Stay smooth or get on the attack?

Barack Obama's campaign is at a crossroads. Many of their loyal supporters are getting anxious as the Republican base has been reignited by the addition of Sarah Palin to their ticket. These Democrats are most concerned that Obama is not responding with enough zeal and fire as is being thrown at him from the other side.
The latest advertisements from the Mccain camp are being called dishonest, dishonerable, and even outright lies by some relatively impartial pundits and finally Obama himself. One of the ads accuses Senator Obama of advocating sex education for kindergarten and pre-K, a ressurection of a dirty ad run by Alan Keyes in his 2004 Illinios senatorial campaign against Obama. What Obama truly advocated was coaching young children to be aware of sexual advances by adults.
The choice to run this ad was a risk for Mccain, which I believe he paid for in full when he appeared on the show The View earlier this week. And the reaction from Obama supporters to this ad and others like it (the lipstick on a pig smear) was clear; outrage. This begs the question, will Obama shift strategy and begin attacking Mccain with the same vigor and distortion of facts, or will he continue in his battle to stay truthful, clean and above the dirty game that is Washington politics (or Karl Rove politics).
New York Times columnist David Brooks and syndicated columnist Mark Shields came to a conclusion yesterday on The Newshour, that this election and the issues at hand favor Obama and Biden. They agreed that the Mccain camp has pulled some flashy stunts to keep the race quite close thusfar, but has very little substance to carry it through the next 8 weeks in the battle for the whitehouse. That being said, the Obama camp has little reason to panic and will most likely stick with the strategy that got them this far; appealing calmly and earnestly to the middle class of America with incontrovertible facts, and with the registration of hords of young people in every swing state.

Check out the Newshour broacast of Brooks and Shields from Wednesday night and the NY Times article that speaks to the same issue by following the links below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/12cnd-candidates.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2008/09/12/20080912_shieldsbrooks28.mp3