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Ann, a question triggered by your great post this morning: What is the opposite of hope and civility? Is it honesty and candor about the toughness of this race, as you suggest? Is it being “mean and irrational” as Gail Collins argues? Or is it specificity and detail as Joan Walsh implies? From the outset, Obama critics have always conflated his tone with his politics—arguing that all this optimism and coalition-fostering was either empty rhetoric that masked a lack of substance, or that his only end game is to repair politics as it is practiced.
I think that mistake sometimes leads commentators to confuse Clinton’s substance with Obama’s style. When she wins on substance, the problem must be his style. And it leads them to conclude that he has to drop all the sunny optimism and civility in order to be substantial or rigorous or detailed or honest. Substance, rigor, detail, and honesty are not the opposite of civility. Obama can crank up the former without sacrificing the latter. Or at least he can try before hauling out the chainsaw and the flaming torches.
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Here's my two-days-after two-cents. Obama may be feeling weary, but it seems to me he should be feeling he's been remarkably successful at changing the standards of conduct for campaigning, if not yet for governing. But won't it be ironic if the norm-shift to niceness ends up serving neither him, nor the Democratic Party, very well in the end? Our threshold for sustained competition, with any level of conflict in it, seems to have become very low, thanks not least to Obama's invocation of a more harmonious ethos—with the result that his candidacy risks looking hamstrung and a little hapless: The nice-guy stuff would have looked great if he'd won quickly. Since he hasn't, the above-the-fray mentality itself tends to get the blame, fueling fears that its limitations may be more glaring when it comes to real governing. Meanwhile, Clinton looks more like a down-in-the-mud caricature than she would otherwise, and Democratic behavior in general looks dysfunctionally divisive—and inspires gloom-and-doom about November.
But by pre-Obama standards, it seems to me Democrats might be battling on without feeling so bitter and disappointed in each other. Should we be feeling so chagrined that he's facing up to how tough it is to forge broad coalitions, and that she's getting whacked daily for her win-at-all-costs approach? Should we be so panicked they'll tear each other to pieces? And not to be too cynical, but as Gail Collins suggests in her column today, there's a downside to the purportedly high road of just talking positively and peacefully about the issues: It's an invitation to start pandering shamelessly (and all but identically) to the voters. After lots of talk about hope and experience, it surely doesn't hurt either candidates or voters to get some lessons in patience and resilience.