Barack Obama: The Contender

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Taking the Gloves Off
Not until Clinton turned in a couple of unsteady debate performances of her own in October, after having dominated the forums up to that point, did it seem as though someone had thrown a switch in Obama. Suddenly for Obama, as Lincoln wrote of his own presidential aspirations in 1860, "the taste is in my mouth." Voters began to see that he really wanted the job he was campaigning for. "There's a certain joy to it that I see in him now," says his strategist David Axelrod. "I just sensed from that point on that sort of incredible focus, energy, acuity, joy. He's into it."

Obama's Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech hit all the inspirational notes, with its pledge to bring Red America together with Blue America and its invocation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "fierce urgency of now." But it was also an indictment, not only of the Bush brand of politics but of the Clinton one as well. "We have a chance to bring the country together in a new majority to finally tackle problems that George Bush made far worse but that had festered long before George Bush ever took office," he declared. "Triangulating and poll-driven positions ... just won't do."

That, however, can be a tricky argument to make in a Democratic primary, given the exalted status of Bill Clinton in the Democratic pantheon. Obama "has to be very careful about how he attacks her," says Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000 but is not backing any candidate in this race. "He talks about the Clinton years as a failure, when most Democrats know differently." And as a prominent Democratic strategist noted, "I am not convinced this campaign has any sense of how hard the Clintons fight when they feel their birthright is being challenged. I am not sure they are ready for this."

But then, it's a little late for Obama to start worrying about that now. Since he made the decision not just to run but to get pugnacious as well — and since he emerged in the polls as Hillary Clinton's most serious opponent — hardly a news cycle has passed without a punch being thrown by one camp or the other. "It's going to look like this every day between now and the caucuses," says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. In the latest rounds, Obama has tried jujitsu, challenging Clinton on what she considers to be her greatest strength, while exposing his own most glaring vulnerability: experience. When, during a swing through Iowa, Clinton pointedly asserted that she wouldn't need on-the-job training to deal with the economy, Obama shot back, "I am happy to compare my experiences with hers when it comes to the economy. My understanding was that she wasn't Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration."

Obama has also begun to sharpen one of his strongest arguments — that experience is not the same thing as judgment — for which Clinton has not yet found a rejoinder. One of the biggest applause lines in his stump speech has been the note that "Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had two of the longest résumés in Washington, but that experience didn't translate into good judgment." After Clinton mocked Obama's assertion in mid-November that his years spent living in Indonesia as a child gave him strong experience in foreign relations, his campaign revised the line to question her judgment as well. "Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and traveled to many countries as well," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, "but along with Hillary Clinton, they led us into the worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran."