"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ... Months and months before Iowa, he was getting record crowds. I just think they should have really gone after him back in the summer and in the fall. I know it would have been a difficult decision to make back then. She's the leader of the party, the standard bearer, the big dog. Everyone thinks she's gonna win and walk away with it. Why go picking on Barack Obama? But that's just something the campaign should have done sooner."

"We didn't lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren't successful. We did silly stuff, like talk about David Geffen. It wasn't the substantive contrast we needed to make."

"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain."

They didn't go negative enough early enough? I submit that it was when Clinton's surrogates began smearing Obama's middle name, claiming he attended a madrassa, and implying he sold drugs, that voters began moving away from her in large numbers.

People, and Democrats especially, are sick to death of 8 years of rovian attack and wedge politics. And that's why the Bush/McCain ticket is only digging their hole deeper by continuing and escalating it. Bring it on.