Antidote for 'toxic' politics, packed with its own venom

Obama deplores attacks as he uses similar tactics

On the eve of today's key presidential primary in Pennsylvania, Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama met with people at Glider Diner in Scranton. (jae c. hong/associated press)

PHILADELPHIA - Barack Obama strode through the closing days of the Pennsylvania campaign reintroducing himself to voters as a good-government vigilante, ready to combat "petty, trivial, slash-and-burn, tit-for-tat politics" - while seeming to adopt some of those techniques himself.

"I don't mind this kind of silly-season politics," Obama said in Harrisburg on Saturday. "Politics ain't beanbag, that's what they say in Chicago. We know how to throw some elbows. I'm skinny but I'm tough."

Obama's appeal to voters to "declare independence" from a toxic political culture was suffused with its own fresh toxicity: his strongest indictment yet of Hillary Clinton as a practitioner of the vicious warfare that Republicans have long waged against her.

"Senator Clinton has internalized a lot of the strategies and the tactics that have made Washington such a miserable place, where all we do is bicker and all we do is fight," Obama told an audience yesterday on the campaign trail in Paoli, a Philadelphia exurb.

Obama's psychological portrait of Clinton - as a victim so spooked by the tools of her own destruction that she now wields them herself - appeared to carry a hint of self-description as he defended his own newfound ruthlessness.

"If you get elbowed enough, eventually you start elbowing back," he explained Sunday in Reading.

The former constitutional-law professor unveiled a new stump speech he calls a "closing argument" on Friday night before his largest-ever crowd in Philadelphia. Since then, Obama has riffed off the prepared text before friendly crowds while growing more confrontational toward Clinton.

That posture, aides acknowledge, could help Obama to energize his own supporters to turn out and vote but will do little to win over those still undecided - and could jeopardize Obama's image as a high-minded campaigner in upcoming contests, analysts say.

"With the closing arguments in each of the states, each campaign goes back to its corner," said Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director.

In a state where only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic primary, Obama indicates that he sees that corner filled with the party's core voters. In his campaign announcement in February of 2007, Obama uttered "Republican" only once: to boast about his bipartisan work with Indiana Senator Richard Lugar.

Now he has turned the word into an epithet, to be hurled at Clinton.

"I'm not interested in becoming more like the Republicans in adopting their tactics," Obama said in Wynnewood, a Philadelphia suburb. "I want to change them, I don't want them to change me."

While Obama regularly praises John McCain as a "genuine American hero" and said at one point that the Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee would be an improvement over the current administration, praise for a Democratic rival grows fainter with each speech.

A "hardworking, tenacious opponent and . . a fine senator for the state of New York" at Saturday's first stop became "an intelligent person [who] has worked hard for her constituents" by the fourth.

In his last speech of the day, Obama described Clinton as "capable" - twice.