photo credit: daveiam

I am amazed by the number of people thinking the Clinton vs. Obama arguments have been mean spirited, dirty or really anything close to tuff politics. If you read your political history everything said and done at this point has been pretty soft, the big guns have been in their holsters. So will we see a truly ravenous, vengeful and hate filled primary contest? I highly doubt it, but for those hoping for one there is at least the following few glimmers of hope. For those who aren’t hoping for one and have had enough, well, sorry, at the very least we have two candidates who will be launching some attacks against one another.

From The Page Obama on Clinton’s foreign policy premise:

“Over the coming weeks we will join her in that argument. Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crisis? The answer is ‘no.’”

Campaign chief David Axelrod from Politico:

“If Sen. Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate. We’ll do it on our terms and in our own way but if she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that stuff issues, as I’ve said before I don’t know why they’d want to go there, but I guess that’s where they’ll take the race.”

From the Associated Press:

A senior Obama adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Obama’s team will respond to Tuesday’s results by going negative on Clinton — raising questions about her tax records and the source of donations to the Clinton presidential library, among skeletons in the Clintons’ past.

On David Axelrod’s take I want to say the following. The reason the Clinton’s want to go there is because, frankly, no one doubts that they have dirty laundry. The Clinton have basically left the laundry on the front porch for everyone to see for nearly twenty years now. The Obama campaign on the other hand has been running as something “new” a “new kind of politics”. He is a candidate who has been talking about himself in spiritual terms. Attacks against Obama’s character work because of his self described piety and his cleanliness in the political foray.

Most of America doesn’t know about Rezko or how Obama had his start. They have an offhand knowledge that he has admitted drug use, but they don’t know to what extend. The only thing we know about the Senator’s background is what he has shared with us up to this point. There is always a moment when that changes though and in a national campaign it won’t be the Obama camp telling us who they are but rather the opposition and the media who will dredge the lake of his life and find anything that has been hidden. Worse still, anything that is found, even those things that seem small and petty, will be held up like diamonds for at least an hour or two, sometimes days, weeks or months.

Clinton has already been through that ringer. Reminding us all of what that is like has helped Obama until now because the public knew nothing about him, he could claim to be virtuous and without someone to challenge that, the public bought in. If that virtue is distorted or broken then the public has a choice between the evil of two lessors and in this, Clinton is a known commodity, she would have nowhere to really go but up and as a simple rule of physics he would have nowhere to go but down.