One candidate lauded those serving in Iraq because they "did everything they were asked to do."
The other candidate praised those serving in Iraq because "they have done everything asked of them."
One candidate denounced the Bush administration for borrowing from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis.
The other candidate denounced the Bush administration for borrowing from the Chinese to - well, you get the picture.
When it comes to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom Maryland Democrats will be choosing between in today's primary, the difference is not so much substance as style, policies as presentation, what they want to do as how they say they're going to do it.
Yesterday, Clinton and Obama made their last best pitches here, each picking venues that played to their strengths - she doing her wonky best in a Q&A; setting, he rocking arenas full of fans. (The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, also made an appearance, in Annapolis, and his still-hanging-in-there rival, Mike Huckabee, sent his wife to the state.)
Voters turned out all weekend and yesterday for their own in-the-flesh glimpse of the candidates or their surrogates, enjoying the kind of attention that the state rarely gets but now merits, given how hard the nomination, at least on the Democratic side, is going to be to lock up.
If you've ever had Iowa envy or Super Tuesday jealousy - for the kind of in-person wooing that the early-voting and other decisive states get from the candidates - this is your year. We might not have gotten quite the spectacle of the candidate marveling at the butter sculpture at the state fair, or just happening to stop in at the picturesque diner while undecided you is having a milkshake, but we got a bit of the campaign sideshow that usually bypasses small predictable states like Maryland.
Clinton took one of those photo-op factory tours yesterday morning, stopping by the General Motors transmission plant in White Marsh, where they recently began making politically laudable hybrids. She arrived at the cavernous facility in a startling blue suit and full high-def-TV-ready makeup and helmet-sprayed hair. She watched with immense interest as a worker operated some machine making a thingamabob - or maybe it was a whatchamacallit - that apparently goes into a hybrid SUV.
Then it was on to the finished product itself - I don't know, but I think they might have skipped a few manufacturing steps there - a massive hybrid Tahoe. Hillary gamely looked under the hood, then climbed into the driver's seat, losing one black pump. I started to worry her little friend, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who came along for the tour, might similarly try to scale the behemoth and lose more than a shoe, but she remained safely earthbound. Hand in chin, Hillary nodded pensively as - who knows? - the dashboard or the steering column was explained to her. Gov. Martin O'Malley and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown stood by helpfully, seemingly ready to help her reduce our carbon footprints, or at least win a couple of votes.
The point of the visit was to highlight Hillary's plan for "green-collar jobs," those that would be created by investing in energy-efficient homes, cars and office buildings.
She didn't need to convince Raul Gonzales, a transmission technician and fabricator who has worked for GM for 30 years. He moved from Van Nuys, Calif., after the GM plant closed there in 1992, worked at the Broening Highway plant until it too closed and then was lucky enough and senior enough to get a coveted job working on the hybrid transmissions.
"The future's there," he said.
Then it was time for Hillary to really be Hillary and do what she does best: display her command of the material. You can imagine her at school, the girl who was always first to wave her hand at the teacher. And darned if she didn't always have the right answer.
OK, it's not arena-shaking, it's not, pull out your cell phone and text, OMG she is so HOT, but it's sort of dazzling in a different way to watch an immensely intelligent and hypercompetent woman glide through questions from a few of the 25 autoworkers gathered before her - about a trade deal with Korea, the coming recession and the war in Iraq.
Then it was the reporters' turn - and given the rough road Hillary's been on this past week, you have to give props to her for even taking questions. Most went along the lines of: You lost all the states this weekend, you're gonna lose on Tuesday, you had to dip $5 million deep into your own bank account to get through Super Tuesday, your top manager had to be replaced, isn't your life just the pits right about now?
Oh, and by the way, Barack's cooler than you.
If everybody else is worried about that, Hillary isn't. "To the contrary," she countered the naysayers. Everything's great, she's "absolutely" looking forward to Texas and Ohio, she's already cleaned up in other big states from California to New York, and let's let the voters, not the pundits, have their say.
And then she was gone, away from the state that is expected to vote against her and onto the presumably friendly turf of Texas.
Meanwhile, her opponent Barack Obama was doing his rock-star thing, packing arenas from the Comcast Center in College Park to the 1st Mariner in downtown Baltimore.
Stand for change indeed, as Obama calls his rallies. From the time he, finally, made his way to a raised platform in the middle of the 1st Mariner yesterday afternoon, many had already stood in line for hours. They stood when he arrived, and many remained standing to the end of his speech. I think he might have read the phone book. No, actually, it was a standard stump speech, and yet the crowd was primed to applaud at seemingly anything - not just the usual crowd-pleasers, the calls to stop the war, build better schools and improve health coverage, but also ... to restore habeas corpus.
It is now all so familiar, if you ever turn on the TV or YouTube - the liquid voice, the lyrical lines: "Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they're given a chance." "There's no problem we couldn't solve, no destiny we could not fulfill." He's almost too perfectly out of Central Casting, a JFK for our own time, all Gap-ad cool and yes we can oh yes!
So every once in a while, he'll let out this sort of post-ironic, self-aware "huh huh huh" laugh, like, yeah, I know, I'm gooooood, but I'm also in on the joke.
Will Jones and Susan Crockett-Jones of Harford County let their boys, 13-year-old Noah and 11-year-old Asher, skip school yesterday to see what they thought just might be history in the making. It was Noah and Asher, after all, who led their parents from their initial and now dropped-out candidate, John Edwards, and into the promised land of Obama.
"Inspiring," Noah said. "Inspiring," Asher agreed.
Seemingly on cue during his speech, and surely this happens at every Obama rally, someone in the audience can no longer contain herself and screams, "I love you!" He says, as surely he says at every rally, he loves her back.
Then an entire section organizes itself to chant, "It's your time."
He tells them, the entire arena actually, no "it's your time."
And today, it is.
jean.marbella@baltsun.com