Whether or not you consider Barack Obama's (brief) complacency concerning John McCain's attack ads last week to be wise, you can't consider it surprising.

Many haven't... I get the feeling many who complained he wasn't enough of a "fighter" were of like mind when he was competing with Democrats.

...but Obama's campaign declared at the beginning it would be run cleanly and projected that image to the public. David Axelrod has run negative campaigns in the past yet has stated, openly, that Obama is not that sort of candidate. Robert Gibbs, we know, has been involved in political attacks none here would condone. Obama did not hire him for that purpose. We already know what effect that has, from the primaries, but if you need a reminder then follow the fold.

...is speaking for her constituency, and I'd never begrudge her doing so. They've chosen her for their voice and it's her privilege to take the role. She told them tonight that they won't be ignored... and I agree wholeheartedly that they should not "disappear" from the stage and from their driving force in the party.

I say that, in part, because this is about those people, as well as those of us voted for Obama, rather than being about the candidates.

It's happening again. You know what I mean- the bold predictions that Hillary Clinton will in the end come out on top of the popular vote, along with analyses that states she will not. As much as I respect Chris Bowers and his analysis at the latter link- this falls into what we know is a false narrative. There is no such thing as the "popular vote" as a measure of support for the Democratic nomination.

Crossposted at DailyKos

Jon Stewart: "Do you feel like you're stuck in a narrative now...?"

-an apt question asked of Barack Obama this past Wednesday on a Daily Show interview. We haven't wholly escaped the narrative that had been constructed earlier in the race and attained prominence at the YouTube debate, where we were precipitously informed that Obama is naive and inexperienced. The narrative implies the inexperienced Sen. Obama has outlandish ideas concerning diplomacy and foreign relations, and if anything is to blame for the foreign policy debacle of the past several years, it certainly wasn't "inlandish" ideas... [/irony] Here and elsewhere analysts poked holes in the narrative even as it attempted to seize upon remarks concerning Pakistan, Afghanistan and Cuba.