All Barack Obama has to do now is stand there. He doesn't really need the giant sign with his campaign slogan "Change" that someone has draped behind him. He just has to stand in place to exude a sense of change. He doesn't need to say anything in the giant conference center in Des Moines. His thousands of supporters gathered here would cheer him anyway.

But then Obama speaks: about a magic moment in history, and the dream of uniting America. Black and white, red and blue.

In the middle of an overwhelmingly white farming state in the heartland of the United States, a young African-American smiles broadly onstage. Three-and-a-half years ago almost no one outside Chicago knew his name. And now Obama has cleared perhaps the most important hurdle in the way of his run for the White House.

Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, only has to speak. He looks like so many Republican candidates in this campaign -- middle-aged, poorly fitting suit -- but when he opens his mouth, phrases stream out that reminds listeners of Biblical parables. And people warm to him quickly. The one-time Baptist preacher speaks in a banquet hall in the capital of Iowa and says, "People really are more important than the purse." He pauses, smiles at the crowd. "Isn't that a nice feeling?"

Punishment for the Establishment

Barack Hussein Obama and Mike Huckabee are the big winners in the Iowa caucuses -- the needle's eye of any campaign for president of the United States. Obama emerged with 37.6 percent to Edwards' 29.7 percent and Clinton's disappointing third place finish with 29.5 percent. Huckabee was followed by Mitt Romney's 25.3 percent, Fred Thompson's 13.4 percent and John McCain's 13.2 percent.

And while a victory in Iowa -- this small agrarian state in the Midwest, with its roughly 4 million inhabitants -- may seem insignificant at first glance, it can have an outsized effect on the rest of the presidential campaign.

Obama, who represents Illinois in the US Senate, and Huckabee, formerly the governor of Arkansas, have one thing in common: their unusual names, which underscore the nearly revolutionary character of both campaigns. Samantha Power, one of Obama's closest advisors, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "Tell me honestly: Who knew this African-American senator three years ago?" She means before a televised speech Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 -- three and a half years ago now. "Barack Hussein Obama. Does it get any weirder?" She laughs.

And Huckabee? George W. Bush's one-time PR advisor Dan Bartlett said not long ago: "With a name like that you can't be president." On top of everything, he's a cash-poor candidate: Huckabee spent a twentieth of the amount his Republican rivals laid out for TV spots, ads and staff in Iowa. He doesn't have much money, but he's won the "hearts and souls" of the people, or so he claimed on Thursday evening.

The two candidates have not only outdistanced their established rivals; they've outclassed them. Hillary Clinton was the great favorite, but she landed in third place, two-tenths of a percentage point behind former Senator John Edwards. Huckabee had a full 10-point advantage over Mitt Romney, the ex-governor from Massachusetts, who lavished Iowa with an all-out push for votes.

The 'Values Voter' Shift

Their triumph is one of the more astounding results in American campaign history. Mike Huckabee was known last November mainly for growing up in Hope, Arkansas -- like a certain Bill Clinton. Or that he'd lost 100 pounds (45 kg). Or that he was a fairly good speaker. Or that he maintained good contacts, as an ex-preacher, to the influential religious right.

But in public-opinion polls, even in heavily evangelical Iowa, he was an also-ran. The change came at the start of November, when so-called "Values Voters" held a summit in Washington -- a group of religious fundamentalists. The media had focused on Mitt Romney, who had to explain his Mormon beliefs to the largely Protestant crowd, and on Rudy Giuliani, who virtually had to apologize for his three marriages and his liberal attitudes toward abortion. But Huckabee told the Values Voters that other candidates "will come to you; I come from you." The sentence brought them to their feet.

Since then, Huckabee's fortunes have gone straight up. He was funny, he spoke the language of ordinary Americans, he seemed sympathetic; yet he's a stalwart conservative. He reminded the audience of his Christian moral values but said, "I'm not angry at anyone." He condemned abortions, but he's also skeptical of the dogmatism on the Pro-Life right, saying Republicans can't afford an image of caring for children only "as long as they're in the mother's womb."

To New Hampshire and Beyond

While his rivals keep calling up the ghost of illegal immigrants, Huckabee is milder. As governor of Arkansas he made sure children of illegal immigrants were allowed to enter public schools. Things got touchy at the Washington summit when someone asked the former preacher how Jesus would have responded to certain political questions; but Huckabee answered, "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office." At the same time, ads in Iowa emphasized his appeal to religious voters. "My faith defines me," says Huckabee in one of them.

Naturally, he would have to assemble broader support among Americans to win the White House. In Iowa around 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers on Thursday classified themselves as evangelical Christians. The next early primary state, New Hampshire, is different. Huckabee will need more cash and a more professional team. Among his entourage in Iowa, Internet connections sometimes blinked out. At his miniscule campaign office in Iowa, anyone could watch his coordinator through a window, writing e-mails.

But it's exactly this grassroots charm that brought Huckabee to the front of the Iowa caucuses. The question is, which Republican can stand in his way? Mitt Romney worked the citizens of Iowa like no other candidate, he threw mud at Huckabee -- but people just don't like him. "Romney only has supporters who are unbelievably good-looking or unbelievably rich," is how a TV journalist, Chris Matthews from CNBC, put it. John McCain, the senator from Arizona, was hoping for third place in Iowa, but he was shunted to fourth by the sleepwalking actor and former politician Fred Thompson.

New York's former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, still leads in national polls. But in Iowa he earned less than 1 percent of the vote. Of course, he hardly worked the state at all -- he's concentrating on a "Florida strategy," which would involve a breakout win there on January 29 and follow-up victories in important states like New York and California. But it's based on the gamble that other Republicans will tear each other apart before those primaries and keep a clear leader from emerging -- which often runs counter to US election logic.

Clinton Outclassed

Iowa, of course, has also buoyed Obama. In spite of the giant Clinton machine, Obama has now established himself as a serious candidate. Like her, he's raised $100 million over the last year, and he's built powerful campaign teams for almost all the other important primary states.

Now he's marked out Hillary's limits. She was considered the shoe-in candidate, and it was likely this sense of inevitability that cost her votes in the end. For some time she seems to have been battling more against Republicans than against her own party rivals. So Obama succeeded in painting Clinton as part of the system that Americans wanted to move beyond. Here the young sunshine boy, there the old establishment.

After the votes came in at the Clinton camp, she appeared before 1,000 cheering fans, including party heavy-hitters like Madeleine Albright, her husband Bill, her daughter Chelsea. Hillary spoke softly, did not stumble once. She tried to convert her own setback into a win for the Democrats.

But her husband's role in the Iowa campaign only contributed to the establishment image that Obama has tried to draw. Clinton seemed to speak more about his own legacy than about his wife; he seemed to believe that Democrats owed her the nomination.

As the Clintons at last started to see that their approach was missing the mark, they changed the candidate's message. Sometimes Hillary was a hard leader who was tough on terrorism. Sometimes she played the experienced diplomat. But for the past few weeks there have been videos of her with her mother and friends, which is supposed to show viewers what a good friend and nice person she is.

Arguably, the mood began to change during a televised debate at the end of October in Philadelphia. Obama had long been trying to close ranks on Clinton. No one believed he could mount a serious attack, so he summoned some New York Times reporters and promised to change things. Obama, it turns out, really didn't have to be aggressive; Clinton would get herself into trouble. On the harmless question of whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to obtain drivers' licenses, she flip-flopped. Obama simply said: "If I'm not mistaken, Hillary just said two different things within two minutes."

Change vs. Experience

Since then Obama has not let go of this advantage. Change versus experience -- a trip to the past or hope for a new beginning. This time, "hope" has won. Peter Hart, the famed Democratic opinion pollster, asked party voters in December: If politics in Washington were a book, would you just want a few new pages or a whole new chapter? Nearly half wanted an entirely different book.

The thee-way fight among the Democrats will go on for a while -- at least until Super Tuesday, on February 5, when 20 states vote. For Edwards, who concentrated most of his money on Iowa, second place might mean the end of his candidacy, especially considering his distance behind Obama. Clinton, though, has to do what her husband did in New Hampshire in 1992 as "the comeback kid." Don't underestimate the Clintons in this respect, particularly now that Obama will have to face a new level of scrutiny in the media. But the self-confident Clinton strategy will have to be retooled.