http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-working-class-heromar31,0,495985.story By Jim Tankersley | Tribune correspondent
5:44 PM CDT, March 30, 2008
RALEIGH, N.C. — Hillary Clinton kicked off her North Carolina primary campaign last week at a technical school that bills itself "College for the Real World." After some pleasantries and a stab at a basketball reference, she began to outline what she called "the problems that we face" as a nation.
"Our American workers work harder and are more productive than anyone," she said. "And yet for too many, here in North Carolina and elsewhere, that hard work doesn't seem to be paying off."
That same morning, Barack Obama hit New York City for a speech on America's housing crisis. He opened with a 300-word history of the Founding Fathers' views on free markets.
"In the more than two centuries since then," he said, "we have struggled to balance the same forces that confronted Hamilton and Jefferson — self-interest and community; markets and democracy; the concentration of wealth and power, and the necessity of transparency and opportunity for each and every citizen."
The difference in those speeches helps explain Clinton's success in fashioning herself the "Working Class Hero" of the 2008 Democratic presidential race.
On several scales of "readability," which measure the level of education needed to understand a piece of writing, a sampling of Clinton's speeches scored on average two grade levels below Obama's.
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