From here on out, when people ask me what the difference between the three Democratic frontrunners is, I'll tell them this, from Ezra Klein, as he breaks voters down into three groups: policy-oriented, projection or persuasion.
Edwards has gained a lot of rather unexpected support from policy-oriented types -- voters who are surveying the range of candidates and seeing whose white papers conform most closely with their preferences. Want the most radical health care plan you can find? Edwards is your guy.
Hillary, by contrast, seems to trigger a lot of projection. I can't tell you how many of her supporters have tried to convince me that she's really much more liberal than she comes off, but has been forced into displaying a centrist, hawkish streak because of the demands of running as a woman in a traditionally masculine sphere. Her supporters seem to spend a lot of time convincing themselves that she's really very progressive, and appearances to the contrary are misleading.
And lastly, Obama's actually been a fairly persuasive candidate. His policies are close enough to progressive ideals that his supporters don't need to invent new ones for him, but they're just cautious enough to open him up to attack for the left. The result has been a lot of Obama folks arguing earnestly for the superiority of policies -- like a near-universal, but not actually compulsory, health care plan -- that I don't think, a few months ago, they would have considered the optimal approach.
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