Did negative campaigning carry the day for Clinton?

The Associated Press

Hillary Clinton showed how tough she can be in Ohio.

Featured Topic | Posted 38 weeks 4 days ago

Did negative campaigning carry the day for Clinton?

Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was tearing up in a New Hampshire diner. But over the past two weeks, Clinton has been tearing up Barack Obama with ads and speeches questioning his background and readiness to be president of the United States.

Does negative campaigning really work? Did Hillary's aggressive tactics win key primaries in Ohio and Texas? Is the campaign getting uglier?

Ben likes: It's all about the glass jaw

Ed Morrissey/Hot Air

It wouldn’t have mattered if Obama had handled Hillary's negative campaigning with any kind of aplomb. Instead, his campaign made a serious unforced error over NAFTA and essentially got caught in a series of lies over their outreach to Canadian diplomats. That undermined Obama’s political integrity, his greatest asset. He also got caught up in the expected media feast of the Tony Rezko trial, an opportunity for the press to look a little more like journalists than hagiographers.

And how did Obama react? He blew up...

Joel likes: How far will Democrats go?

Ezra Klein/The American Prospect

In Ohio, Clinton proved that going negative works. She spent the last week running a "kitchen sink" strategy, so named because she tossed everything but the kitchen sink at Obama. She attacked him for vague ties to the indicted financier Tony Rezko, for intimations that he might not be as anti-NAFTA as he suggested, for being incapable of answering the phone in the White House during the early morning hours, and, slightly humorously, for sending out unfair attack mailers. And it worked. She controlled the news cycles, one after the other, and his momentum was easily blunted.

Clinton's problem now is that she doesn't need to beat Obama, she has to convince the superdelegates to beat Obama for her.