Barak, the Non-Attack Dog

The sudden resuscitation of McCain's campaign by the Lipstick Pit Bull has many people worrying that the Obama campaign is not being aggressive enough in its response. There is a new Obama ad out today that directly contradicts the claim that Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, and questioning McCain/Palin's honesty, since she actively campaigned for it before she was against it. It's good, but Obama in person doesn't like to do that.

He just does not like to go for the jugular. I just watched 16 minutes of an interview with Keith Olberman on MSNBC's Countdown. Olberman tried again and again to get him to do so: asking if he had considered boiling down the economic message to a simple question, like Harry Truman's saying, "How many times do they have to hit you over the head before you start asking who is hitting you?" And KO asked why not use the word "lie" to characterize the distortions that McCain and Palin are making? And he tried to get him to react to GA Congressman Lynn Westmoreland's calling Barak and Michelle "uppity." Westmoreland tried to weasle out, saying he was using it as a synomyn for elite. Come on: I grew up in Georgia. Everybody knows that's only the first half of a common racial slur, and the second word begins with an 'n'. It's a vicious attack on an African-American who "tries to rise above his station." Even David Gergen said so on This Week a couple of Sunday's ago.

Obama just wouldn't go there. He gave wonderful, thoughtful, reasoned answers. But he will not take the angry, outraged simple sound bite when it's handed to him on a silver platter. He just kept saying things like: "We just have to keep telling the American people where we want to take this country, and they are going to make up their minds."

This is pretty frustrating to those of us who have lived through two presidential candidates who took the high road and stayed wonky -- and Karl Rove made mince meat of them. And we are afraid the same thing is happening again.

I think this is partly Obama's deliberative, negotiative, reasonable nature. I think it's also a tactical decision not to present himself as the "angry young black man" and trigger that frightening racial stereotype that has limited Louis Farrakhan's and Jesse Jackson's and Al Sharpton's and Jeremiah Wright's appeal to white people. Martin Luther King was able to find a tone of indignation and gravitas about injustice that was moving and transformative without sounding irrational or out of control. Obama wants to present reasoned answers, stay on issues, and tie McPalin to Bush 24/7 but without sounding angry or, perhaps, uppity?

The risk is that, in trying to avoid scaring Bubba and Rosie the Riveter, he is losing another whole segment who want to hear him stand up to these gross insults and lies -- and may take it as an indication of whether he would stand up to the Chinese, the Iranians, and the Republicans.

I think Obama's temperament is supremely suited to being president. The question is, is it suited to winning the presidency against the Republican attack machine? Maybe they need to unleash Joe Biden and get him on TV more. He's good at those distilled, sound-bite kind of zingers, and he loves doing it.

Ralph