This isn't just Rovian politics, it's Clintonian, plain and simple. They always play rough. go for the jugular. Ambition, you know.

Begala and Brazile are too close to the action. They see the party from an apparatus viewpoint, not from the street. They don't understand the passion behind those that believe in Obama and that if Obama loses through vicious attacks and the changing of the rules, many of those Obamacrats ain't coming home come November. Maybe Brazile does, but not when she's a talking head on a primary night. Begala is a Clintonite.

Taking a page from a previous post you wrote and I commented on (the one where I mostly agreed with you but you didn't seem to think I did) the Obama campaign is going to have to enlist a series of surrogates that can help meet charge with countercharge. A prominent white woman supporter should take on Hillary and roughhouse her. A semi-conservative white male should also play the role of defending him re "who do yo want to answer the phone at 3 a.m." He'll need a beefy blue collar type democrat from the North defending him in public because he's losing votes to middle and working class ethnic voters - especially Catholics.

Obama needs to develop his own War Room RIGHT NOW. It would be hard for him to go directly negative - yes, as a man vs. a woman and as a black man vs. a white woman. Team Billary plays the victim card very well. But Team Billary will do whatever it takes to win.

So he has to fight back immediately. Clinton's comment that she had experience, McCain had experience, and Obama's experience was apeech made in 2002 was below the belt and targeted toward Obama's nuts. If his doesn't counter that type of stuff immediately, then the rest of the country will look like Ohio.