In his piece yesterday about Barack Obama in the Washington Post ("Too Cool to Fight?"), columnist Richard Cohen said something profound. While discussing the concept of "swiftboating," Cohen pointed out that swiftboating isn't merely about smearing one's opponent; nor is it merely about spreading falsehoods. The essence of swiftboating, Cohen wrote, is taking your opponent's greatest strengths, and turning them into negatives, liabilities. John Kerry, for example, was so dumbfounded that someone would challenge his stellar war record, he felt it was unnecessary to vigorously defend himself against the charges--a decision he now sorely regrets.

Likewise, who would have thought that the McCain campaign would treat community organizing not as something that embodies basic American virtues like duty, self-sacrifice and commitment to justice, but rather as something worthy of contempt? Who would have thought that inspiring millions of Europeans to once again believe in the U.S., would be treated by McCain and company as somehow un-American, and evidence of empty celebrity? And who would have thought that the candidate who excelled at Harvard and became president of the Law Review would be seen as "elitist," while John McCain, who finished fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, and Sarah Palin, who went to six different colleges in six years, would get a free pass?

In considering this Orwellian state of affairs, one has to conclude that swiftboating works not simply because of the virulence of the swifterboaters, it also depends on the passivity of the swiftboatees. It is for this reason that Cohen takes Barack Obama to task for a disappointing, namby-pamby performance on George Stephanopoulos, during which Obama seemed to lack any fight, any passion, regardless of how outrageous the smear against him. When asked whether McCain had picked a running mate who was "capable of being president," Obama could only muster a wan, "Well, you know, I'll let you ask John McCain when he's on ABC." Even Obama's strongest backers have to admit that this is pretty mealy-mouthed stuff. Cohen reached the same conclusion that I reached in many previous blogs, that Obama relies far too heavily on his trademark "cool," and is too slow to anger, too reluctant to fight. Come on Barack, where's the outrage?

There is an interesting parallel between Barack Obama and the great tennis player and humanitarian, Arthur Ashe. Ashe grew up in a very segregated Richmond, Virginia, and as a promising teenage tennis player, wasn't allowed to play at many of the clubs in Richmond. When he was allowed into tournaments, Ashe knew that he could not engage in any racquet throwing, arguing over line calls, or moments of petulance--standard etiquette for his white counterparts. Ashe knew instinctively that he had to be the perfect gentleman, lest he give the good ole boys reason to kick him out of the tournament. As a result, Ashe became, throughout his life, a model of comportment, and diplomacy. These traits, combined with Ashe's intelligence and empathy, were integral to the humanitarian work that Ashe did in South Africa and elsewhere.

All too often, however, people who are thoughtful, reflective and empathic are mistakenly seen as weak. Even Ashe's contemporary, Billie Jean King, an otherwise very wise woman, once said derisively about Arthur Ashe, "I'm blacker than Arthur is," perhaps the dumbest thing she ever said. My point is this: calm and diplomacy are great traits to own, but there are certain times in life where it is passion and fight that carry the day. I believe that Obama is currently in the fight of his life, and he needs to recognize this and squarely engage the opposition.

Since the early days of the primaries, I've maintained that the most significant moment of the campaign was the heated argument Obama had with Hillary on stage in South Carolina. People have forgotten that before that memorable moment, even the black community had not fully gotten on board the Obama campaign. But Obama finally reached the boiling point in South Carolina, after Bill Clinton called Obama's opposition to the war a "fairy-tale," and after Hillary put out an ad claiming that Obama supported the policies of Ronald Reagan. Losing his temper in the South Carolina debate was the best thing that ever happened to Obama. The public got to see that he did have some fight, some fire, and it made him all the more human and authentic. That moment was a game-changer for Obama.

The problem is, we have not seen enough of this. The only other time during the entire campaign that I can remember Obama rising to anger was when Hillary, after repeatedly refusing to say that Obama was ready to be president, suddenly decided that the "dream ticket" would consist of her as president and Obama as veep. The raw cynicism of this got Obama's dander up once again, and he mocked Hillary's flip-flop beautifully. He needs to display more of this kind of passion.

So where should the campaign go from here? First, Obama/Biden should absolutely refuse to be boxed in by the fact that Sarah Palin is a woman. They should go after Sarah Palin in the same manner that they would go after John McCain. Yes, temporarily Sarah Palin has rallied the McCain troops. But in picking someone so manifestly unprepared to be president, McCain has created a vulnerability for himself large enough to drive a truck through. Obama and Biden have simply been slow to exploit it. The notion that Palin is ready to be president, but isn't ready for Meet the Press, is another one of those Orwellian absurdities that should be trumpeted by Obama, Biden, or both, every five minutes. I can hear Palin apologists already, saying, "But she's being interviewed by Charlie Gibson!" Fiddlesticks, that's a far cry from maintaining a daily dialogue with the press and with the voters, something one would expect of any candidate.

In keeping with this, the Obama campaign ought to start keeping a daily tally of the number of days that the McCain is hiding Palin from the Sunday talk shows. They should make a big deal out of it, declaring in a daily press release:

"It's been 10 days and counting since Sarah Palin has been in the McCain 'witness protection program.' When will she come out of hiding?"

The Obama campaign should beat this issue like a drum, because Palin's lack of readiness to be president is the ultimate issue, more important than her support for the "bridge to nowhere," more important than her faux opposition to pork barrel projects, more important than her denial of global warming. Smoking out Sarah Palin, and by extension, John McCain's judgment, should be project number one for the remainder of the campaign. And it's become fairly clear that Hillary won't do it. Hillary is content to continue her perfunctory, joyless, I'm-only-out-here-because -I-have-to-be style of campaigning. Now that Hillary has opted to stick her thumb in Obama's eye by professing such loyalty to the "sisterhood" that she can't take on Sarah Palin, the time has come for Obama to move beyond "nice." He needs to find his inner toughness.

As more information surfaces about vice-presidential choice Sarah Palin, it has become increasingly clear that Palin was a last-second choice on the part of John McCain, and underwent virtually no vetting prior to her selection. Multiple reports have indicated that McCain wanted Joe Lieberman for the position, but encountered such stiff opposition from party regulars that he was forced to drop that option. Another prospect, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, was was also unacceptable to the party base, due to his pro-choice position on abortion. That left Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, sorely lacking in both charisma and depth, and Mitt Romney, with whom McCain's relationship is strained at best. It is also clear that McCain was influenced by the tremendous success of the Democratic Convention, and was pessimistic about his chances were he to make a predictable, ho-hum choice for veep. That is why, at the 11th hour, he chose Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, hoping that she would lend a new vitality and pizzazz to the ticket. The problem for the McCain campaign is, the pick was made with such haste, the McCain campaign knew little about her.

Since then, information has emerged which suggests that Palin is a lot longer on drama, and shorter on gravitas than McCain would have hoped. Let's take a look at what we now know:

1) The New York Times reports that Palin has hired a private lawyer to deal with the investigation into whether she improperly used her office as governor to try to get her ex-brother-in-law fired, during his bitter custody battle with her sister.

2) It has come out that during the 90's, Palin was a member of the "Alaska Independence Party," one of whose goals was the secession of Alaska from the United States. Can you imagine if Barack Obama had belonged to a group which advocated the secession of Hawaii from the Union? We'd never hear the end of it!

3) Palin campaigned against her own mother-in-law, who was attempting to succeed Palin as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Much of Sarah Palin's disenchantment stemmed from her mother-in-law's pro-choice views. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, who lost the mayoral race to the candidate that Sarah Palin backed, told the New York Daily news that she is considering voting for Obama.

4) While McCain praised Palin during his introduction of her, for rejecting the infamous "bridge to nowhere," it has since come to light that that before it became a national scandal, Palin was a staunch supporter of the infamous bridge. Further, in direct contradiction to what Palin said during her introduction, Alaska never gave the $400 million back to the federal government; rather, they simply transferred it to other projects. Simply put, during her debut in Dayton, Ohio, Palin fibbed when she said she had returned the money.

5) Depite the reformer label that Republicans have enthusiastically pinned on Palin, we now know that while Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, she brought in 27 million dollars of pork barrel spending, for a town with a population of 7,000. That may be a national record for pork barrel abuse per capita.

The McCain campaign has issued a series of statements purporting to show that they did a serious job of vetting Palin before choosing her. However, the statements raise more questions than they answer. Staffers first told the Washington Post that the FBI had fully investigated her; the FBI, however, denied this, saying that they perform no such function for the candidates. Further, the New York Times found that the McCain campaign never bothered to talk to Palin's associates in Alaska. Here is Lyda Green, the State Senate president, who lives in Wasilla, where Palin served as mayor:

They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, questioned whether any serious vetting had been done on Palin, given the universal surprise in Alaska over the choice:

I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called. I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.

The fact that the McCainites knew so little about Palin diminishes her as a candidate, but it diminishes John McCain even more, making a mockery of his bromides about judgment, experience and leadership during a time of great national uncertainty. The selection of Sarah Palin was clearly an amateurish, slapdash process that resulted in a pick that may now blow up in McCain's face.

Of course the most lurid fact to emerge since the choice Sarah Palin is that of her daughter Bristol's pregnancy, a pregnancy putatively in its fifth month. This information was disclosed to the press in the wake of rampant internet speculation that Bristol, now 17, had been the real mother of Sarah Palin's fifth child, Trig Paxson Van Palin. While I am aware that the internet is rife with false and slanderous rumors, many of which have indeed targeted Barack Obama, the facts surrounding the birth of Trig Palin are so bizarre and unlikely, that they bear further discussion:

On March 5, 2008, Sarah Palin announced at a press conference that she was 7 months pregnant with her fifth child. The reaction to the news was universal; everyone was shocked because she didn't look remotely pregnant. A month later, while presumably 8 months pregnant with a child that she knew would have Down's Syndrome, she attended a conference in Dallas, requiring significant travel by air, itself a bit unusual for someone with such an advanced pregnancy. As Sarah Palin tells the story, she was in Dallas on April 17, when she began to leak amniotic fluid. Whether her water fully broke is, I suppose, a semantic issue. Despite this sign of impending childbirth, and accompanying labor pains, she decided to give her keynote speech at the energy conference she was attending. Then, rather than simply check herself into one of Dallas' fine hospitals, she went to DFW airport, bought a ticket, checked her bags, dealt with the hassle of security, and made a 9 hour trip back to Anchorage (with a stop in Seattle), while not disclosing anything to Air Alaska, and while apparently leaking amniotic fluid. So Palin's version in a nutshell is that she got pregnant at age 44, and at seven months, wasn't showing at all--itself highly unlikely. Then, at eight months, her water broke, and she chose not to go to a hospital in Dallas, all the while knowing that she would be delivering a "special needs" child that could come at any moment. Instead, she decided to return to Alaska, the rationale apparently being that she wanted to have her child in Alaska. To say that this scenario strains credulity is the understatement of the year.

It is also important to note that during this time, Bristol had been absent from school for eight months with "mononucleosis," and that some of her schoolmates had reported seeing her looking pregnant. We are now told that Bristol is 5 months pregnant, which would put Bristol's conception at almost the exact time of Trig Paxson Van Palin's birth, conveniently knocking down the notion that Bristol could have given birth at that time. If indeed Bristol is five months pregnant, she could not be the mother of Trig. However, we have to take this on faith; if this was all a deception, why would we get the truth now? If Sarah Palin's version of events is true, it is the coincidence of a remarkable series of unlikely events, whose collective probability is close to zero. A few more troubling revelations about Sarah Palin could doom her to the same fate as would-be attorney general, Harriet Miers, and would-be vice-president Thomas Eagleton.

Finally, in conjunction with the Palin selection, let me say a few words about Hillary Clinton. Regular readers of this blog know that over the course of the campaign, I have regarded Hillary Clinton as a cynical and somewhat destructive figure. It was for that reason that I was overjoyed at the level of unity reached during the Democratic Convention. I said to myself, "Great, now I won't have to talk about Hillary anymore!" Well, with the selection of Sarah Palin, it looks like I spoke too soon.

John McCain's attempt to attract and co-opt former Hillary supporters with Palin is a gamble, not so much because of Palin's experience deficit, but because the success of McCain's strategy depends on Hillary being an accomplice to his plan to drive a wedge between Hillary's past supporters. The fact is, Hillary could put the kibosh on McCain's use of Palin as a champion of women's interests, by simply standing up and saying firmly:

She is a woman, yes. But she stands against all the important things that animated my campaign: Universal health care, the protection of a woman's right to choose, the establishment of a living wage for working families, a progressive tax system that doesn't favor the rich, a major move toward green, renewable energy, and an immediate end to the war in Iraq, with an emphasis on regional diplomacy. Sarah Palin stands against all of these goals. She is no more a promoter of my agenda than Clarence Thomas has been a promoter of civil rights. I strongly urge any supporters of mine to see through this cynical ploy by Senator McCain, and support Barack Obama for president!

Barbara Boxer and others have already said words to this effect, but the person who really needs to speak out on Sarah Palin is Hillary Clinton. McCain apparently believes that if he can appeal to Hillary's narcissism and continuing sense of victimhood, that she may simply sit on her hands while he siphons off some of Obama's support. Who knows, McCain may be right. So far Hillary has issued only the most tepid, innocuous statement about Palin. Over the next 65 days, I'll be watching to see how Hillary handles the Sarah Palin issue, and you can bet that Barack Obama will be watching as well.