Obama and Clinton Should Focus on McCain

In last night's victory speech, Obama added some extra lines to provide a better contrast with McCain. TPM's Greg Sargent highlights this part of Obama's speech (emphasis mine):

When I am the nominee, I will offer a clear choice. John McCain won't be able to say that I ever supported this war in Iraq, because I opposed it from the beginning. Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for a hundred years in Iraq, which is reason enough to not give him four years in the White House.

If we had chosen a different path, the right path, we could have finished the job in Afghanistan, and put more resources into the fight against bin Laden; and instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Baghdad, we could have put that money into our schools and hospitals, our road and bridges - and that's what the American people need us to do right now.

And I admired Senator McCain when he stood up and said that it offended his "conscience" to support the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in a time of war; that he couldn't support a tax cut where "so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate." But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, the Straight Talk Express lost its wheels, because now he's all for them.

Well I'm not. We can't keep spending money that we don't have in a war that we shouldn't have fought. We can't keep mortgaging our children's future on a mountain of debt. We can't keep driving a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace. It's time to turn the page.

Clinton needs to do the same thing and keep her focus on McCain and the Republicans. Some of the so-called pundits, like Pat Buchanan who I had to endure watching on MSNBC's coverage last night, are claiming that Hillary has to go negative on Obama. I disagree. The last time the Clinton campaign went negative on Obama, leading up to South Carolina, there was a huge blowback from Democrats. Rather, Clinton should focus on how she is better equipped and capable of beating John McCain in the general election.

~BT