Obama plays defense

AUSTIN, Tex. -- Barack Obama's "words, just words" candidacy continues to pile them on: last night’s stump speech, delivered before 20,000 attendees sprawled around the base of the sandstone state capitol here, came in just a few minutes shy of an hour.

But what's bloating Obama’s rhetoric is not expanded uplift: the candidate many Democrats are beginning to see as their frontrunner spends much of his time on the defensive. Instead of being freed by his standing to engage in the type of inspiration that has fueled his bandwagon so far, Obama is letting his rhetoric -- perhaps more than at any other point in the campaign -- be determined by Hillary Clinton’s.

After Clinton began repeating the mantra that his candidacy is about "speeches" over "solutions," Obama keeps expanding the passages in which he enumerates his desired policy outcomes. His inspiring message of "hope" now comes complete with a shoutout to further investments in domestic infrastructure.

It's not all so subtle: the former constitutional-law professor seems to relish the opportunity for rebuttal, and happily gives voice to each of the criticisms that Clinton has made against his candidacy. "I'm going to -- in fairness -- offer the other argument," Obama said midway through his speech, and then repeats and responds to a number of them with a systematic rigor that would lend itself to easy outlining.

"Then there's the argument -- hold on! -- there's the argument that, you know, he talks good," Obama said, rehashing Clinton’s speeches-versus-solutions formulation. Obama asserts that "those two things go hand in hand," but not before arguing that he has experience in exactly the same terms that Clinton uses to describe his own.

Dissmissing him as only a speechmaker "ignores 20 years of work," Obama said, a sum that suggests he has accounted for every thing he has done since receiving his undergraduate diploma -- precisely the type of résumé-buffing fuzzy math that has led Clinton to claim the race’s mantle as the experienced candidate based on her "35 years of change."

Obama moves on to "this third argument" -- that he's not tough enough -- and then to another that "he’s too liberal," which in front of an Austin crowd seems less like an argument against Obama’s credentials than one for them, and it elicits cheers.

"They make fun of y'all, too," Obama said. "They say, 'All these people who are following Obama are delusional, they just like pretty words,'" and the people following Obama just laughed.