Lynn Sweet ably documents the game here: Obama, after refusing to release certain information for months or years, is suddenly releasing it so that, a week or two from now, he can blast Hillary for being so secretive.  Secretive about the matters he himself withheld.

Bradley was especially concerned about the effect of large donations to Bill Clinton's libary and to his AIDS foundation. Bcz the big donors might demand favors and clemency and who knows what all! But, when asked, he said he had no evidence, but there was a need to know...about possibilities.

The MCM has begun to retill the grounds for saying Clinton is "untrustworthy," a line which they used to great effect against Al Gore. And they luuuuuuv to use it against any Dem nominee, so Sen. Obama ought to pay attention.

Notice the "digging" into whether or not her claims about foreign policy experience were "true." Somehow Andrea Mitchell only heard about Trimble's dismissive comment on Hillary and the Northern Ireland peace process.  There were other comments by people who were there who supported Hillary, but none were "found" or reported by NBC. Even though Jamie Rubin read one from John Hume on Tucker's program!

Can't recall who they dug up to deny her diplomatic work in Macedonia (oh, yeah, Sinbad?)), but there was a comment from a Macedonian (?) diplomat supporting her on NPR. But this did not show up on the MCM broadcast news.

Then they found Orrin Hatch and unnamed senate aides to say she was lying about her work on SCHIP. Hatchet Man Hatch! Just ask Anita Hill about his willingness to slime women.

70s Nostalgia? Hmmm....Maybe Not

I've been struggling with how to write about the Geraldine Ferraro and Reverend Wright incidents. They both involve difficult and complex issues that aren't always going to be fairly explored by people viewing race and gender solely through a lens of candidate advocacy, and that makes the climate for discussing them difficult.

I was very impressed with what Obama had to say on that front:

    Obama: I do think there is an overlap in the sense that there is a generational shift that is taking place and has constantly taken pace in our society. And Rev. Wright is somebody who came of age in the 60s. And so like a lot of African-American men of fierce intelligence coming up in the '60s he has a lot of the language and the memories and the baggage of those times. And I represent a different generation with just a different set of life experiences, and so see race relations in just a different set of terms than he does, as does Otis Moss, who is slightly younger than me. And so the question then for me becomes what's my relationship to that past?

    You know, I can completely just disown it and say I don't understand it, but I do understand it. I understand the context with which he developed his views but also can still reject unequivocally. . .

    Tribune: You reject his views, you won't reject the man. Is that it?

    Obama: Yeah, exactly. And this is where the connection comes in. I mean, I do think that Geraldine Ferraro, the lens through which she looks at race, is different. . . . She's grown up in different times. The Queens that she grew up in is, I'm sure, a different place than it was then. Just as Chicago is a different place than it was then.

Obama casts Wright and Ferraro as people whose evolution and politics have root in a different time. He shows both vision and leadership in this analysis. And those who would rather take the discussion into "candidate surrogate gotcha" are, I think, doing so at all our peril.

I watch the TV these days and I see that the image of the Democratic party is quickly morphing from the party of economic justice or the party that will get us out of Iraq into the party that wants to return to the identity politics wars of the 70s. Because the Democrats have largely sat back and been content to watch the Republicans self-destruct rather than step out in a leadership position on issues that could have positively defined them, they're vulnerable to being cast thusly. It's a big turn-off to most Americans that shrewd GOP political operatives and cooperative media have been quick to seize upon.

Talking about race and gender is important. Finding a way to do so responsibly, with appropriate context -- and not simply as a way to tear each other down -- is equally important. A failure to do so may find us looking at a resurgent GOP this fall no matter who the Democratic nominee is.

And at that point, we all lose.

The answer to your question is simple. The media and the Obama-loving blogs would cheer him on. We know the 'Obama rules' in the media already, don't we?

If Clinton attcks, it is negative. If Obama attacks, he is just responding, of course, to a chorus of cheers.

Your larger point is valid. Is this the strategy of a winning campaign? No!

This is a campaign that tried to run out the clock in Ohio and Texas and it didn't work.

Now they think they can attack Hillary to nomination. There is a problem here: (a) Over the last three months people have to come to believe that the media has been very unfair to Hillary and favorable to Obama and (b) people have heard far worse things about Hillary from the media over the last fifteen years and are fairly inured to it.

Issues like tax returns, library records, travel schedules etc. are things that turn on the media but not working-class voters in places like Scranton and South Philadelphia. Economy is the number one issue on their minds now. On a visceral level the anti-american rhetoric of Obama's apstor matters more.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets--to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district--to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

Now, that's hardball politics! I think it throws the complaints about Hillary's hardball tactics into a new light.

The fact is we are still very early in this election season, and, it appears, we have a ways to go in the primary season. The "discovery" process for our candidates is not yet finished. I apologize for posting an article by somebody who is clearly angry at Barack, but if you want to know where and how the attacks are going to surface about him, you can get a heads up here:

http://wweek.com/editorial/3418/10516/

and asking for transparency in a candidate--how is that "going negative?"