Obama turns up heat as he targets Hillary

With her lead so strong, he decides he has to get tougher

The indisputable force of Hillary Clinton, her tenacious lead for the Democratic nomination, has finally "fired up" Barack Obama and made him "ready to go" -- to use his own campaign refrain.

As he heads into Iowa Tuesday night for a five-day swing, his rhetoric has become more emotionally charged and pointed at New York Sen. Clinton -- although he is more measured in his approach than the other Democratic front-runner, John Edwards, former senator from North Carolina.

"Hillary Clinton is a colleague and a friend, and she is a skilled politician," Obama told a crowd of mostly students and faculty on Saturday at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.

"She has run what Washington would call a textbook campaign, and the disagreement we have is with the textbook itself.

"It's a textbook that's all about winning elections" but tells voters little about solving the country's problems, he claims. "It encourages calculated answers to suit the politics of the [moment] instead of clear, consistent principles about how you lead America."

In the last week, Obama has been trying to illustrate more vigorously that he is the one who can bring change to Washington, not Clinton; he is trying harder to define the differences between them, a difficult task as so many of the Democratic candidates' policies are nearly identical on health care, the environment, etc.

But he has definitely put more oomph in his delivery since the Democratic debate in Philadelphia a week ago, and the addition of adviser Valerie Jarrett, a former city commissioner in Mayor Daley's administration. She now travels with Obama and was in South Carolina with him over the weekend. Her increased involvement in the campaign shows.

Jarrett, however, takes no credit for Obama's zeal. "It's coming from his heart and soul," she said. "Maybe it's the next evolution of the campaign. The subject matter touched him deeply." (She was referring to a civil rights talk he gave in South Carolina.)

Obama has ratcheted up the rhetoric several notches and is adopting an effort to heckle Hillary's policies that he didn't seem to have the stomach for before. Reports in the New York Times suggested some of his financial backers were getting antsy about Hillary's success and Barack's unwillingness to take her on.

In South Carolina, he told a crowd he would be a president who uses the word "change" not as a "slogan, but change we can believe in," later adding: "I'm not running for this office to fulfill any long-term plans or because I believe it's somehow owed to me." An obvious reference to Clinton, who hopes to follow her husband's path to the White House.

And answering the question about why he, the youngest Democratic candidate at 46, decided to run when he lacks the political experience of the elders in the race, he said: "I am running because there is such a thing as being too late, and that hour is almost here.

"I don't want to wake up four years from now and turn on one of those cable talk shows and see that Washington is caught up in the same food fight," he said.

It will be interesting to watch how this reborn Obama will be perceived in Iowa in the next eight or so weeks before the early caucuses. Will Iowans buy it? Or will a reborn Hillary snatch victory away?

Because of the way the caucus system works, Iowan voters can switch sides in the middle of the process -- something Democratic Party chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean found out after he took a wrong turn through their cornfields just over four years ago.

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One of the laughs Obama now gets on the campaign trail is gratis my colleague Scott Fornek, who did an exhaustive study of Obama's genealogy. Obama, Fornek revealed, is a distant, distant cousin to Vice President Dick Cheney -- something that got even wider notice when Cheney's wife, Lynne, mentioned it recently during a TV interview.

Noting that in the next presidential election in 2008, Cheney's name will not appear on the ballot because he has been around for two terms, Obama kidded: "We've been trying to hide that cousin thing for a long time.

"Everybody has a black sheep in the family . . . a crazy uncle in the attic." And as he looks up, searching for the demented relative, the crowd roars.