Obama to be more agressive

I said early this month that Obama needs to start going after Hillary. There was an NPR story on this week about how Obama's campaign is losing steam, and it interviewed a former Obama supporter who was so excited about his candidacy, bought all his books, but now could care less. Where's the excitement? It's unclear what Obama offers as opposed to the other candidates; as Dick Morris said, he doesn't know how to use issues to gain support.

Now a NY Times article: "Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton."

His senior aides said they were now spending much of their day fielding calls from concerned donors and other supporters asking why Mr. Obama was not challenging Mrs. Clinton more forcefully and warning that he could cede the role of the main anti-Clinton candidate to former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who is running an aggressive campaign in Iowa. Typically, one aide said, the supporter asks some version of the same question: “What happened to the Obama we saw at the 2004 Democratic convention?”

Morale at his Chicago headquarters, aides said, has been dragged down by the perception that Mrs. Clinton is lapping Mr. Obama. And aides said that they had been struggling for weeks for a balance between offering a contrast with Mrs. Clinton and avoiding the anger that they said had marked Mr. Edwards’s candidacy.

In a 53-minute interview as he ate breakfast aboard a chartered jet that brought him here from Chicago, Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton had been untruthful or misleading in describing her positions on problems facing the nation. He accused her of “straddling between the Giuliani, Romney side of the foreign policy equation and the Barack Obama side of the equation.” He said that she was trying to “sound or vote” like a Republican on national security issues and that that was “bad for the country and ultimately bad for Democrats.”

This is exactly where Obama can hit Clinton--foreign policy. As I've argued recently, as a woman looking at a general election campaign Hillary has no choice but to look tough. There's dissatisfaction with Hillary's hawkishness amongst Democratic primary voters. The tough part is translating that into support for Obama. But by ratcheting up the rhetoric, Obama can at least start to draw contrasts.