tough talk

The NYT reflects on how cautiously the Obama campaign is handling McCain's accusation that they're playing the race card:

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected, given the 200-year history of this country, it is really fraught with peril.”

More broadly, the battles this week over Mr. Obama’s comments and Mr. McCain’s efforts to link Mr. Obama’s celebrity to that of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears raised the question for some political types of both parties about whether Mr. Obama is aggressive enough to lunge for the Republican jugular.

I think anybody who has been paying close attention to the Obama campaign in its battles with Clinton and McCain will have seen how ruthless it can be on the attack - even though the candidate himself often stays above the fray.

But I think Lehane's comment is symptomatic of the way that many in the party have got themselves in such a tizzy about not wanting to seem like softies this time round that they are, slightly pathetically, acting super-macho instead. Punch to the solar plexus indeed. Has he been reading too much of The Hardy Boys? They were always delivering manly blows to the solar plexi (?!) of bad people, as I recall.