David Brooks argues pretty persuasively that Barack Obama has to avoid getting dragged down to Hillary Clinton’s level. I think he’s right about this, too:

[T]he real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.
If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.