Voters flirt with change
THE BATTLE between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards has long been cast as experience versus change - and now change is on the move.
Her lengthier service in the US Senate, combined with her days as first lady, has given Clinton the aura of a candidate ready on day one to be president, while Obama and Edwards are seen as less experienced figures whose real appeal is the more dramatic change they represent. And as for the truly experienced Democrats, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd? With the media focused on a three-horse race, they simply haven't garnered the attention they merit.
For most of the year, the clear advantage was Clinton's. But now, with campaign crunch time upon us, the dynamic is starting to shift - and it obviously has the Clinton campaign rattled.
The growing desire for change is most evident in lead-off Iowa, where a couple of new polls show that Obama has caught Clinton and may even have inched a little ahead, with Edwards a very close third.
You can certainly see why Obama is generating renewed excitement. When he's good, he's very, very good - and on Sunday night in Boston, the Illinois senator had a large crowd enraptured as he made his case.
Clearly worried, Clinton is now questioning Obama's political courage and commitment - and even suggesting that there may be issues with his character.
After Obama told his Boston audience that he wasn't running for president "to fulfill some long-held plans," Clinton's campaign quickly sent out an e-mail accusing him of "rewriting history." That missive recounted comments he had made to family, friends, and law school classmates going back 10 and 15 years about his interest in running. It even had references to school essays he wrote as a kindergartner and a third-grader saying he wanted to be president, though Clinton pollster Mark Penn has since said those were included simply as a joke. (Asked for some indication that the reference to elementary-school essays was meant humorously, a Clinton press aide said he'd have to check and get back to me.)
Obama's progress is all the more remarkable because when you ask him to put aside the atmospherics of leadership and specify how things would be dramatically and substantively different under him than under Clinton, the senator doesn't have a particularly compelling answer.
"I'm not sure you can separate out the policy from the atmospherics," he said Monday in an Q&A session at the Globe, noting that candidates of the same party tend to converge on the same basic policy proposals.
Instead, he's selling himself as a more effective, less polarizing leader. Citing Hillary Clinton's ill-fated healthcare-expansion effort of the early 1990s, Obama says he will succeed at expanding coverage by bringing the parties together and leading a discussion about the choices that must be made.
The real issue, he says, is this: "Who has the leadership to be able to bring all of the parties together to actually solve this problem and mobilize the American people so that we can actually get it done? And that's the quality that I bring to bear in this race that I don't think the other candidates have."
So where's the evidence of that ability? Obama cites his work with Republican Senator Richard Lugar passing legislation to help find and destroy conventional weapons caches; his efforts on behalf of the ethics reform bill that passed earlier this year; a law he cosponsored to post all government spending on a searchable database; and legislation to limit the use of no-bid contracts in national disaster relief efforts.
That list, however, is a fairly light anchor for the weightiest of offices, and it highlights again the hurdle his campaign must overcome: a biography short on national experience and big national accomplishments.
Still, politics is the art of making the most of an imperfect opportunity - and that's what Obama is steadily doing. People I interviewed at his Sunday event said their sense of Obama as a person had overcome doubts about his experience as a politician.
To prove persuasive in the face of rivals like him and Edwards, Clinton needs to show why her greater experience matters, why it would make her a more capable change agent and a bigger, more promising leader.
And she and her campaign need to be careful about resorting to arguments that only make her look small.
Scot Lehigh's-email address is lehigh@globe.com.
