Edwards' Emotionalism: The candidate and His Family in New Hampshire by John Dickerson

CONCORD, N.H.—John Edwards is the anti-Obama. The Illinois senator's stump speeches are studded with anecdotes and set-piece jokes and have a changing rhythm he has compared to a jazz performance. When he offers policy specifics, they feel secondary. Edwards finished speaking Monday in the Concord High gymnasium without offering anecdotes or jokes—the rhetoric didn't soar much above the fiberglass backboards. He punctuated his stream of policy talk on global warming, Iraq, education, poverty, and health care with the Edwards C: the shape he makes with his thumb and first finger when citing a fact or policy detail.

Later, at a tour of Stonyfield farms, Edwards made the distinction with Obama clearer. He called on Congress to stand up to the president even if Bush vetoes a date for withdrawal of American troops—a conscious effort to distinguish himself as more anti-war than Obama, who said Sunday that Congress should pass the war-funding money without a timeline for withdrawal if Bush vetoed the spending bill. He then made a broader swipe. "I hope you will put a really rigorous test to [the presidential candidates]. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of the rhetoric. It's not enough to talk about 'hope' and 'we're all going to feel good.' We're past that. This is a very serious time in American history. It's time for anybody running for president to treat this seriously. I have talked about hope and inspiration in the past, and they're wonderful things, but you have to translate them into action." The only way it could have been clearer that he was talking about Obama would have been for him to hold up the Illinois senator's book jacket and point to it.

Edwards is not just trying to be the policy candidate, but the macho policy candidate, boasting and taunting his opponents to match his level of specificity. His wife reinforced the message. "I'm confident about his ideas, so grill the business out of him," she said, introducing him.