Clinton's remarks resonate --- perhaps more than she wanted

Whether it was her intention or not, Hillary Clinton set the agenda for the conversation on the Democratic campaign trail this week with recent remarks on "the system."

"I want to work within the system,” Clinton said in Portsmouth, N.H., last Sunday. “You can’t pretend the system doesn’t exist.”

The comments drew major attention at the time. And since then, her two main competitors in the Democratic presidential race, Barack Obama and John Edwards, have zeroed in on them as a potential opportunity to strongly define their differences with Clinton.

"Look, Sen. Clinton is right –-- you cannot pretend the system doesn’t exist. But you also can’t pretend that it works," Edwards said today. "And that’s where she and I part company. Because I believe if you defend the system that defeats change, you can’t be a president that will bring change."

Speaking at an event in Nashua, N.H., where he formally accepted the endorsement of the nation's carpenters union, Edwards continued: "She says you bring change by working within the system established by the Constitution. I think the system has been corrupted by corporate powers never contemplated by the Constitution. This is not the government of, by and for the people that our founding fathers intended."

Obama similarly riffed on Clinton's "system" language during a well-received speech Friday in San Francisco.

The two men almost assuredly will be calling attention to the two sentences in her Portsmouth speech again and again. The Clinton camp clearly crafted them as part of the effort to cast her as a practical problem-solver. But the question that now looms is to what degree the words can be used against her.

-- Don Frederick