What I got during the CNN/National Black Caucus Debate in South Carolina, is that Hillary Clinton had a really good time attacking Barack Obama.
She was really enjoying herself.
She was tough, just like she's promised us.
I could feel it.
Obama brought up and engaged in the conflict effectively but I didn't get the sense that he was enjoying it.
He was doing it because it was necessary.
He's made a different judgment. He is acting upon a different sense of his own character.
There's a core difference between what Obama is doing, and what he is, and what Bill and Hillary are and what they are doing in their campaign.
As a mature person, an experienced person, I believe that it is unnecessary to become what you hate in order to defeat it. In fact, I believe that it is impossible to defeat what you hate by emulating it.
The fact is, a person can't lie without becoming a liar.
Bill Clinton took the presidency in the 1990's as an outsider, by promising that he was close to the people, that he could and would change Washington.
He is no longer that person and neither is his wife.
Look at the tactics they are using! They hope to out-Republican the Republicans, should they win the primary. They hope to serve as man and wife, a team, in the White House. These are the promises implicit in their campaign.
Bill Clinton is not just acting as a surrogate or a spouse - He is acting as half the candidate. This is an unspoken truth.
I think that Obama opened up that discussion last night when he said to Hillary that he wasn't sure who he was running against.
The truth is that he is running against both of the Clintons. Voters and the media need to bring this out into the open so it can be examined in the primary and judged to be a good idea, what the people want, what will work in the general election, what is good for all of us.
Is this what we want for ourselves? A year long campaign dragging out all the old GOP antipathy, the history, the smears, the women, the news clips, of Bill Clinton's personal failings and the ideological chasms that still exist? Will Hillary be eclipsed, as a candidate, by all this garbage?
We need to DISCUSS THIS, AIR IT, before we are all faced with a year of it.
Then, we need to think about whether or not we want the kind of Presidency that will emerge from such a campaign, whether or not the Clintons can win against the GOP candidate.
Is this what Democrats want? Is this what the American people want? Four, no five, no nearly SIX MORE YEARS OF THE SAME OLD SHIT?
Hillary's soundbite about the slumlord was effective, in the moment. Obama couldn't soundbite her back because the truth was more complicated than the accusation was.
Hillary knows this - She went through the Whitewater investigation and withstood all of the soundbite attacks of Ken Starr and the GOP surrogates.
She really knew what she was doing. That's not the question, the concern. Do we LIKE what she was doing? And, even if we like it, will a Clinton presidency serve us as we face the very real problems of global climate change, economic instability, terrorism, and other social, political, and physical infrastructure problems?
I'm sick to death of the GOP style tactics, the game of the soundbite and spin, the stovepiping of reality.
For me, experience has come to equal corruption, at least in Washington D.C.
I am sick to death of the political gamesmenship, wedge politics, partisanship, smear, push-polling, anonymous hit squads, operatives creating narrative using inneundo, partial truths, cyber-stalking, and public humiliation tactics, voter suppression, fearmongering, disempowering voters, distraction, and thug politics.
Haven't we had enough yet?