By Michael Teitelbaum, CQ Staff

The contest for Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Maryland’s 4th Congressional District — a rematch of the very close 2006 primary contest won by longtime incumbent Albert R. Wynn over lawyer Donna Edwards — has been fiercely contested throughout. Wynn, an eight-term House member who chairs a subcommittee on the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, argues he is far more qualified than Edwards, who has never held public office. Edwards says she embodies the change that voters are seeking, and portrays Wynn as voting wrong on issues ranging from Iraq to energy policy.

But the heat has been turned up even higher, as the campaign has become increasingly personal in its final days.

The Wynn campaign on Thursday made automatically generated phone calls that aimed to draw the attention of district residents to past tax liens that had been placed against Edwards. According to documents obtained by CQ Politics, Edwards had a federal lien issued against her for failure to pay enough taxes, totaling a combined $9,786 for the three years of 1994, 1995 and 1999. In addition, there was a tax lien placed against Edwards by the state of Maryland, issued by the circuit court in Anne Arundel County, for taxes in the amount of just less than $11,700 owed between Jan. 1, 1999 and Dec. 31, 2003, and a separate state tax lien issued in Prince George’s County Circuit Court for taxes in 1999 in the amount of roughly $646.

Lori Sherwood, Wynn’s campaign manager, contended that Edwards had brought the issue into the campaign herself by claiming she could sympathize with district residents facing current economic problems because she once faced foreclosure on her house. Sherwood contended, “Instead of working out a payment plan with the IRS which hundreds of thousands of Americans do every year, Ms. Edwards let the state and federal government incur more costs by forcing them to take her to court in order to collect money rightfully owed.”

Edwards, in an interview with CQ Politics, countered by strongly denying any wrongful behavior. She said all of the taxes were eventually paid off, and claimed the liens were caused by various problems that included $7,000 in debt incurred because of an illness, $100,000 that she owed in student loans, and the financial difficulties she faced raising her son with no child support for almost 10 years. These expenses, she said, came on top of the money she needed to cover her basic cost of housing and food. “I just did this situation to take care of myself and my son,” Edwards said.

Edwards described Wynn’s use of the tax lien issue as “an 11th-hour attempt to save himself by running my name into the ground.” She continued, “This is shameful. This is most unethical behavior ever.”

This late flap caps a campaign that otherwise has reflected the change vs. experience dynamic seen in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. This is in spite of the fact that Wynn and Edwards, both part of the African-American majority in the Democratic-dominated 4th District, have endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama , who is running on the theme of change as he seeks to become the nation’s first black president.

The dichotomy between Wynn and Edwards has played out in a number of debates held during the campaign’s final days, in which the two front-runners were joined by four lesser-known challengers.

Wynn spent much of the debates talking about what he has brought back during his tenure to a district made up of parts of Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. This includes money for a dual-county anti-gang initiative to a biotechnology project in Montgomery County to an extension of the popular Metrorail Blue line to Largo in Prince George’s County.

Wynn said in an interview with CQ Politics, “Do we want a rookie congressman when I have the experience and seniority in Congress to move legislation?”

Wynn has been endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, as well as by Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , who represents the neighboring 5th District of Maryland. He also received praise from an unlikely source, Republican Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor who lost to Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin in the state’s 2006 race for U.S. Senate. With Republicans putting up virtually no opposition in 4th District, Steele said he has voted for Wynn in his general elections because he “has been a strong supporter of developing economic development and bringing minority-owned businesses to Prince George’s County.”

Yet Edwards, who came within 3.3 percentage points of upsetting Wynn in the 2006 primary, cites her work with progressive political organizations and calls herself “a public interest fighter.” She said she understands the tough choices made by the district’s constituents don’t have health insurance or face debts such as student loans.

“I share people’s pain because I’ve been there,” Edwards said. “You won’t have to look at me 16 years later and ask, ‘Where has she been?’”

She consistently has gone after the incumbent’s votes in favor of legislation that made it more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy, and has continued to hammer Wynn — as she did in 2006 — for supporting the 2002 resolution that authorized President Bush to use military force against Iraq. While Wynn has since declared that voting for the resolution was a mistake, Edwards said, “It’s too little, too late.”

Both candidates are well-financed. Wynn reported receipts of just more than $1 million for the 2007-08 election cycle through Jan. 23 and had $146,000 in remaining cash on hand as of that date. Edwards raised a total of $794,000 — making her the second best-funded candidate challenging an incumbent in a primary, according to a CQ Politics analysis — and exceeded Wynn with $338,000 in remaining cash on hand.

The race also has drawn a spending frenzy by outside groups, who have financed independent expenditures supporting one or the other candidate to a combined total of nearly $2 million — with nearly $1.6 million of that in favor of Edwards.

One major group backing Edwards, the national Service Employees International Union Committee on Political Education (SEIU-COPE), has put more than $868,000 into the race this year, including a $470,000 broadcast television buy. This has been supplemented by another $143,000 for mailings paid for by the political action committee (PAC) of the union’s regional entity on the East Coast. This is in spite of the fact that a local SEIU chapter covering a small part of the 4th District broke with the national union and is backing Wynn. Most of the other local SEIU chapters in the 4th are backing Edwards.

Wynn has gotten outside advocacy, too, including more than $300,000 from the National Association of Realtors PAC for media, mailings and public opinion survey costs and a $100,000 radio ad campaign run during the past two weeks by the National Education Association.

In a recent debate at a church in Silver Spring, Wynn said he supports public financing of elections and had concerns about outside organizations who put in money. “We don’t know where it comes from,” he said. Edwards took a swipe at the fact that Wynn has received a sizable amount of contributions from corporate political action committees and said she doesn’t think “Congress has gone far enough” to take private money out of politics.

The remaining four candidates are longshots who have struggled for recognition from the local media and voters. The best-financed of the four is real estate broker George Mitchell, who raised $93,000 through Jan. 23 and had about $2,500 cash on hand. Mitchell employs a good-humored “tell it like it is” style, and cites a desire to improve education as his main focus.

Jason Jennings, a financial consultant who ran for the state’s House of Delegates in 1994 and lost in the Democratic primary, advocates lowering the national debt level. At the debates, he questioned voters’ ability to make changes in political leadership by saying, “I hope you don’t like the truth, because you keep voting for the ones that keep lying to you.”

Michael Babula, owner of a statistics firm and professor at Loyola College in Maryland, supports the idea of universal health care for everyone and placing a 90-day freeze on home foreclosures. He opposes abortion, says the war on drugs has failed, and favors publicly funded school vouchers. He called Edwards, “A wolf in sheep’s clothing” and Wynn “a wolf dressing up like grandma in Little Red Riding Hood.”

George McDermott is running again after entering the 2006 4th District primary and taking 3.9 percent of the vote. A businessman, he has railed against “corrupt judges and lawyers” in the state’s judicial system and says he wants to overhaul it.

Emily Cadei contributed to this story.