Reply #9: It was a vacuum

[PATRICK]

that said more than argument what the character of the two person horse race was about. Most of the issues vanished like the wind and the resulting highlighting of the "women" vs. blacks" made it appear to some of us as relatively trivial and distracting as we thought. Even sadly embarrassing. The brakes began to appear on the negative campaigning, imperfectly. The leader in the contest can always reap from the high road.

I am sure both these things and reconciling for the fall is an ongoing conversation Edwards still has with the two leaders.

The irony is that Obama and Clinton are more tailored toward wide base, fall type voter attraction and somehow this mitigates against putting very popular issues front and center. So things like this do intend to get worse. The main theme is all about the leadership issue. In issues, the GOP always lie together, while the Dems, though touting differences are pretty much together. The central issue likely IS
leadership no matter what content or leanings either one brings to the table. That and the still vague notion of coattail clout that even gets lost in the queasy electability fear card. Bread and butter issues rarely get into larger corporate/criminal disasters that are too large a subtext to shove out of view- but that is where they are, just like impeachment.