On Sunday, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J., tried to point out that the presidential campaign has gotten awfully brutal awfully fast.
Naturally, Cory Booker promptly got slammed.
But the point Booker was trying to make wasn’t only about the legitimacy of attacking private equity — it was that the tenor of the presidential campaign on both sides has become “nauseating to the American public.” In saying so, he touched on something potentially even more unspeakable among Democrats: the idea that the slash-and-burn tactics of Obama’s reelection campaign mark a definitive departure from the promise to change politics for the better.
“My outrage and really my frustration was about the cynical negative campaigning, the manipulation of the truth,” Booker told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday night, noting the irony of the fact that his plea for civility had been promptly turned into a partisan weapon. “And so here [Republicans] are plucking sound bites out of that interview to manipulate in a cynical manner, to use them for their own purposes.”
Many a requiem has been written for “that hopey-changey thing,” as Sarah Palin so memorably dubbed it. And to be sure, much of the griping about the president’s harsh tone is the disingenuous phony outrage of Republicans who would prefer not to be its targets. But as Obama embarks in earnest on his second presidential campaign, deliberately invoking the echoes of 2008 as he does so, the contrast with his old image is especially stark.
Read more at The Atlantic.
