The Gloves Are Off

Friday afternoon, Louisville Kentucky, the NRA was out in full force, deep throated gurgles from the audience marked key moments in the otherwise pedantic speech of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.  Suddenly a loud noise rang out from offstage.  Huckabee pauses for a split second, then with his eyes narrowed and his grin expanding beyond the normal capacity of a human face he joked:  "That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair....somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor".  The crowd goes wild, appreciating the pithy humor of the Democratic contender for the national throne running from a gunman.  Funny. But not, "ha, ha" funny.

The day before Huckabee decide, in the heat of the moment no doubt, to paint a picture of Obama running for his life before the NRA, President Bush was attending an event that was organized to honor the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel.  During that event he directed his remarks at Obama, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.  We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement."

During a Friday press conference Obama roundly criticized, and critiqued, the Presidents remarks denouncing them as divisive,

"The speech yesterday wasn't about an actual policy argument, it was about politics ... about trying to scare the American people. And that's what will not work in this election."

Of course if history has anything to say about what will and won't work scaring the American people has a long track record of success as a campaign tactic.  The point is that the gloves are off and as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party Obama may well want to keep the moral high ground during the campaign into November, but he had better be well prepared for the dirty threats, invective, lies and half truths that will be launched from the low ground.