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.”

The full cover article, The Contender, is here.