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Style & Substance Among The Dems' Big Three - Clinton, Edwards & Obama Play To Different Strengths In Iowa by Ronald Brownstein for The National Journal: Obama emphasizes his determination to transcend Washington's bitter partisanship by building new electoral and legislative coalitions and providing "a seat at the table" even for powerful interests like the insurance and oil industry that have frequently warred with Democrats....
Edwards has seized the other pole in the debate, aligning himself with liberal activists ranging from the founders of the most militant Democratic Web sites like the Daily Kos to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Many of them ridicule the possibility of bipartisan cooperation in such a polarized era. With blowtorch intensity, Edwards is delivering an anti-corporate, populist message more uncompromising than any heard in a Democratic presidential race since at least Jesse Jackson in 1988 and possibly Fred Harris in 1976. Edwards derides as a "complete fantasy" Obama's argument that Democrats can achieve their goals while reaching out to business interests and Republicans. Instead, Edwards insists, change can come only through an "epic fight" that he is uniquely equipped to wage.
"All the fancy words in the world will change nothing," he declared with the aural equivalent of a sneer before one audience last weekend. "You'd better send somebody into this arena that is ready for this fight, somebody that has got the guts and the determination to fight for you and your children."
In responding, Obama has hedged his bets. From one direction, he has argued that Edwards' promise of undiluted confrontation is unlikely to produce results. ("There's no shortage of anger and bluster and bitter partisanship out there," Obama said. "We don't need more heat. We need more light.") But Obama has also amplified the populist tone in his own stump speech and heavily aired a television ad in which he rails against companies that shift jobs overseas -- a perennial concern in a state whose manufacturing base has contracted for decades.
Clinton, characteristically, has sought a place between Obama and Edwards. In her speeches, she touts both her ability to work with Republicans (such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham) and her willingness to fight them when necessary. "It drives them crazy, but I'm still here and I'm still standing," she told a Mt. Pleasant audience in the speech that launched her final campaign swing last week.
Clinton's argument that she knows when to offer the iron fist and when the velvet glove fits into her overarching message in the final days: that she has the experience to handle the challenges of the presidency from "day one" and to deliver the change that Obama and Edwards talk about. "It comes down to this," she says in a two-minute closing argument ad scheduled to run Wednesday night on every Iowa television station with a dinner-time newscast. "Who is ready to be president and ready to start solving the big challenges we face on day one?"
These distinctions, although simplified and exaggerated by the campaigns' need to differentiate themselves from each other, draw on deep wells in each of the contenders' lives. Obama is the child of mixed-race, mixed-nationality parents; his father was a black Kenyan and his mother a white American. He has been a bridge-builder almost everywhere he's spent time in his adult life -- from Harvard Law School, where he mediated between racial and ideological factions as the first American-American president of the Law Review, to the Illinois state Senate, where he partnered with Republicans on campaign finance and ethics reform and expanding health care for children.
Edwards was shaped by his years as a trial lawyer, an inherently adversarial experience that he now cites as the source of his vision for governing. "This is what I learned," he said. "If you're tough enough, if... you're willing to work hard enough, you're smart enough, you can beat these people.... But all of the nice words in the world won't help."
Clinton, although she's only held elected office since 2001, has spent much more time directly in the political arena than either of her rivals. She has the scars to prove it after battling over education reform in Arkansas during the 1980s, health care reform in Washington in the 1990s and serving as Bill Clinton's consiglieri throughout his turbulent political career. Like her husband, Hillary Clinton has balanced a commitment to consensus as a strategy with a street-fighter's instinct to immediately respond to a punch with a punch of her own -- and if anything, she has displayed an impulse toward confrontation that is even greater than her husband's. Intellectually, she is closer to Obama; emotionally, to Edwards.
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