Level of Nasty
Obama and Clinton fight and also fight not to fight.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 7:05 PM ET
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
When Barack Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, spoke to reporters on a conference call Wednesday, you could hear a siren in the background. It was just the usual city sounds outside of his Chicago office, but it matched the emergency tone of the call. In the wake of Obama's three losses in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, Axelrod was opening up a new, aggressive front against Hillary Clinton. He spooled out a string of accusations about her undisclosed tax returns and White House records as if he'd been holding his breath for the last 12 months. In fact, he has. This was a public attack unlike any the campaign has issued before. "She is a habitual nondiscloser," said Axelrod, even as he criticized the Clinton campaign for running a "scorched earth" series of attacks on Obama recently.
The next day, Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson, followed with the political equivalent of Godwin's law by charging that the Obama campaign was imitating Ken Starr. At this rate, the campaigns will be trading expletives by April (that's already happening inside the Clinton campaign). If anything will save us from a perpetual seven-week harangue before the key Pennsylvania
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http://www.slate.com/id/2185921/