It’s Gut-Check Time

With restoring prisoners' rights of habeas corpus now a surefire applause line at Democratic events, maybe it's time for more Latin: modus operandi—a way of operating (MO for short). In a carefully prepared sound bite at last week's Des Moines Register Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton thought she had found a line to jump-start her flagging campaign: "Some believe you get change by demanding it. Some believe you get it by hoping for it.

I believe you get it by working hard for change," she said, in thinly veiled shots at John Edwards and Barack Obama.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the postdebate "spin room." While Clinton's acolytes pointed to this as a key moment in a largely dreary debate, so did Edwards's aides and Obama's. In other words, for all the bickering, they agreed on the terrain of battle. The contrast they offer is not about ends. Their policy goals and first-100-days agendas are strikingly similar. It's about means—the tone and approach required to make change happen in Washington. And their choice of means tells us something important about who they are and how they got into politics in the first place. For Edwards, it's confrontation. For Obama, conciliation. For Clinton, perspiration. The candidates who connect best to their real selves and deepest motivations usually win. Contrary to popular belief, phonies fade fast in politics.

Edwards sees politics as the extension of litigation by other means. The words Hillary used to describe his MO—"demanding change"—are fine with him. While his hard-core anticorporate rhetoric may be a cleverly honed campaign message that's at odds with much of his Senate record (and one likely to be softened if he survives Iowa), his adversarial approach to the world is not a pose. He first ran for office in 1998 to fill a void left in his life by the death of his 16-year-old son, Wade. The passion that works for him on the trail, as his wife, Elizabeth, explains, comes from fusing a desire to make Wade proud with a debt to those, like his millworker father, who struggled.

But this idea that power can simply be "taken" from insurance companies and drug companies does not bear scrutiny. Edwards told me last week that the special interests would see "the handwriting on the wall" after his election and capitulate to the popular will. If only it were that easy.

Obama spent much of his childhood and early adulthood figuring out who he is. He succeeded (as his book "Dreams From My Father" conveys) and became an integrated man in the fullest sense of the word. The ease with which he carries the burdens of history is what gives him his appeal. His experience as a community organizer in Chicago helps explain both his success at building a sophisticated campaign from scratch in a few months and his preference for the kind of conciliation that succeeded with skeptical community activists there—and, later, in politics. (His success in bringing together the police and the ACLU to win landmark death-penalty legislation shouldn't be discounted just because it happened in Illinois, not Washington.) But Obama's lack of experience with confrontation increases the odds that he could be swamped early in his presidency, as Bill Clinton was. Hope has a way of wilting.