Today's required reading

Thomas Frank explains why now is not the time for Barack Obama to play nice.

If he is to prevail in November, Mr. Obama cannot allow the right to profit from the discontent stirred up by their own misbehavior. Talking about "hope" is very nice when you're leading by 20 points, but what the Democrat has to do, now that John McCain has evened up the score, is take control of public outrage. He should not recoil from the bitterness that's out there. He should speak to it.

At the very least Mr. Obama must begin to offer an explanation for why things have gone so very wrong over the past seven years. He should tell us how, say, the failures of Iraq reconstruction were made inevitable by the conservative philosophy that "government should be market-based," as Mr. Bush once put it.

Besides, attacking Mr. McCain himself is pointless. The man no longer stands for anything. He has transformed himself from a maverick into a cipher, a hood ornament on a hit-and-run machine [Ed. Note - Daaaaaaaaaaaamn!!!!]. He has no more political content now than the constantly changing cast of cynical right-wingers aboard his campaign plane.

That's why this election must be a referendum on Republican rule and the destructive doctrines behind it. It is a contest to put the blame where it belongs.

Word.