The Des Moines Register has a good piece about yesterday's back and forth between Hillary and Obama on healthcare. But, I confess, this is the graf that immediately caught my eye:
After arriving more than two hours late because of flat tires on her chartered airplane, Clinton told the audience at Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny that Obama has been saying there's no difference between their plans.
On a somewhat more serious note, it will be interesting to see if Hillary's point about Obama leaving 100,000 Iowans uninsured resonates, or whether Obama can successfully deflect it with his argument that a.) it's too hard to enforce a Hillary-style mandate, and b.) the reason people don't have health insurance isn't because they don't want it, but because they can't afford it. (I have it on good information that Jonathan Cohn is weighing in on the substance of these points fairly soon.)
One thing worth considering is that John Edwards did much better in Iowa in 2004 than people with far more extensive healthcare plans--Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, to name a few. (And Obama has a much more extensive plan than Edwards did.) I doubt that's the reason Edwards did better, but it doesn't seem to have hurt him.
On the other hand, the resonance of the issue seems to have changed somewhat since then.
--Noam Scheiber