John Dickerson raises the question at one point of "do undecided voters really want more attacks?" referring to Obama possibly stepping up attacks on Clinton. He also later suggests that Obama may do better to come up with policies that are "as compelling as he is", in lieu of focusing on attack politics. This in my opinion is exactly the right course for Barack: better policy ideas, better selling of those ideas, and don't bother with attack politics.
Me personally, I can't stand attack politics, regardless of the specific people involved. I guess it most stems from the fact that attack adds typically vary from a compilation of half-truths, to technically-true but grossly misleading statements, to sometimes out-right lies. And then there's the spectacle of all of these primary candidates, squabbling & trying to skewer each other, only to come back a month after they're forced to drop out & endorse the very same opponents they were once running down. It makes them all look like a bunch of self-serving phonies.
But more than that, there is the fact that it appears everybody & anybody, who follows the news regularly like to bemoan the ugliness of modern politics. The ugliness, the shallowness, the divisiveness, the partisanship, its everywhere, its just awful and we all hate it. Now along comes a guy who says he wants to make it a serious priority to try and promote people disagreeing without becoming disagreeable. He wants to try and stop the cycle of escalation in politics, and bring people together. And then, at every single turn, in every tactical decision in a campaign primary battle, so many of these same avid political observers criticize him for missing an opportunity to causing more bad blood.
My question for all of you who hate that Obama hasn't been hitting Hilary harder on the campaign trail is, when is this cycle of escalation supposed to end? What, when your candidate wins? We need people to be anathema to Bush, DeLay, and those scorched-earth fighters in politics. Can't Barack just forge ahead by coming up with better ideas, and finding more effective ways of selling those ideas to the public? Must the difference between winning and losing in politics always be defined by who is more willing to go out there and call their opponent a liar and a fraud? Aren't the American people smart enough to respond to something other than a WWE Smackdown-like political spectacle?
