I highly recommend Reed Hundt's new post over at TPMCafe about the state of the primary campaign and confusion about the difference -- in a modern political context -- between going on the offensive and going on the attack. I won't try to summarize or restate Reed's argument, just suggest that you go read them. But I'll touch on an overlapping point about the state of the race.

Like a lot of people I'd recently been criticizing Barack Obama's aimless and unaggressive campaign. And that has changed, at least to a degree, in the last week or two. But being more aggressive doesn't mean unloading on Hillary. It might involve some attacks on her, sure. But that's not the basic point. As a practical matter, given Hillary's longevity in Democratic politics (meaning basically how much she's a known quantity to partisan Democrats) I don't think it will accomplish that much. And largely because of that it won't be enough to make Obama the nominee by default.

What's the premise of Obama's campaign? I hear less triangulating, more principle (which basically means the same thing), change, etc. But those are slogans. To make these work politically I think Obama would have to say, Clinton is the cautious Democratic politics of the past. It was good in its day. And I respect all that Sen. Clinton has accomplished for our party. But I'm about something different and that's why X, Y and Z. Perhaps it's something dramatic on climate change. But that's not the point. I'm not running his campaign. But I think you need policy specifics that demonstrate the point.

So Obama says we Democrats know X, Y and Z is necessary. And I'm going to propose and commit to passing legislation in my first two years in office. And you can see I'm different because watch, Hillary won't follow me.

As it is, at the beginning of the last debate when they both made their basic pitch for their candidacy, it was Hillary's poll-tested platitudes and then Obama criticizing Hillary's establishmentarian platitudes with platitudes about change and other platitudes about avoiding platitudes.