The Negs

The LA Times's Mark Babarak takes a look at the shoe that hasn't dropped in the campaign yet: attack ads on television. The candidates don't like to bust these out, because in a multiple-person race negative ads can easily backfire and mainly serve to benefit a third candidate. At some point, though, someone's going to decide he (or, in principle, she, but Clinton almost certainly won't shoot first) needs to go for it.

That kind of thing can transform a race. Most people who follow politics closely have already gotten a little bored with this super-long fight, but most voters still have only very hazy notions about the campaign and the evidence is that attack ads really do make a big difference -- I expect this to especially be a problem for Giuliani. What's more, even relatively small ad-induced changes in the polls would inject dynamism into the competition and bring renewed attention and enthusiasm from the junkies.