The Spat.(The Talk of the Town)(Democratic Party's presidential candidates)

Correction appended.

During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th--"Tsunami Tuesday," when voters in states with half the nation's population participate in a not quite national primary--the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly "American" name--these were the Democrats' leading contenders, supplemented by a more conventional pair of distinguished senators from the East Coast. After years of talk about "looking like America," here was the real thing. On questions of policy, the views of the candidates were as reassuringly similar as their backgrounds were exhilaratingly different. Such disagreements as they had, none of them fundamental or bitter, were subsumed in their revulsion at the moral and strategic failures of the Bush Administration. As for Democratic voters, it was hard to find one who wouldn't tell you something like this: "I'm supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I'll be fine with any of them--just so we get a Democrat in the White House."

But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened. Anger and depression, the pop-psych books tell us, are two sides of the same coin: depression is anger suppressed, anger is depression liberated. Is it possible to strobe between the two? It must be, because, as the Clinton-Obama race turned nasty, a rapid alternation was noticeable among the sort of obsessive Democrats who follow every twist and turn. This was true of people all across the deep-blue universe: passionate Obama supporters; tentative Obama supporters; Obama-Clinton fence-sitters (including the fans of John Edwards, now bereft); and tentative Clinton supporters. (Passionate Clinton supporters, notwithstanding their candidate's shrinking but still sizable lead in national polls, seem to be a little rarer.)

The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as "negative attacks." The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years." A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:

Really? Aren't those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we're in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?

Uh, no. Those are not the ideas Barack Obama's talking about. But the spot's disingenuous questions were plainly intended to deceive the unwary into assuming that Wall Street tax breaks and the like are the very ideas Obama has been advocating. With equal honesty, the spot could have said, "Denying global warming? Torturing prisoners? Appointing right-wing ideologues to the federal courts? Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?" But that might have taxed the credulity of even the unwary.