ABC News: Edwards is Buzz Maker of the Week
Rick Klein of ABC News on how Edwards performed incredibly well this week in the last debate on MSNBC:
The week was supposed to belong to Barack Obama -- he told us as much, in an interview with The New York Times where he vowed to step up his attacks on frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
But when Tuesday night's debate arrived in Philadelphia, it was John Edwards who was the dominant force. On issue after issue -- ties to lobbyists, trade, Social Security, Iraq, Iran -- Edwards offered the sharpest contrasts with Clinton -- and continued to present a thorough and coherent rationale for his candidacy.
When Clinton herself fed the negative storyline her opponents are seeking to build -- of an obfuscating, too-comfortable frontrunner -- it was Edwards who called her out.
"Sen. Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes," Edwards said, after Clinton bungled an answer about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.
Edwards' campaign looks virtually nothing like the race he ran in 2004, when he was the fresh-faced outsider who refused to attack. He's more aggressive now, for starters, but he also has a sense of purpose: Let me fight for you, he seems to say, and make the changes to the political system that we all know it needs.