MUSCATINE, Iowa - As lawyers, all three leading Democratic presidential contenders are formally trained in the art of making a case. As they appear before audiences around Iowa this week, their distinctly different legal backgrounds - and their unique styles of thought, logic, and language - are beginning to show in their final pitches to voters.
John Edwards, a career trial attorney before running for the Senate, practices a courtroom-style summation that rouses listeners to use their vote to deliver justice.
Hillary Clinton, who practiced mostly corporate law at a Little Rock firm, approaches her speeches as a dealmaker: itemizing a list of goals and demands and then explaining what it will take to realize them.
Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar, reiterates his rivals' arguments and tries to expose them as logically unsound.
The rhetorical differences have become more pronounced in their newly constructed "closing arguments" - an effort to reconcile a year of accusations, claims, defenses, and counter-claims in a single stump speech.
"This is the summary," said Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller. "It's time to make your last points, to fend off the opposing arguments, and to inspire."
The distinctions may be most apparent in the way candidates integrate core Democratic causes such as healthcare, global warming, and the Iraq war into their messages.
For Clinton, they are the substance of her speech as she describes problems and the policies she would enact to fix them. "Here's what I'm going to do," she says before moving through her platform one issue at a time.
Obama puts policy-based concerns into the voices of Iowans ("That's what you have told me.") as evidence to support his contention that Americans are demanding urgent change.
Edwards doesn't spend much time on the details of the issues at all, instead using them to frame a battle between good and evil.
As a former trial lawyer, Edwards is the only candidate with experience making closing arguments - the prime rhetorical venue for a plaintiff's attorney.
"In that last speech, you have to make that connection," said Ken Rothweiler, a Philadelphia personal-injury lawyer and Edwards fund-raiser. "You can debate the logic of any position, but in the end it comes down to making that emotional connection."
Edwards emphasizes that his agenda is "real personal," and recounts his family's rural, working-class lineage as credentials to take on an "epic fight."
"Isn't it about time we stood up and said 'enough is enough'?" Edwards asks audiences. "Isn't it about time that we say we're going to stand on the shoulders of our parents and our grandparents and we're going to fight for what they worked and sacrificed for?"
Constructing "melodrama" between dueling forces is a classic technique before juries, said Philip Meyer, a professor of legal writing at Vermont Law School. "Like trial attorneys, Edwards appeals to the 'heroic' jury to intervene on behalf of the injured victims and, perhaps, save the community by punishing the evil forces," he said.
Edwards's speech is filled with a large cast of villains he lumps together as "entrenched money interests" - drug companies, insurance companies, power companies, and corporate lobbyists - that "are standing between you and what you are entitled to."
"You know when they'll give their power away?" Edwards asks his audiences. "When we take their power away from them."
Clinton, however, focuses less on placing blame for existing problems than on guiding listeners along a path toward desired outcomes. Her rhetoric is cautious, as she warns audiences to weigh risks rather than imagine possibilities.
Even when Clinton asks voters to support her because of her experience around government, it comes in a measured assessment of trade-offs. "I'm asking that we all think as carefully and as seriously as we can about what is at stake," she said Wednesday in Pella, Iowa.
Such weighing of priorities is a hallmark of the corporate lawyer, Clinton's primary practice after working as a children's advocate early in her legal career. Specialists note that corporate lawyers aren't primarily concerned with justice but rather with making contracts to help their clients get what they want.
"She doesn't seem to focus on the jury. The experience argument is about cost" - the cost of having an inexperienced president, said Kathleen Kendall, a communication professor at University of Maryland specializing in campaign rhetoric.
When assessing the chances of enacting her healthcare plan, which is modeled on the congressional plan, Clinton emphasizes the ways she is ready to blunt Republican lines of attack. "They're going to have a hard time explaining why we don't give to you what we give to members of Congress," she said in Story City.
Meyer, the legal-writing professor, said of Clinton: "As opposed to a litigator, who wants the client to succeed against an opponent, she is a 'positional' thinker, protecting clients' interests, thinking strategically in measured and incremental moves, conveying her well-informed advice to her client."
One of the ways closing arguments differ from campaign announcements or other high-profile speeches is that candidates have the opportunity to synthesize opponents' claims and respond to them.
"Every campaign evolves - you see what other people's arguments are," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "You know people are choosing from different arguments. As you create yours, you are aware of what theirs are."
While none of the three candidates typically mention rivals by name, Obama invokes his most directly. His new speech is centered around a methodical accounting of the strongest arguments his opponents have to offer, which Obama then analyzes to expose the weaknesses in their logic.
"You can't at once argue that you're the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it," Obama says, loosely translating some of Clinton's campaign statements. "You can't fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America."
He read versions of these lines late Friday night at a high-school gym in Muscatine slowly, making them sound like riddles, and his audience chuckled as he went along.
In his speeches, Obama also seeks to refute the charge made by Edwards that he is "not angry or confrontational enough."
"By acknowledging the strengths in the other guy's argument, you're saying, 'I'm willing to look at all sides of an issue fairly,' " Meyer said, in analyzing Obama's comments. "That allows you to establish your character with the audience."
In devoting a large share of his time at the podium to directly challenging opponents' assertions, Obama seems to acknowledge that there is a particular urgency to the mission of persuading the undecided voters he identifies as his targets at the outset of his campaign events.
Indeed, Obama's oratory has lost some of the fluidity that once drew large crowds to hear him. In its place is the transparent signposting typical of law professors working through conflicting precedents and published opinions.
"That's the experience argument," Obama instructed his listeners at one point in his Muscatine speech. "We're hearing another argument now."
