Obama really does think that the free media ride he's been given so far will carry over to the general.  Edwards is drawing the contrast with Obama on who has the fight to take on the multinationals and their lobbyists who write the laws against the benefit of most Americans.

Yesterday when asked about whether Obama would swear off 527 support in the general he would not answer the question but hoped the Republicans would play nice.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/12/23/ politics/fromtheroad/entry3643326.shtml

He was asked if he would accept support from 527s if he was the nominee but Obama did not give a definitive answer. He said he hopes to get Republicans to come up with an agreement on how to operate.

Now an Edwards spokesman is responding with the obvious.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articl es/2007/12/24/in_shifting_race_edwards_a ims_for_the_gut/?page=full

"He's wearing rose-colored glasses," Jonathan Prince, Edwards's deputy campaign manager, said of Obama. "It's nice in theory that you think you can get everyone to come together, but it doesn't work that way."

I personally don't think that Obama's charm is going to cause Cigna to give up profits or Exxon Mobil to start using only renewable energy.

Edwards, a onetime courtroom lawyer, portrayed Obama, a former constitutional law professor, as cool and abstract in his thinking. "From my perspective, this is not an academic or a philosophical question," Edwards said. "This is about who has the toughness and fight to take on corporate greed and win."

It was a new front between two candidates who had previously kept their quarrels quiet. "The differences between Senator Clinton and myself are much more dramatic than the differences between Senator Obama and myself," Edwards said in early November, when both were trailing Clinton by significant poll margins in Iowa and nationally.

It may in fact have been Clinton who first highlighted the stylistic difference between her two rivals, when she said at a recent debate in Des Moines that "you can't demand change, you can't hope for change, you have to work hard to make change, and that's what I've done."

Krugman takes on Obama for bashing labor unions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinio n/24krugman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Once upon a time, back when America had a strong middle class, it also had a strong union movement.

These two facts were connected. Unions negotiated good wages and benefits for their workers, gains that often ended up being matched even by nonunion employers. They also provided an important counterbalance to the political influence of corporations and the economic elite.

....

It's often assumed that the U.S. labor movement died a natural death, that it was made obsolete by globalization and technological change. But what really happened is that beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor.

Don't take my word for it; read Business Week, which published an article in 2002 titled "How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay." The article explained that "over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups." It then described the tactics -- some legal, some illegal, all involving a healthy dose of intimidation -- that Wal-Mart and other giant firms use to block organizing drives.

These hardball tactics have been enabled by a political environment that has been deeply hostile to organized labor, both because politicians favored employers' interests and because conservatives sought to weaken the Democratic Party. "We're going to crush labor as a political entity," Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist, once declared.

But the times may be changing. A newly energized progressive movement seems to be on the ascendant, and unions are a key part of that movement. Most notably, the Service Employees International Union has played a key role in pushing for health care reform. And unions will be an important force in the Democrats' favor in next year's election.

But Barack Obama, though he has a solid pro-labor voting record, has not -- in part, perhaps, because his message of "a new kind of politics" that will transcend bitter partisanship doesn't make much sense to union leaders who know, from the experience of confronting corporations and their political allies head on, that partisanship isn't going away anytime soon.

O.K., that's politics. But now Mr. Obama has lashed out at Mr. Edwards because two 527s -- independent groups that are allowed to support candidates, but are legally forbidden from coordinating directly with their campaigns -- are running ads on his rival's behalf. They are, Mr. Obama says, representative of the kind of "special interests" that "have too much influence in Washington."

The thing, though, is that both of these 527s represent union groups -- in the case of the larger group, local branches of the S.E.I.U. who consider Mr. Edwards the strongest candidate on health reform. So Mr. Obama's attack raises a couple of questions.

First, does it make sense, in the current political and economic environment, for Democrats to lump unions in with corporate groups as examples of the special interests we need to stand up to?

Second, is Mr. Obama saying that if nominated, he'd be willing to run without support from labor 527s, which might be crucial to the Democrats? If not, how does he avoid having his own current words used against him by the Republican nominee?

read the rest...