Clinton, Obama sharpen their rhetoric

WASHINGTON — On the way to her win in New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband criticized Barack Obama for spouting "poetry" and "fairy tales."

The day after, Obama said he was ready to use sharp words to counter attacks.

"I come from Chicago politics. We're accustomed to rough-and-tumble," the Illinois senator said Wednesday in one of many television interviews. "We have to make sure that we take it to them just like they take it to us."

It didn't take long for the first volley, though it did not come from Obama but from an ally.

Citing a key moment at the end of the New Hampshire campaign, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) said Clinton had choked up when someone asked about her hair, "not in response to other issues. . . . Her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina."

An Obama advisor said Jackson, Obama's national campaign co-chairman, was speaking only for himself. Obama, campaigning in New Jersey, renewed his call for an end to partisanship, saying, "We can't keep doing things the same way."

A spokesman for New York Sen. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, called Jackson's comment "puzzling." After the 2005 hurricane, he said, "Sen. Clinton went to the gulf . . . and comforted victims of the storm. She worked hard in the Senate with local officials from the region to get assistance to those in need."

Although Clinton was asked at a coffee shop Monday about who did her hair, she became emotional as she described the strain of campaigning.

Jackson's attack on Clinton suggested that as the Democratic presidential race turns into a duel between the two closely matched front-runners, the candidates' supporters -- if not the candidates -- may stray from the relatively genteel tone that has dominated until now.

Already, in the days leading up to Tuesday's primary election in New Hampshire, the language of the contest was sharpening.

Former President Clinton called Obama's account of his opposition to the war in Iraq "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," and suggested that Obama was too inexperienced to be president.

Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who trails Hillary Clinton and Obama in polls, dismissed Clinton as a candidate of the "status quo."

Clinton's narrow victory in Tuesday's primary election in New Hampshire, after Obama's surprise win in Iowa's caucuses five days earlier, made it probable that the contest will last through Feb. 5, when California and 21 other states hold Democratic primaries or caucuses.