An emotional President Obama brought the end of his campaign back to the place where it all started on Monday night: Iowa.
In a bittersweet final campaign speech marked with nostalgia and sentimentality, Obama said he wanted to return to Iowa, the state where a 2008 caucus bid helped catapult him to the White House, "to ask for your vote."
"Tomorrow, tomorrow, Iowa," Obama began, standing before a crowd of 20,000 people at an outdoor rally, his final campaign event as president. "Tomorrow, from the granite of New Hampshire to the Rockies of Colorado, from the coastlines of Florida to Virginia's rolling hills, from the valleys of Ohio to these Iowa fields, we will keep America moving forward.
"I came back to ask you to help us finish what we've started," Obama added, standing near his 2008 campaign field office in Des Moines. "Because this is where our movement for change began. Right here. Right here."
Throughout the late-night speech, Obama, who at one point wiped a tear from the corner of his eye, reflected on his start in the state, when few people knew his name, seeking to bring his campaign full circle.
“You took this campaign and you made it your own and you organized yourselves block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, starting a movement that spread across the country, a movement made up of young and old, and rich and poor, and black and white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, Democrats and Republicans who believe we’ve all got something to contribute,” he said. “When the cynics said we couldn’t, you said, ‘Yes, we can.’ You said, ‘Yes, we can’ and we did.”
In one of the more poignant moments, Obama told the crowd that “one voice can change a room.”
“In Iowa, in 2008, your voice changed the world,” he said.
Obama isn’t expected to campaign on Tuesday, spending Election Day in his hometown of Chicago, where he is expected to shoot a game of hoops before waiting for the poll results to come in.
His opponent, Mitt Romney, will spend part of the day in Ohio, trying to secure some last-minute votes in the must-win swing state.
Obama is counting on Ohio along with Wisconsin and Iowa to help secure his Midwestern firewall.
And on Monday night, he urged Iowans to help push him over the top one more time.
"I've got a lot more fight left in me. But to wage that fight on behalf of American families, I need you to have some fight in you,” he said.
Before the president took the stage, first lady Michelle Obama likewise grew emotional and teary-eyed about her husband's last stop. "This is the final event of my husband's final campaign," she said. "So this is the last time that he and I will be onstage together at a campaign rally. And that's why we wanted to come here to Iowa tonight."
