Two From Vegas

"Edwards presses rivals for details at health care forum" (AP-CNN):

John Edwards said Saturday he will definitely stay in the presidential race, trying to reassure voters and donors that he can handle the dual pressure of the campaign and his wife's cancer diagnosis.

At a Democratic presidential forum focused on health care, Edwards pressed his rivals to provide a detailed plan to cover the nation's uninsured -- estimated at about 47 million -- and describe how they will pay for it.

His chief competitors, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, did not rule out the possibility that they would follow his lead with a plan requiring a tax increase, but they provided no specifics. (Watch the Edwardses in the public eye for the first time since announcing her diagnosis Video)

"I have not foreclosed the possibility that we might need additional revenue in order to achieve my goal, but we shouldn't underestimate the amount of money that can be saved in the existing system," Obama said when asked whether he would raise taxes to reach his goal of universal coverage by the end of his first term.

"I can tell you I will do whatever it takes," the Illinois senator added.

Clinton did not say whether or not she is considering a tax increase, but said she cannot see putting more money into what she described as the current broken system. She said she is committed to succeeding where she failed with the health care plan she crafted in her husband's first term in the White House.

"We're going to change the way we finance the system by taking away money from people who are doing well now," said Clinton, who represents New York in the Senate. Asked who she was referring to, she mentioned insurance companies.

The forum was sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington-based policy group.

It came two days after Edwards announced that the breast cancer that his wife thought she had beaten had returned, this time in her bone. He pointed out his wife, Elizabeth, sitting in the front row and said they both understand that dealing with their personal struggle will require "a focus and a maturity."

"I'm definitely in the race for the duration," he said. "This is not the first challenge that Elizabeth and I have been through."

Edwards pointed out that they lost their teenage son, Wade, 11 years ago in a car accident -- something that he didn't talk about much when he ran for president four years ago.

"I know because of the nature of the woman I'm married to that she will be there every single step of the way," he said. "We take our responsibility to serving this country very seriously."

Edwards said he and his wife are getting too much credit for forging ahead when millions of women are enduring the same struggle and the additional worry of getting the necessary care.

"One of the reasons that I want to be president of the United States is to make sure that every woman and every person in America gets the same things that we have," Edwards said. His plan would require employers to provide insurance and individuals to have it at a cost of $90 billion to $120 billion.

Edwards said any politicians who say they can provide universal health care and other promises while ending the federal deficit are not being honest.

"They've probably got a bridge in Brooklyn they want to sell you, too," Edwards said to laughter and applause. "I just don't think it can be done."
Richardson: Universal care in first year

No other candidate has given a cost estimate. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, however, said he could provide universal care in his first year as president without raising taxes.

Richardson said his plan would include a tax credit for low-income people who need coverage, and prevention strategies such as a nationwide smoking restriction like the one he signed in New Mexico.

He said he would pay for his plan in large part by ending the war in Iraq and shifting the military spending to human needs -- an idea that won loud applause.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd said his plan would require a tax increase by repealing President Bush's cuts to the top 2 percent of income-earners.

Video of the candidate forum was fed live over the Internet. The moderator, Time magazine's Karen Tumulty, took questions from Internet viewers as well as prescreened questions from union members in the audience. (Read Tumulty's takeexternal link)

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel promoted a single-payer universal health care system.

Obama was challenged by an audience member who said she had gone to the senator's Web site looking for health care reform information and found only plans about HIV and lead poisoning. He said he would have a detailed plan in a couple months, after he has a chance to discuss it further with experts and front-line workers.

He said he wants to require that employers either provide coverage or help their workers pay to get their own and favors cutting costs through prevention, management and technology improvements.

Clinton, who received the warmest reception from the audience with several interruptions for applause, said her deadline for universal health care would be two terms in office.

She said part of the reason her plan failed in the early 1990s was that people with coverage did not understand that it would not change. "We're going to do a better job explaining this time," she said.

"Barack Obama shines his magnetism on Vegas" (Las Vegas SUN):

Sen. Barack Obama hugged half the people on stage after his speech Friday and went down into the crowd, and the flashes started.

Cell phone cameras, digital cameras, professional shooters. It was dark, but the flashes kept revealing his wide grin as the workers of Culinary 226 reached to touch him.

Obama drew 10,000 in Oakland, 15,000 in a light rain in Austin, Texas, 3,500 his last time in Las Vegas.

Sen. Thomas Eagleton said in the days before his death this month that he had not seen people so eager to physically touch a candidate since Robert F. Kennedy.

Awhile back, a photographer for People magazine captured Obama on a beach in nothing but swim trunks, and the national cooing was audible. Can we imagine a comparable episode with another politician? (Do we want to?)

That may be because Obama is beyond the realm of mere candidate. He's now in another cultural sphere, the upper reaches of celebrity shared with the likes of Oprah or Bono.

Political observers can't quite explain it, beyond noting that he seems to have tapped into the American psyche despite playing in an arena - politics - that many people consider boring, even ugly.

Pop culture and communications experts, however, do have theories about the mania.

"His appeal is that he sounds a lot more like a president you would hear on "The West Wing" than on CNN: the soaring rhetoric, the commanding presence - he's like the visionary political leader out of central casting," said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Center for Popular Television at Syracuse University.

"There's this appetite for Josiah Bartlet," he said, referring to the fictional president played by Martin Sheen.

For Ruth Sherman, a communications consultant and a blogger for Fast Company magazine, Obama's appeal results from well-practiced communication techniques. "It's not an accident. I think people who are good at connecting, which is what he's good at, I think they learn the value of it at a young age.

"These skills are concrete and they're learned," Sherman continued. "They're not born that way. It just looks like it, because he seems so comfortable in his own skin."

Pepper Schwartz of the University of Washington is an expert on appeal of another sort. She likened the attraction to Obama to infatuation.

"He's a very attractive candidate in a number of ways, and it's hard to separate him being good looking from his delivery, which seems to be so honest and straightforward," Schwartz said.

"The entire package is very attractive . The package is so good, that you get persuaded before you know what's really said."

For Obama, this kind of talk is dangerous, conservative talk radio fodder.

In a Sun interview Friday, he said the energy around his candidacy is a function of his message, and this particular historical moment.

"As I travel around the country, what I'm convinced of is that the country is deeply ready for change, and they're paying a lot of attention, and I think the approach I've taken to the issues, which offers a common sense, pragmatic, hopeful agenda for change is one that people are interested in, and particularly young people."

Nevertheless, Obama offers a compelling personal history laid out in his book "Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." In an age of incessant confession, via blogs and Myspace, his accomplished memoir places him squarely in the present.

His father was a Kenyan goat herder, his mother a white Kansan, and he was born in Hawaii in 1961. He was raised by his mother in Hawaii and Indonesia and graduated from Columbia in New York in 1983.

Obama moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. He admits to some adolescent drifting before becoming the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He could have had a job at any rich firm in America, or gone straight to politics. Blair Underwood based his "L.A. Law" character, at least in part, on Obama.

Instead, he returned to Chicago, where he took on civil rights cases and taught law.

He was elected to the Illinois state senate, and after eight years, his national career was launched in a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Hints about his appeal today can be found in the language and cadences of that speech.

"The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an 'awesome God' in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states.

"We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."

Obama writes much of his own material, which is fluid and occasionally soaring.

Evan Thomas, a Robert Kennedy biographer and editor at Newsweek, said Obama sounds more genuine by writing his own words because, by definition, the words are his alone.

Thomas, however, drew a distinction between Obama and Kennedy. The latter was more of a rabble-rouser, while Obama is more cautious, he said.

Thomas also noted the difference in eras. "This is not 1968. Those were pre-revolutionary times," he said, citing urban riots and the war draft.

Still, few would dispute that the nation is at a political impasse and many voters are waiting for someone to break through it.

Leo Braudy, an expert in politics and popular culture at the University of Southern California, said "when things get polarized, you get into this either/or situation, and the kind of candidates who galvanize people in those situations are people who can bridge those gaps ."

Obama echoed this in the interview. "We engage in a lot of either/or debates. For failing schools, the answer is either more money, or vouchers," he said.

There's no denying the raw energy of his campaign. But he acknowledged that it is unlikely to carry through the next 20 months to the White House.

His chief rivals, Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards, have better organizations, in Nevada and elsewhere.

"I'm mindful that big crowds don't translate into caucus-goers, so it's going to be important for us to channel this energy into organization," Obama said.

To do that, he needs his charisma to raise money and recruit top political talent, as Clinton, Edwards and other Democrats have done, and build organizations from the ground up.

As Thompson, the pop culture expert, said: "It's great for act one, but we need to see how this will translate into act two and act three."

Or, as Schwartz noted, "Infatuation leads to deep engagement or deep disappointment. It could be, he's even better than we thought; or it could be, nope."