Newsweek on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

According to Newsweek, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the only two Democrats who are running and it's not certain they can beat John McCain. Well, that's not entirely what the magazine says but the cover and the inside story seem to suggest that. The main story is eight pages long; here's a section that caught my eye:

The former president will campaign separately from his wife across the country, almost as if he's a vice presidential candidate. This will multiply their impact, but it also avoids the direct side-by-side comparison that hurts Hillary, as it did when both spoke at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Friends predict she will take speaking lessons (as he did some years ago) so that her speeches are less like policy-wonk laundry lists. They also believe she needs to show her sense of humor more in public, but in a way that's self-deprecating, not the sometimes sarcastic wit she wields in private.

(snip)

... A recent Marist Poll showed that 47 percent of respondents nationwide "definitely will not consider" voting for her, a percentage that alarms some former aides to President Clinton. Those numbers will need to change for Democratic primary voters—now comfortable with assessing electability—to move her way.

A sobering message for Obama is the example of Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in the 2006 midterms. ...

... ...a second, lesser-known attack ad was more troubling to Ford and could be used someday against Obama, too. It showed Ford in a church as the narrator tags Ford as a hypocrite on religious values. Then there was Ford's decision to ambush Corker in a parking lot. It may be that black candidates seeking white votes have less room than other politicians to go on the attack. That could leave Obama trapped between his positive tone and the need to be tough. If he loses his temper in the process, it might prove fatal politically. The margin for error for a rookie is small.

John McCain is not quite the gentleman he once was and a growing number of Americans are beginning to understand how conservative he is; the new John McCain and other Republican hopefuls have seen how successful Bush-era Republican attack ads are against Democrats and are hiring the kind of people who can do their worst. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and any of the other Democratic presidential candidates will have to convince voters in the primaries that they can handle the minefields.

John Kerry was a fine candidate and would have made an excellent president but he was slow to handle the Swiftboaters who were allowed to lie and smear Kerry for weeks. The voters are catching on to this kind of stuff and are beginning to understand that the Republican base currently favors right wing candidates, particularly at the national level, and these candidates happen to be out of touch with America and simply can't win without a nasty bag of tricks. Still, at the end of the day, a Democratic candidate needs to know how to handle the pressure and how to defuse Republican smear campaigns.

Come to think of it, if Americans want to be in charge of their democracy, they need to get better at understanding how wealthy Republicans often finance these smear campaigns; to put it plainly, voters must discount TV ads and such that carry such phony messages if they don't want our elections to be dominated by a wealthy Republican elite.