Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards launched his four-day bus tour of New Hampshire yesterday by taking jabs at his opponents and his party, and calling for voters to "end this game" in Washington. He stopped short of naming top-polling Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but he criticized policy from the 1990s, when Clinton was first lady, and spoke against energy policy that Obama has supported.

Edwards criticized the "rhetoric of change" from candidates without a substantive plan, while he used the word often to support his own platform. He disembarked from his campaign bus to the sound of Sheryl Crow's "A Change Would Do You Good" and spoke at lectern with a sign that read, "To build one America, end the game."

"Those wedded to the policies of the '70s, '80s or the '90s are wedded to the past - ideas and policies that are tired, shopworn and obsolete," he said to about 350 people outside Dartmouth College's Wilder Hall. "We will find no answers there."

Elizabeth Edwards introduced her husband at each stop and the couple toured with their three children. They held town halls in Hanover, Keene, Peterborough and Hooksett. They also toured a new energy-efficient housing development in Peterborough and stopped to fill the bus with a fuel that is 20 percent biodiesel. The tour comes to Concord's White Park at 5 p.m. tomorrow.

In Hanover, Edwards said that a "vision for the future that is rooted in nostalgia" is troublesome.

"The problem with nostalgia is that what we tend to do is only remember what you like - right? - and you forget the parts that you didn't. It's not just that the answers of the past aren't up to the job today. It's that the system that produced them was corrupt - and still is corrupt."

Edwards said it is the party's job to change course by cutting corporate influence and refusing to take money from lobbyists. He pledged to publicly finance elections.

"We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats," he said. "Swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders is not what we need. The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale. The Lincoln bedroom is not for rent."

The comment referenced a controversy during Bill Clinton's administration in which big contributors stayed the night in the White House's famed bedroom.

Edwards later claimed he didn't mean to target Clinton during his new stump speech, but her campaign thought otherwise.

"Angry attacks on other Democrats won't improve Sen. Edwards's flagging campaign," Clinton spokeswoman Kathleen Strand told the Associated Press. "Senator Clinton has the leadership and experience to make real change happen, and she has been fighting for American families for 35 years."

Edwards talked about capping carbon emissions, addressing poverty, reforming education through No Child Left Behind and pulling up to 50,000 troops out of Iraq immediately. He discussed his plan for universal health care, saying that insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists should be cut out of policy making.

"The system in Washington is rigged, and I'll say it again," he said. "It is rigged, and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers that protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy who are every day trying to ensure that they get even wealthier. . . . For them, more of the same means more money, more power."

On energy, Edwards said he would put a moratorium on building coal-fired power plants until pollution prevention technology had improved.

"The difference between me and - well, to be blunt about it, my two major rivals is I do not believe we need more nuclear power plants," he said in Keene. "I do no believe in using liquid coal."

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