Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama face opposite challenges in pursuing the Democratic nomination. Clinton's is to find the compelling narrative to complement her laundry list — and I say this as a fan of laundry lists. Obama's is to find the way to better knit together inspiration and policy.

Clinton's is the harder task, and right now her campaign is not only failing at it but going about it in exactly the wrong way. The Obama campaign, after wallowing in New Age-y — dare I say Oprah-esque? — language, is taking the first unsteady steps toward bolstering rhetoric with specifics.

I tend to come away from Clinton speeches impressed, by the breadth and depth of her knowledge, the intelligence of her proposals, the subtle way she has — despite the pull-to-the-extremes temptations of a nomination battle — tried to preserve her options for the presidency.

Granted, a Clinton speech can seem like a Ginsu knife infomercial: Increased Pell grants! Billions for green-collar jobs! But wait, that's not all. We'll have a government blogging team!

At a Clinton event in Manassas, Va., the other week, she talked about "investing in infrastructure with long-term bond financing." Not exactly a "yes, we can" moment.

"People say to me all the time, 'You're so specific. Why don't you just come and ... give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and get everybody all whooped up?' " she acknowledged in Manassas.

But getting voters "whooped up" is essential to winning — and it still eludes Clinton. The reason her misty moment resonated with New Hampshire voters was not just that they saw the real person behind the carefully constructed defenses — they saw a real person who cared about their problems.

In the weeks since, the Clinton campaign has squandered that success, playing into voters' preconceptions of the win-at-any-cost Clinton machine. Instead of building up Clinton, her team is trying to tear down Obama as just another flawed politician.

Take the campaign's two latest gambits. The first is to attack Obama for backtracking on his pledge to accept public financing for the general election. This is an entirely legitimate criticism. Clinton is not the candidate to make it.

Perhaps because she more shrewdly assessed the financial landscape, Clinton has refused to make the same commitment. So her complaint about Obama boils down to: "He's now waffling about whether he'll do something I've consistently waffled about." A candidate who pledged not to campaign in Florida and Michigan and is now trying to seat their delegates can hardly complain about a rival playing games.

The second gambit is to accuse Obama of plagiarizing speech lines from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Obama acknowledged, belatedly, that he should have credited Patrick, a campaign co-chairman. But voters don't think candidates write speeches themselves. Is it so much worse to borrow lines from a supporter than to take them from speechwriters? This is not Joe Biden channeling Neil Kinnock.

More fundamentally, the Clinton campaign is misreading what Democratic voters want. Voters aren't foolish or naive; if anything, sometimes they are more cynical than is warranted about politics and politicians. Still, they are responding to Obama because of a yearning to believe in something. Telling them they've been chumps is not a winning message.

For his part, Obama's test is to fold some substance into the souffle without having it collapse. This should not be too hard: Everything in his biography suggests that Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful policy-maker as well as a gifted politician. His would not be a clueless, "What do we do now?" presidency.

But Obama has so far been aggressively dismissive of campaigning by position paper. "Everybody's got a 10-point plan on everything," he says. Yes, but those plans matter. No one expects them to be submitted verbatim to Congress, but they reflect judgments and tradeoffs presidents must make.

Clinton and John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, have seized on this apparent allergy to specifics. "My opponent gives speeches; I offer solutions," Clinton gibed. Obama's speeches, McCain said, "have been singularly lacking in substance."

And so, the Obama campaign has been, of late, handing out copies of its economic plan — 47 pages of, guess what, 10-point plans. "This is going to be a speech that is a little more detailed," Obama said as he outlined his economic policy at a General Motors plant in Wisconsin last week. "It's going to be a little bit longer, with not too many applause lines."

Good. A little less applause could be healthy for Obama, who's been sounding awfully cocky. ("It's true, I give a good speech. What can I do?") If he wins the nomination, he should write thank-you notes to Clinton and McCain.

Ruth Marcus is a member of The Washington Post’s editorial page staff.