Our vanity candidate was given a lesson of being polite in NH when facing one of his own backers. AP is reporting:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/0 8/obama_tries_smallgroup_politic.php

The Illinois senator sounded a familiar theme, that he is an outsider to Washington and to politics as usual.

But Maggie North of Claremont told him he risks becoming part of the usual political scene if he keeps being drawn into well-publicized disputes with rivals. He and chief rival Hillary Rodham Clinton have jabbed at each other over foreign policy, the war on terrorism and the use of nuclear weapons.

"You can be it," she said. "But you've got to stop. Excuse me for being blunt, you've got to stop getting involved in the way people are fighting each other, chewing you up a little more."

"That's what you do when you run for president," Obama responded, getting a laugh.

North, who is considering an Obama endorsement and backed Howard Dean in 2004, praised Obama as someone fresh, but she said she worried that he was hurting himself.

Obama said infighting among the candidates is part of the process.

"Some of that's OK, it thickens your skin. ... Putting you through the paces like that is part of the hazing that's required for the job," he said.

North wasn't persuaded.
"What happens when you engage in that is you become like everybody else," she said.

AP continues the following...

Obama repeated his criticism of lobbyists, calling them the enemy and saying their donations are corrupt.

"If they're spending a billion dollars on lobbying over 10 years, they're averaging $100 million a year _ that carries weight in Washington. The congressmen will deny it, but they're not spending it just to provide good information," he said.

While Obama doesn't accept money directly from federal lobbyists, he is not above benefiting from the broader lobbying community. He accepts money from firms that have lobbying operations and has tapped the networks of lobbyists' friends and co-workers. Obama, a former state senator from Illinois, has long accepted money from state lobbyists. One of them, Concord, N.H., lobbyist Jim Demers, attended an Obama event in Keene later and is a top adviser to the campaign.

GQ has a profile of our vanity candidate Obama,
http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id =content_5841
the following paragraph verifies Obama is nothing but a vanity candidate:

How, then, to close the Gap? In the press, an idea was starting to gel that Obama was all style and no substance. John Edwards was defining his campaign by its big ideas (universal health insurance, withdrawal from Iraq, a new war against poverty), and Hillary was defining hers by her mastery of policy and, as she repeatedly says, how she is "ready" to be president. Obama's stump speeches, however, highlighted a vague message of hope. At the February meeting of the Democratic National Committee, a venue that attracted all of the presidential candidates and most of the Washington, D.C., press corps, Obama gave a speech in which he said, "There are those who don't believe in talking about hope. They say, `Well, we want specifics, we want details, and we want white papers. We want plans.' We've had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we've had is a shortage of hope." Afterwards, the press criticized the speech as yet more feel-good ambiguity. Obama, rather than having a knee-jerk response to the negative reaction and changing his tack, instead later added to his regular stump speech a mocking reference to reporters who dismiss him as nothing more than a "hopemonger."

What the press didn't know is that Obama's resistance to becoming a candidate of white papers had a strategic logic. As his pollsters had clearly divined, if the campaign hinged on who had the best health care plan or who better understood the minutiae of tax policy, then Obama was toast. That was the contest Hillary was hoping to have. ...

As his pollsters had clearly divined, if the campaign hinged on who had the best health care plan or who better understood the minutiae of tax policy, then Obama was toast.

Newskweek has an excellent piece on Obama's Arugula moment. He is proved to be not just a vanity candidate, but also an elitist who has no touch with middle-class America...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20226452/sit e/newsweek/

On a sunlit Friday afternoon in July, Barack Obama stopped by Beverly Van Fossen's farm in Adel, Iowa, to speak about "rural issues." It was standard Hawkeye State stumping--until the senator took a stab at sympathizing with farmers whose crop prices have stagnated. "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" he asked. Unfortunately, Adel isn't exactly arugula country. "Someone near me whispered, 'What's arugula?' " says Van Fossen, 74. " 'You can't find that in Iowa'." Same goes for Whole Foods. The closest locations, reported The New York Times that evening, are in Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kans., and Minneapolis. Whoops. Right-wing bloggers pounced. The dishy Wonkette called Obama a "super rich Ivy League elitist." Peter Feld, a former Michael Dukakis staffer, wrote on Powers-Point.com that a similar slip by his ex-boss--the suggestion that Iowans grow "Belgian endive"--surfaced repeatedly in 1988 attack ads. C'est la vie politique.

While Obama continues his vanity tour powered by money provided by elitists (don't believe for a minute that most of his money is from selling $5 T-shirt), Hillary is campaigning hard in rural Nevada, and drew a great crowd of 2,500 people.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/storie s/nevada/2007/aug/13/081310884.html

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton relied on an anti-Washington message to appeal to rural voters Monday in her first venture into the Nevada desert.

"We're going to end all these no-bid contracts, we're going to make things more transparent, we're going to get rid of all these cronies that came to Washington to work in the Bush administration," Clinton told a group of raucous supporters at a town hall-style rally. "To do all this, it's going to take reforming Washington."

Clinton spoke to crowd of about 2,500 at a roller-skating rink in this historically conservative pocket 60 miles west of Las Vegas.

Afterward, Patricia Wosic, a a single mother, described her support for Clinton as support for candidate who will advocate for women. "It's about time we have a woman representing this country. I can't even afford to get my daughter dental (insurance) because the men in this country don't care about single moms," the 44-year-old mail carrier said.

The senator was scheduled to spend her evening with a union nurse at a Las Vegas hospital. The event is part of the Service Employees International Union program intended to give candidates a glimpse of the daily lives of its members.