The Thermostat Question

At Slate, John Dickerson picks up on a telling metaphor:

"Speaking in Albuquerque, N.M., Monday about equal pay for women, Obama said that he didn't want his daughters 'to ever confront a situation where they are disadvantaged because of their gender. The thought of it makes my blood boil.' Really? Perhaps he watched Jack Cafferty while on vacation, because that's not the way the senator usually speaks, and you won't find that kind of language on his Web site. When he's spoken about pay equity before, he's mentioned his daughters, but he hasn't reached even a simmer.

"This little rhetorical flash of passion connected with something I've been hearing from Obama aides lately. One of the challenges for the Obama campaign is showing that a man of his unusual background shares the values and concerns of 'regular Americans.' (Mark Penn focused on this difficulty in his famous strategy memo that argued Obama wasn't 'fundamentally American.') The campaign has tried various ways to show Obama's core. They've used ads in which he's said the word 'values' a lot, and they've highlighted his biography.

"But talking about the temperature of his blood is a whole new way for Obama to connect with voters. He's showing that he can get emotional about the same things everybody gets emotional about."

It's a Goldilocks problem: McCain has long been said to have too much of a temper, and now Obama not enough.

If the rap against Gary Hart was where's the beef, the question about Obama now is, where's the passion?

"One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy," says Time's Joe Klein, "has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn't boil, who carefully considers the options before he reacts--and that his reaction is always measured and rational. But that's also a weakness: sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent's lungs out. On the same day as the North Carolina meeting, Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and reacted with carefully prepared passion to John McCain's scurrilous campaign theme that Obama doesn't put America first. 'Let me be clear: I will let no one question my love of this country,' he said, to the best applause he received from that skeptical crowd. It was an effective moment, but defensive. It was not how you win a presidential campaign."

Some liberal bloggers, such as the Guardian's Michael Tomasky, are practically writing the attack ads:

"We now know that John McCain wears $520 shoes, owns an obscene number of homes (variously placed at seven to 10) and has probably never written a check to a utility company or a home contractor or a dentist in at least 26 years (since he married La Hensley). And Saturday we learned that he thinks someone with a net worth of only $4.9 million is not rich. He can be painted as -- and indeed is -- out of touch with what regular Americans go through every day.

"If he were the Democrat, everyone in America would know the above. The Republicans would have run ads featuring those Ferragamo loafers and aerial photographs of the seven, eight, nine or 10 houses. For good measure, the script of these ads would have cleverly made sure that viewers knew that this emasculated sissy-man didn't earn a penny of the fortune that purchased all this. He married it!

"Can't do that to McCain because he's a war hero? Nonsense. It was done to John Kerry. He was a war hero. In fact, Kerry, we can safely assume based on the things I've read, killed more men in a face-to-face way than McCain ever did. That's arguably more manly than even surviving five years' torture. It can be done to anyone.

"But the Democrats just don't think this way. No, it's not that they're better human beings. They're afraid to go toe-to-toe with Republicans on these things because they figure (accurately) that Republicans have more experience at this stuff. And they're more concerned about media reaction. Republicans don't care about editorial criticism from the major newspapers -- they tough it out until the charges stick. Democrats would start backing off if the Times and the Post wrote editorials taking them to task.