edge-of-town Marriott Hotel for a rally roughly twice that size.

Clinton was assured, fairly serious and undoubtedly spoke with ‘the Presidential voice’ – which isn’t surprising, since she listened to it for eight years. Obama on the other hand banged the drum for hope, change, and other abstract concepts that sound bland on paper, but inspirational when delivered from the mouth of a great orator.

Clinton was making a job application for a high powered executive job (’here are my skills, here’s my experience’), Obama, though clearly exhausted, was delivering an idealistic sermon calling for a better world.

Both rallies were as glitzy and professional as you’d expect from people hoping to be future leaders of the free world. Both used ‘warm-up’ acts to get the crowd fired up – in exactly the same way that TV studio audiences are warmed up by stand-up comedians. Both rallies used Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ at some point – precisely the kind of catch-all, please-all song that’s just hip enough to not be a Republican anthem. In fact Obama’s youthful team weren’t even trying to feign the sober atmosphere of a traditional political gathering:

“You guys have got a really great show ahead of you”, warm up guy number one (of five) promises us. A really great SHOW. This is politics as entertainment; no-one’s pretending it isn’t.

The most distinguishing aspect of these ’stump speeches’ is not policy – “80% of the Democratic candidates’ platforms are the same”, the same politics professor tells me later – but which former leaders Clinton and Obama choose to invoke as their political ancestors.

For Hillary, unsurprisingly, it’s Bill Bill Bill all the way. She talks about the 1990s like she was already in the White House as President. Her opponents will remind you that First Lady is not an elected position, but job titles don’t matter to people like Dennis, our kind host in Iowa City: “She was virtually Vice President I think, maybe even more powerful than that. I’m voting for Hillary because I want eight more years of her”, he jokes.

Clinton even goes so far as to use the plural pronoun to describe things Slick Willie achieved, like progress on the Northern Ireland peace process. “In fact,” she boasts, “I visited Northern Ireland even more than my husband did.” Errrrm, a lot of people visit, I murmur to myself, it doesn’t mean they single-handedly ended decades of sectarian violence.

It’s clear from Barack Obama’s speech that he’s also plotted his lineage like a professional genealogist: so we get grandstanding quotes and references to Martin Luther King and JFK in the first twenty minutes – and even a slightly cheeky reference to the promise of the young Bill Clinton. I’m going to play the lineage card myself and invoke PJ O’Rourke – if you’re a Democratic caucus-goer later today, do you want age and guile, or youth and innocence?

At 8.30pm earlier tonight (yes, that’s still Wednesday 2 January, do keep up) we finally got a break from the massed ranks of press cameras and high-end crowd management. Waiting for New Mexico governor Bill Richardson to give his last campaign speech in Iowa in a small, homely bar called The Mill, surrounded by ceiling fans, festive lights, and pints of hoppy beer, our ‘warm-up act’ this time was a blues outfit in early middle age. As the crowd chat away to each other, and the band wind up an old bluegrass standard, the harmonica player turns to the family in the booth nearest to the stage and asks: “Have you any idea when he’s due to turn up?”

*it’s a book by PJ O’Rourke. It’s good.