TNR’s Michael Crowley has written an excellent piece on Barack Obama’s failure to draw sharp contrasts with Hillary Clinton. As Crowley points out, Obama seems to have a personal hangup about negative campaigning and it’s hurting his ability to close the gap with Hillary. The parallel Crowley draws to Bill Bradley is especially striking:

There’s a recent antecedent for this pacifist style: Bill Bradley’s campaign against Al Gore. Like Obama, Bradley campaigned on poetic themes of hope and changing the political status quo. And, like Obama, Bradley disdained negative campaigning. Whereas Obama posits the “politics of hope” against the “politics of fear,” Bradley spoke of “a contrast between a politics that’s nothing but tactics, and a politics that’s based on ideals and beliefs.” To one veteran of the Bradley campaign, Obama is making a grave mistake. “You cannot, in a competitive Democratic primary, create a new kind of politics,’” says Michael Powell, a former senior adviser to Bradley. “It leads to a warped logic that you end up not defending your own positions and you don’t challenge the views of your opponents.” Bradley, at least, organized his campaign around a universal health care plan that challenged Gore’s cautious piecemeal approach; Obama has no contrast- drawing policy equivalent. From the future of Iraq to health care to tax policy, Obama’s plans are either similar to or less ambitious than those of his opponents.

In short, Obama is paying the price for the easy road he had in 2004. The collapse of his main primary opponent and his landslide win in the general election meant that he never had to go negative. As a result, he is not comfortable doing so and spends much of his time spouting goo-goo nonsense about everyone getting along.

The reality, however, is that negative campaigning is essential to democratic politics, especially when you’re not the frontrunner. It’s how voters get (a) competition for their votes and (b) sharp contrasts between the candidates. Right now Obama’s reluctance to go negative is depriving Democratic primary voters of both.