Letters to the Editor
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And if it had been two white men?
Aren't our personal conversations -- at bars, over coffee, around the pool, in the den -- littered with these kinds of exchanges? A bit of heat builds up and then someone says "Yeah, but none of that is getting the dessert menu, is it?" and everyone laughs, and we go on.
I can't help wondering if the so-called "nastiness" of this "spat" would have even raised a single eyebrow if the participants were two white males. Wouldn't it just be a "normal" moment in a "normal" campaign if that were so?
To paraphrase Edwards: how is building up a few seconds of luke-warm personal criticism into be some sort of Democratic Kristallnacht getting a candidate selected?
What it is achieving beyond question is painting these two fine candidates as special hot-house flowers, rewriting the rules of debate because one of them is a women and the other African-American. The rules haven't changed.
The only interesting thing I can see to come out of the exchange is that both of them appear to feel pretty comfortable under pressure, and that neither of them seem to have any "killer" skeletons in their closets -- or surely the other would have dragged it out.
And that's all good.