WASHINGTON — Much like New York’s governor, John Edwards is spoiling for a fight.

The former North Carolina senator has become the angry reformer among the top White House hopefuls, adopting a firebrand style that recalls the man who charged into the Albany statehouse last fall, Eliot Spitzer.

But as Mr. Spitzer’s zeal has led to scandal and an apparently stalled agenda, his experience seems to offer more warning than inspiration for Mr. Edwards and other presidential contenders gunning to turn Washington on its head.

Where the governor promised to use his prosecutor’s penchant for confrontation as a means of transforming a dysfunctional state capital, Mr. Edwards, a former trial lawyer, has pledged a similar take-no-prisoners approach to topple the reign of corporate lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

“We’ve got to stop playing nice. We have to beat these people,” Mr. Edwards declared at a Democratic labor forum Tuesday night, referring to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies he blames for blocking efforts to enact universal health care.

Mr. Edwards’s combative tone marks a shift from his White House bid of four years ago, and signals his latest bid to outflank his better-funded rivals, senators Clinton and Obama, who lead him in national polls.

In implicit critiques of the Clinton legacy and of Mr. Obama’s message of unity and hope, Mr. Edwards speaks derisively both of “triangulation” and “compromise.”

If Mr. Edwards’s new intensity scores points on the stump, then Mr. Spitzer’s troubles are a test case for its limitations in governance. Months of partisan bickering and a state police scandal blamed largely on his hard-charging manner have stymied the governor’s reform agenda, forcing him to admit mistakes and adopt a more conciliatory tone. In his most recent speech, on Tuesday, the man whose biography was titled “Spoiling for a Fight” was even preaching “humility.”

Despite Mr. Spitzer’s early struggles, the Edwards campaign welcomes the comparison.

“I would point out that Spitzer got elected governor,” a senior adviser, Joseph Trippi, said in an interview. “There are a lot of people in this country who do think you need to change the culture in Washington and really shake it up, just as the voters of New York thought that needed to happen in Albany.”

“The people of New York got exactly what they wanted,” Mr. Trippi added. “They got a governor who’s going to change things, shake things up.”

The battle for the mantle of government reform within the Democratic race has largely come down to Messrs. Edwards and Obama, who have each painted Mrs. Clinton as a “Washington insider” beholden to special interests. They have each pointedly refused to accept campaign contributions from political action committees and lobbyists, while Mrs. Clinton has defended such donations, saying lobbyists represent “real people.”

Substantively, Messrs. Edwards and Obama are close on the issue, but the Edwards campaign is playing up their differences. Mr. Trippi criticized the Illinois senator for saying at an earlier Democratic debate that insurance and drug companies would “have a seat” at the bargaining table, which he characterized as a far cry from Mr. Edwards’s more aggressive stance. He also said Mr. Obama had ignored Mr. Edwards’s call to join him in pressuring the Democratic Party to swear off lobbyist donations altogether.

An Obama spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, pointed to his record of fighting for ethics reform both in the Illinois state legislature and in the U.S. Senate. She also added: “He’s dealing in the politics of reality.”

Ms. Psaki would not comment on Mr. Edwards’s fiery tone, but she said Mr. Obama “wants to be somebody that people look to as a uniter and not a divider.”

As to whether either approach to overhauling Washington is actually better, modern history offers little guidance. Though many presidential candidates have promised sweeping reforms, few have ever succeeded, an author of biographies of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert Dallek, said.

“The lesson one should take away from the Spitzer example and from our history is that campaigning is one thing, and governing is quite another,” Mr. Dallek said.

Self-styled Washington “outsiders” have been successful White House campaigners in the last half-century, and no sitting member of Congress has won the presidency since Senator Kennedy in 1960. Four of the last five presidential winners — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush — never served in Washington.

But, notes a presidential historian at Boston University, Bruce Schulman, their records on government reform paled in comparison to the ultimate Capitol Hill insider, Lyndon Johnson, who served 24 years in Congress before assuming the presidency.

“To some extent, the insiders have been more effective at changing government,” Mr. Schulman said.

In Albany, Mr. Spitzer’s setbacks cannot be blamed on any outsider status; while he ran as a reformer, he had served two terms as the state’s attorney general and had the firm support of the Democratic Party establishment.

And not everyone agrees that hard-charging candidates like Mr. Edwards should view his first seven months in office as a cautionary tale.

According to a senior fellow at the Center for Public Integrity, Bill Hogan, they needn’t worry about offending lobbyists — so long as they win. “The story of Washington is that money follows power,” he said. ‘The money is not going to forsake the person in power.”