On the eve of critical primary elections in North Carolina and Indiana, Barack Obama has released his fourth negative ad in six days.

What happened to Barack's pledge to stay positive?  Only a week ago he made a big hoopla about his promise to take the high road, and it was reported on several mainstream media outlets and throughout the blogosphere:

April 28 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, attempting to regain his momentum after losing the Pennsylvania primary, promised to shun negative campaigning as his race drags on against Hillary Clinton.

Obama, 46, an Illinois senator, began his drive for the nomination with a message of unity and the pledge that he wouldn't run a typical political campaign. Today, Obama said he realized his campaign had strayed in recent weeks.

``I told this to my team, you know, we are starting to sound like other folks, we are starting to run the same negative stuff,'' Obama told a crowd of about 5,000 in Wilmington, North Carolina. ``It shows that none of us are immune from this kind of politics. But the problem is that it doesn't help you.''   Source.

Hmm...I guess he changed his mind, and now thinks negative campaigning might help.

Or was it just more empty rhetoric?

Here's one of Barack's latest commercials, in which he hypocritically accuses Hillary Clinton of "the same old negative politics..."

Contrast that with one of Hillary's latest, in which she makes her case for a policy initiative, the gas tax holiday...

Now, whether you agree or not with Hillary's proposal, at least she's talking about substantive issues of relevance to the voters.

Why is Barack going against his word, and relying on attack ads to compete against Hillary?  Maybe he should focus more on sharing his own concrete solutions for improving the lives of Americans.

So much for the audacity of hope.

Here's an interesting social psychology experiment you can try at home.  

Take a couple who live together and ask them (separately) what percentage of the housework they do.  Then add the totals that each person gives you.

What you end up with is almost always more than 100%.  For instance, the man says he does 40% of the housework, while the woman says she does 70%.

What does this mean?  Does it mean that men overestimate the significance of putting down the toilet seat after they pee?  Or does it mean that human beings are actually not so good at making accurate assessments of this sort?  The evidence suggests it's the latter (though I have to admit, there is a shortage of research about the former, so this is nothing definitive).

All of which leads to me to interesting social experiment number two.  Take a Clinton supporter and an Obama supporter and ask them (separately) what percentage of the overall negativity in the primary their candidate is responsible for.  Then add the totals that each person gives you.

What odds that you'll end up with more than 100%?

New NY Times editorial below the fold...

Peter Daou, (blogging guru and) Hillary's Internet Director posted the following on the campaign/s official blog earlier today.  What follows is his post in its entirety...

Three Myths About the Democratic Race
by Peter Daou3/24/2008 11:26:17 AM

MYTH: Barack Obama is running a positive campaign that will unite Americans.

FACT: Barack Obama and his advisers have conducted a divisive "full assault" on Hillary's character.

While talking a lot about the politics of hope, change and unity, Sen. Obama and his campaign have been conducting a relentless and singularly personal assault on Hillary's character. They have blanketed big states with false negative mailers and radio ads and have described Hillary and her campaign as
"disingenuous,"
"divisive,"
"untruthful,"
"dishonest,"
"polarizing,"
"calculating,"
"saying whatever it takes to win,"
"attempting to deceive the American people,"
"one of the most secretive in America,"
"deliberately misleading,"
"literally willing to do anything to win," and
"playing politics with war."

Corporate Democrat Barack Obama now claims John Edwards is responsible for the closure of Whirlpool factories in Illinois, Iowa and Arkansas.  He also claims Edwards was a supporter of North Carolina's oppressive Right to Work laws.  The flier Obama is circulating in Iowa labor circles can be read here.  I guess the candidate Mr. Axelrod touts as someone who would never resort to "cheap shots" just showed Iowa laborers who the true Obama really is: a cynical campaigner who exploits labor in NH while claiming he is their advocate in Iowa.  Some people will say and do anything to win an election.

Senator Barack Obama (D-Rezko) must be a very unhappy and miserable man today. As Fathers Day weekend was approaching he decided to unload buckets of his Chicago mud politics on Hillary.

This is from a new website called www.Hillaryis44.org.  

A primary focus of the www.Hillaryis44.org is to go negative on HRC's opponents, presently Obama, by collecting and reprinting dirt on them.  When one clicks on the "contribution" tab you are taken to the contributions page on HRC's main campaign website.  At the same time, the site disowns any connection to HRC's campaign. Is this true?

The January 4, 2007, issue of the New York Times contained an article with the following headline:  "In the Back Room and Over Drinks, Senator Clinton Plans for 2008."  A few aspects of this article, I think, are worth discussing.

Even the casual reader will be struck with just how much of this article consists of "information" spoon fed to the Times reporters by unnamed sources in the Clinton campaign, and puffery added by the reporters.  The result?  A very nice puff piece that very effectively disseminates, to a very large national audience, almost exactly what the Clinton campaign wants to tell the country.  

Some might see this article as a sign of an effective campaign, one with excellent connections and levers within certain media. Others might simply see this article as an example of a hometown newspaper puffing up the hometown candidate, two willing dance partners essentially in love with each other.  It happens.  

But an interesting question arises here because the New York Times is no longer just a hometown newspaper.  It is a national newspaper, with a huge national readership.  As such, does it have any responsibility to provide equal treatment?  Is Dennis Kucinich entitled to puff pieces like this?  

One of the messages that the Clinton campaign disseminated through this article disturbed me, and here I quote from the article:

Mrs. Clinton told Democrats that she viewed her two strongest potential Democratic opponents to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina.

They said that she considered Mr. Obama as her biggest obstacle to the nomination, but that she believed the threat of his candidacy would diminish as voters learned how inexperienced he is in government and foreign affairs."

Has Hillary Clinton already gone negative?   What do you think?  

I realize that if you gathered together a dozen experienced political operatives, and asked them about going negative against an opponent, all twelve would tell you that going negative is both effective, and necessary to win.  But...is there a slice, perhaps 20% of the Democratic electorate, that does not approve of a Democratic presidential candidate going negative on another Democratic presidential candidate?  Are you such a voter?  Will you punish candidates who do it?  For those of you who consider this an actionable offense, here are some points of reference, from the 2004 race for the nomination, to consider.  

A first type of going negative is when the candidate himself/herself explicitly goes negative.  You saw a lot of this type in the televised Iowa debates back in 2004.  Every candidate, with the exception of Senator Edwards, viciously attacked Howard Dean. Some of the candidates even explicitly stated they were going to refrain from answering the specific question they were asked, and instead, attacked Howard Dean.  Wow, that's going negative!  

A second type of going negative is to have your campaign office issue a viciously negative press release.  The Kerry campaign did this to Howard Dean, very early in the campaign, back in April of 2003.  They issued this press release:

Howard Dean's stated belief that the United States "won't always have the strongest military" raises serious questions about his capacity to serve as Commander in Chief.  No serous candidate for the Presidency has ever before suggested that he would compromise or tolerate an erosion of America's military supremecy.

A third type of going negative is to have staffers leak to the press very negative material on your Democratic opponent.  This approach can be greatly strengthened if you further devise a strategy that guarantees the press will print the dirt.  The Clark campaign did this to Howard Dean before the Iowa caucuses.  The Clark campaign compiled a binder, chock full of dirt on Dean, then offered certain reporters exclusive access to the dirt on the condition that they immediately publish it.

Assuming you find going negative an actionable offense, do you find each one of these types equally actionable?

A final interesting point on Iowa in 2004:  for a long time, Howard Dean was leading in Iowa.  One of the major reasons why Dean came in third place in Iowa was that Kerry, Clark, Gephardt and Lieberman went negative against Howard Dean.  It was a barrage.  This result tends to underscore the effectiveness of going negative.  (Political operatives are nodding thier heads.)  

However, one is left to wonder something:  if Kerry, Clark, Gehpardt and Lieberman had NOT gone negative against Howard Dean, would he have won Iowa?  If so, then the subsequent Dean scream, designed to rally volunteers who had just lost, would never have occurred.  And thus, 2004 might have gone quite differently...:)  

Thanks again to friends in Michigan, I've got scans that prove the Michigan Republican Party is sending out mailers that make it sound like the state is crumbling because of Gov. Granholm. Truth is they don't do much more than note the state's troubled economy and try to lay the blame at her feet.

To see the images and hear more on just how pathetic this is, click below.