Obama: Can he afford a knife fight?
Posted: Friday, March 07, 2008 9:01 AM by Mark Murray
The New York Times’ Brooks: "Now, the Obama campaign is facing another test. There are a few ways to interpret the losses in Texas and Ohio. One is demographic. He didn’t carry the groups he often has trouble with — white women, Latinos, the less educated. The other is tactical. Clinton attacked him, and the attacks worked. The consultants, needless to say, gravitate toward the tactical interpretation. And once again the cry has gone up for Obama to get tough. This advice gets wrapped in metaphors. Obama has to start ‘throwing punches’ or ‘taking the gloves off.’”
“Beneath the euphemisms, what the advice really means is that Obama has to start accusing Clinton of things.” Brooks goes on to write that Obama is making a big mistake: "[T]he Clinton people will draw them every step of the way. Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos. On Thursday, a Clinton aide likened Obama to Ken Starr just to badger them on.”
“As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president. In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him."
The Boston Globe: "As the Democratic primary race enters a new, critical phase, Senator Barack Obama's campaign is wrestling with how to respond forcefully to Hillary Clinton's recent attacks on his record without violating the positive, uplifting spirit at the core of his message." More: "But Obama's arsenal is limited by his insistence that his campaign not engage in below-the-belt attacks. Asked by reporters Tuesday how far he was willing to go, Obama said he would not 'change the tone of our campaign' or 'do things that I'm not comfortable with.'"
Rolling Stone endorsed Obama and calls him “The New Hope,” while Clinton appears on the cover of Time as “The Fighter.”
