E.J. Dionne is one of the smartest columnists in the country. This analysis is especially interesting. He states that Sen. Obama is running a grassroots campaign whereas Sen. Clinton favors the top-down approach.
From E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post:
Three differences and three similarities will define the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
The
most important difference lies in where their respective political
journeys began. After her early work as an advocate for children,
Clinton came to political maturity in the South as part of her
husband's efforts to rescue the Democratic Party from its low point in
the 1980s. She was shaped by her party's need to win back moderate and
conservative voters who had strayed to Ronald Reagan's banner.
The resulting Clinton project was a brilliant top-down effort to shape
new Democratic ideas that would appeal to Southern whites and the
Northern working class. This explains why both Clintons were drawn to
the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, far more an elite policy
shop than a grass-roots organization.
Obama, by contrast, began his political life as a community
organizer in inner-city Chicago. His earliest experiences were of a
bottom-up politics mobilizing the poor and the marginalized. This had
the paradoxical effect of giving some of his ideas a decidedly
progressive and activist tilt and others a more conservative tinge.
Consider
two statements he made in 1997, shortly after his election to the
Illinois Senate. On the one hand, Obama noted that welfare recipients
"generally are not represented down here in Springfield," the capital,
and that his job was to stand up for them.
But the organizer's
emphasis on local and community responsibility sounded quite
traditional when he declared the same year that "though we may be
lobbying for more school funding, it's also important for us to bring
education into the homes and ensure parents are checking children's
homework, turning off the television, teaching common courtesy."
In
keeping with his grass-roots background, Obama's campaign for the 2008
Democratic presidential nomination kicked off with a sense that it was
a national movement, while Clinton, from the moment she announced her intentions on Saturday, commanded a well-established, well-staffed and well-financed national organization.
