I highly recommend Dana's comments on Samantha Power's regrettable departure from the Obama campaign. For one thing, this makes it less likely that a future administration will hire Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter at the same time, and I was really looking forward to writing about Secretaries Slaughter and Power. So that's a bummer. Worse, Power is a remarkable foreign policy voice, and her elevation was a positive side benefit of the campaign. But with a column in Time and the direct phone numbers of Obama and his advisers, I'm sure she'll be fine. Fact of it was, you can't call the other leading candidate for the Democratic nomination "a monster." And you really can't do it if you're on the Obama campaign. This is one of the problems with his promise to change the tone, and his oft-repeated pledges to not run a campaign he can't be fully proud of. If you've forsworn moments of rage and instances of sleaze, you can't laugh it off when your associates dip into those waters. On the bright side, you get votes for your high-minded positioning. Clinton, by contrast, doesn't get any support among folks who want to change the tone, but she can take a "that's politics" line to out-of-control advisers. Josh is right, though. The Clinton campaign is deep inside Obama's head. His folks are rattled. And this is a problem. They've never really been comfortable on the offense. They're good at counterpunching on policy questions, but seem unable to really throw themselves into an attack. For now, lots of his supporters are responding to this, basically, with a "shame on you, Hillary Clinton," approach. They're pissed that Clinton is attacking their guy like this. But McCain won't care about the shaming. And Obama needs to actually score some hits. Not elegantly delivered one liners, or wry takes on the Clinton camp's cynicism. He needs to make Hillary Clinton look like an unacceptable nominee. And with $55 million in the bank, Clinton's history, and an army of ready volunteers, ad makers, and surrogates, he's certainly got the tools. The question is whether he's got the will.
