Am I the only one who finds these comments by Elizabeth Edwards pretty mild?

The question is, what does [Hillary Clinton’s] campaign tell you about how she’ll govern? And I’m not convinced she’d be as good an advocate for women. She needs a rationale greater for her campaign than I’ve heard. When she announced her candidacy she said, “I’m in it to win it.” What is that? That’s not a rationale. Same with Senator Obama — I’ve yet to hear a rationale. John is extremely clear about what he can accomplish and why he’s the one to do it.

This is being touted as a “smackdown.” Meh.

I found this exchange from Elizabeth Edwards in the same interview a little more interesting:

Well, you must wonder: Why isn’t it equally big news that Rudy Giuliani blew off his Iraq Study Group meetings to get paid much more to give his speeches, which weren’t about poverty? Why doesn’t that story follow Giuliani around? A number of reasons. There’s just a lot less investigative reporting on political campaigns than there should be.
But when that story came out — Newsday broke it — it seemed like a big scoop to me. I think that maybe the Romney campaign, the McCain campaign, are not pushing it to the other outlets …
Are you saying some other Democrat pushed the poverty speech story to the media? I don’t know about that one, but I do know that some of these stories are being pushed by other Democrats. Come on, we talk to the same people. But it’s not like we have completely clean hands; our research people will share things with reporters — not this kind of nonsense, this is irrelevant.

“It’s not like we have completely clean hands” is one of the more refreshingly honest comments to come out of a campaign this year. Too bad this woman also asked Ann Coulter:

EE: I’m making this call as a mother. I’m the mother of that boy who died. My children participate — these young people behind you are the age of my children. You’re asking them to participate in a dialogue that’s based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don’t think that’s serving them or this country very well.

Is the act that dirties the campaign’s metaphorical hands, distributing opposition research on opponents to sympathetic reporters, really that far from “dialogue that’s based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues”?