Fighting Back
You have probably seen by now the contentious barbs Obama and Clinton threw at each other in last night's debate. Overall, I thought Obama did fair, considering Hillary's a pro at gutter politics and that he's not so great generally in the debate setting. But there's one lesson I wish Obama would learn, and it wouldn't be so hard: he played too much defense. One moment in particular made me cringe: when Hillary brought up Obama's voting record in IL - the (trivial, in my view) fact that he voted present about 100 times (out of 4,000 votes) - and framed it as the Senator not taking responsibility for his votes.

I would have much preferred for him to not spend one second explaining himself and instead declaring this: that he's not going to take lectures on legislative accountability from a Senator who voted for the Iraq War and now refuses to say it was a mistake, who refuses to take any responsibility for the extreme harm that has come to Americans and the world thanks to the vote that she cast to support President Bush in preparing to send hundreds of thousands of US troops in harm's way. We can already hear Republican attacks on her, that she was "for the War before she was against it". It would also have been a good time to bring up the quote he's been using in his speech, in which she apparently said she voted for the Bankruptcy Bill (the 2001 version) but she wished it wouldn't pass. I mean, the nerve of a person with her history of triangulation, and dissembling in the face of her own votes, to attack him for not being accountable is truly astounding.

Instead...he spent minutes explaining the minutiae of state legislative strategy in Illinois, never turning the question back to where it's much better suited - back on her.

And now Bill Clinton is still on tv now mis-quoting Obama's statement about Republicans being the party of ideas during the 90s. I'm sure that offends Bill. But that doesn't justify his repeatedly saying that Obama said they were "good ideas" when he clearly did not, and would not, have said it. Hillary's campaign - and her husband's involvement - is growing increasingly odious.