TIME cover story: "Obama Finds His Moment"

[ClarkUSA]

As many of you know, Barack Obama is on the latest cover of Time magazine. Here is an excerpt from the well-balanced story of Obama's evolution from a candidate to a contender.

Since he made the decision not just to run but to get pugnacious as well — and since he emerged in the polls as Hillary Clinton's most serious opponent — hardly a news cycle has passed without a punch being thrown by one camp or the other. "It's going to look like this every day between now and the caucuses," says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. In the latest rounds, Obama has tried jujitsu, challenging Clinton on what she considers to be her greatest strength, while exposing his own most glaring vulnerability: experience. When, during a swing through Iowa, Clinton pointedly asserted that she wouldn't need on-the-job training to deal with the economy, Obama shot back, "I am happy to compare my experiences with hers when it comes to the economy. My understanding was that she wasn't Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration."

Obama has also begun to sharpen one of his strongest arguments — that experience is not the same thing as judgment — for which Clinton has not yet found a rejoinder. One of the biggest applause lines in his stump speech has been the note that "Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had two of the longest résumés in Washington, but that experience didn't translate into good judgment." After Clinton mocked Obama's assertion in mid-November that his years spent living in Indonesia as a child gave him strong experience in foreign relations, his campaign revised the line to question her judgment as well. "Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and traveled to many countries as well," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, "but along with Hillary Clinton, they led us into the worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran."

The New Ground Game

The polls, though notoriously unreliable in nominating contests, suggest that Obama is at last gaining some traction. Every survey out of Iowa shows the race a tight, three-way fight between Obama, Clinton and former Senator John Edwards, but growing numbers of voters there are rating the need for new direction and new ideas as more important than strength and experience. The question is whether Obama's newfound aggressiveness will undermine his image as the candidate of a new kind of politics. Meanwhile, Clinton's formidable lead in New Hampshire has dropped by nearly half, to 14 points in the latest CNN/WMUR survey, conducted by the University of New Hampshire. More telling is what is happening on the ground: in the past three weeks, Clinton has nearly doubled the size of her late-out-of-the-gate field operation in Iowa, adding about 100 new people, though she still has not caught up with the forces that Obama has had in place pretty much since June. She is also intensifying her travel schedule in Iowa (she has visited only 39 counties to his 68, by the Obama campaign's calculation) and her advertising (which has lagged his — she has spent $3.7 million to his $5.4 million).

Clinton's allies are revising and stepping up their game plans. Emily's List, the political network of pro-choice Democratic women, had planned to put its money into helping Clinton in the big states that vote on Feb. 5 but is now moving its resources into Iowa. The Clinton campaign "clearly thought on a glide path to the nomination, and that has been disrupted," crows Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "They're going to bring in the cavalry."

<snip>

Whatever the drawbacks of this long and brutal campaign season, Obama believes the exercise is a good one for picking a President. "Ultimately, the process reveals aspects of an individual's character and judgment. If you think about past Presidents, probably those two things, along with vision, are the most important aspects of a presidency," he says. "Do you know where you want to take the country? Do you have the judgment to figure out what's important and what's not? Do you have the character to withstand trials and tribulations and to bounce back from setbacks?" In the coming weeks, voters will form their own answers to all those questions.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1688931,00.html

Gobama! Fired up...ready to go!