Senator Clinton turned up the heat on Barack Obama on Sunday, saying the race comes down to “courage and convictions” — and blasting Obama’s positions on health care and his Political Action Committee as lacking both.

Hillary came out firing on the health care before she took even a single question at a media availability in Cedar Rapids, accusing Obama of changing his tune on whether his plan covers all Americans depending on the audience. “Yesterday, in the space of a few hours, it went from universal when I wasn’t there, to comprehensive when we were on the same [stage],” she said — a reference to Saturday’s Black/Brown Presidential Forum in Iowa, where Obama seemed to be at great pains not to call his plan “universal.”

“I think the people of Iowa need to know there’s a big difference between our plans,” she said. “But more importantly there’s a big difference between our courage and our convictions, what we believe and what we’re willing to fight for.” Touting her record, Clinton said “the people of Iowa are going to get a chance to chose between someone who talks the talk, and someone who walked the walk.”

On universal care, she said, “Senator Obama got to the brink and blinked,” adding “You’ve got to ask yourself, who’s really committed here? Who’s doing it for political reasons, and who has a lifetime of conviction and commitment?”

But it didn’t stop there. Hillary also attacked Obama for failing to shut down his Hope Fund leadership PAC, spurring allegations that he’d used it to spread money to curry favor with key figures in early primary states — accusing him of hypocrisy. “Its not only that this PAC is still open and operating,” she said. “It’s that, contrary to what we’ve been hearing now for a year, it had lobbyist money, it had PAC money, and they were more than happy to take that money and to use it to try to influence elections, and to create relationships with people while he was running for president.”

And asked whether she was saying this was an issue of character when it comes to Senator Obama, Senator Clinton at first demurred — but then said “it’s beginning to look a lot like that. You know, it really is, where you can’t get a straight answer on health care; where somebody who runs on ethics and not taking money from certain people is found out to have at least skirted if not violated the FEC rules, and to use lobbyist and PAC money to do so.”

Senator Clinton seemed to express something like regret about the frontal assault, saying she’d rather be attacking Republicans and America’s problems. But, she said, “I have been, for months, on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks. Well, now the fun part starts. We’re into the last month, and we’re going to start drawing the contrasts.”

UPDATE: Barack Obama takes issue with Hillary’s assertion that this part of the campaign is “fun.” The campaign released a statement from the Senator saying “this presidential campaign isn’t about attacking people for fun, it’s about solving people’s problems…. Washington insiders might think throwing mud is fun, but the American people are looking for leadership that can unite this country around a common purpose.”

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