Months ago I saw a former member of some boy band on the Jimmy Kimmel show. He told a story about how he had a back and forth on-stage rivalry with one of the other band members.
Most nights they would trade insults but at one show he decided not to fight back. The other guy kept throwing out more outrageous and wild insults trying to get a response. Pretty soon the audience started booing the guy throwing unprovoked insults.
That sounds a lot like Obama's strategy for dealing with ugly attacks. When Alan Keyes and Hillary Clinton started going negative it ended up hurting them far more than it hurt Obama because he refuses to act in the same ugly manner.
But that doesn't mean Obama fails to respond. His usual response is to: 1) point out that this is the kind of ugly politics people are sick of, 2) point out how ridiculous the ugly attack is, and 3) talk about the issue in a more substantive way. In that way, Obama is able to go on the attack without giving people that slimy feeling they get when they hear negative attacks from other candidates.
We saw it recently with McCain's tire gauge silliness. Obama essentially called McCain an ignorant liar and no one in the press called it a negative attack. How slick is that? But it works because McCain was in fact lying and being obnoxiously ignorant.
George W. Bush and his dad ran some of the most notoriously ugly and negative campaigns in modern politics. They do that because they know that in the long run it always helps Republicans to go negative. In most elections one candidate goes negative and the other responds with equally negative attacks. Everyone gets sick of the process and starts talking about the lesser of two evils. That depresses voter turn-out by increasing cynicism, which traditionally helps the Republican Party because their wealthy and upper-middle class base will always vote regardless. It's no coincidence that the Republican landslide in 1994 was the lowest turn-out election in decades.
We finally have a candidate who knows how to escape that trap. We have a Democratic nominee who knows how to make ugly attacks hurt the other party more than it hurts him. I've heard some people argue that Obama needs to go aggressively negative against McCain, but I think he needs to keep doing what he did so well in the Democratic primary and his US Senate election.
We have a candidate who knows how to respond to attacks without fueling the cycle of cynicism and voter disenchantment. Keep it up Barack.
Cross-posted from my blog.