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I don't think so. To the millions of ill-informed and apathetic voters out there, who vote strictly on who seems more likable, and in complete ignorance of voting records, positions on issues, etc., the "new tone" tactic may be just what is called for. Certainly the democrats are falling all over themselves with nastiness. If republicans respond in kind, then to these voters "they're all alike." I suspect millions of these voters are just going to feel more comfortable with republicans, and they will associate the democrats with carping, stirring up bad feelings, agitating race issues, etc. Bush's high positives in the polls, and democrats high negatives seem to bear this out. We'll see in the Fall.

Exactly.

There is a perception that Republicans are mean and nasty because we went after Bill Clinton over what some people say was a trivial issue. I felt the same way at the time, to tell you the truth. There were much more important reasons to impeach Clinton over besides lying about a consensual relationship! (Treason, for one.)

President Bush is trying to rectify that perception. That doesn't mean that Sean Hannity shouldn't grill the Bush Administration officials like he did.

Bush's high positives in the polls,
and democrats high negatives seem to
bear this out.

Corelation is not causality. The high
positives have to do more with
prosecution of the war. Refusal
to play hard ball has characterized
Republicans as being spineless even
among the faithful for decades.
It is not a winning way.

>>>>If republicans respond in kind [to the Democrats' nastiness], then to these voters "they're all alike." <<<

Well, many of the voters I've heard from say that politicians are all alike in that they won't REALLY rock the boat in ways that could do some true good. Some have even said that as long as merely two political parties get to debate in the national debates, we'll continue to have back-room collusion between the two supposedly "competing" parties. When a third party comes along that's sufficiently strong, though, the fiesta gets spoiled because it wants power badly enough to rock the boat and start landing some real punches.

The U.S. is apparently one of the few "democracies" that has merely a two party system, is it not? We still make the third party's presidential candidate have 15% BEFORE getting to debate. Without Perot's billions, that's exceedingly tough to accomplish (as he learned in '96 and Nader did in '00). Conveniently enough for those who want to keep everyone else subservient to the 2 party system, there are only around a few hundred billionaires WORLDWIDE. And several of them owned stock in Enron & Worldcon, etcetera...