Well, everybody seems to be having fun with this.. A few observations:
1. I think Obama won the round. The Clinton camp’s initial reaction was over the top: Do they really expect Obama to censor his campaign contributors? The Obama camp’s response was swift, brutal and elegant, another signal–after Obama’s take-down of the Australian Prime Minister–that he’s not going to take guff from anyone. And Hillary raising the “politics of personal destruction” at the AFSCME candidate forum because a Hollywood mogul leveled on her seemed rote and oh so ten years ago.
2. I love all the tut-tutting from other Democrats (Richardson, Vilsack). Such a transparent attempt to break into the news.
3. This is useful. You want to see how feisty the candidates are going to be. If John Edwards had gone after Kerry in the primaries, we might have learned how inept the big guy’s responses would be when the Republicans attacked.
4. Yeah, yeah–this was about fluff, not substance. But it makes me hopeful that some real tiffs about substance will come in time.
I’ll have more to say about the Clinton and McCain campaigns–two stumbling front-runners–in my print column, to be posted later today.