Grant Rodgers

grodgers@dmreg.com

AMES, Ia. — Martin O'Malley was met with larger-than-normal crowds in two Iowa college towns Wednesday as the Democratic presidential hopeful makes a final campaign push across several cities ahead of the Feb. 1 caucus.

The former Maryland governor spoke — standing on a chair — to a rally of around 220 at Grinnell College before filling Torrent Brewing Company in Ames to capacity at a 7:45 p.m. event. He ended the evening in what's become typical O'Malley fashion, leading a group in singing along to Iowa folksinger Greg Brown's "The Iowa Waltz."

In Ames, a crowd member asked O'Malley what he could be doing as a presidential candidate to draw attention to tragedies that have stemmed from U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, specifically an Oct. 3 U.S. airstrike that bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan. The White House has called the bombing a "terrible, tragic mistake."

"Awful things happen in war, man," O'Malley responded. "This is a really messed-up world that we're in right now. This evil that we combat over there is a genocidal evil, and we need to do a much better job ... of limiting this collateral damage that can sadly proliferate when we start treating war like a push-button exercise."

O'Malley will return to Iowa on Friday to campaign across 13 Iowa cities before a Monday night caucus party at Wooly's in Des Moines

At the event

SETTING: Grinnell College in Grinnell and Torrent Brewing Company in Ames

CROWD: 220 in Grinnell, the room was filled to a 156-person capacity in Ames

REACTION: The crowd sang along and one person shouted out "Greg Brown!" when O'Malley sang in Ames. Near the end of his speech, a woman fainted and paramedics were called. O'Malley later took a selfie with the woman after she stood up. "(I) knocked that poor woman off her feet with the power of my message," he later told the crowd.

WHAT'S NEXT: O'Malley will return to Iowa to visit 13 cities ahead of the caucus.