I’ve been writing for the last few months on the difficulty Senator Barack Obama faces in launching major attacks against Senator Hillary Clinton. In short it boils down to this. You cannot run a campaign of “change”, “hope”, and “unity” while publicly bashing the daylights out of other people.

Obama’s creative way of getting around this? He has started putting forth “contrasts” between himself and Clinton.

Now as the leaves turn and the air gets cooler there’s going to be more of an emphasis on the contrast between myself and the other candidates in the race.

The problem is this. Obama has been giving these same “contrasts” since day one of his campaign. I see no evidence he is willing to step up real attacks and frankly if he did I think he would only face wrath from Democrats who have a lust to win the White House this cycle. The latest from his wife Michelle is a prime example of this continuation of the same old with her saying “nothing is inevitable” that her husband is a “uniter” that Clinton is polarizing based on survey numbers and that her husband has brought in more money from more people.”

These so far are the reasoning of Obama’s stepped up “contrasts”. How is any of this different than what we’ve heard since earlier in the year? It isn’t! Worse still is that the arguments are all pretty flawed. For one thing it is increasingly difficult to say Clinton has high unfavorable ratings. Why? Because she is dominating all the polls. She is for the first real time polling higher in Iowa and the latest has her with a 21 point lead in New Hampshire. She is also beating Giuliani & Thompson in national polling. So if everyone hates her why when asked do they say they want to vote for her?

Second is money. There is a constant back and forth with the Obama campaign. One minute they tell the public money doesn’t matter. The next minute they point to their money to show their electability. So which is it? Also this last quarter saw Clinton raising more money than Obama which doesn’t help the “we have and can raise more money” argument.

Finally we come to the donors argument. Obama’s campaign had a major blow this fundraising quarter. To bypass the “money in politics is bad, we raise more money we are good” dilemma the Obama campaign trumpeted the idea of “new donors” or the total number of individual donations made by people to show they are on top. They said this past quarter they would be king. They were not, Clinton actually had more new donors. But if you also look further it was reported that items such as T-shirts, lawn signs and other trinkets were counted as individual donations for the Obama campaign, something the Clinton and other campaigns did not count (they may have switched but I haven’t heard or seen that yet).

So those campaign contributer numbers are misleading.

Obama has pinned himself into a corner. I have and will continue to make this point. How and why did he get here? I think the answer is two-fold. One he isn’t experienced running national campaigns or even running very competitive state campaigns. He has never had to really attack nor has he faced an onslaught against him.

Second is that Obama has adopted a worldview of liberalism. Which is what makes him appealing to the left and does contrast him to Sen. Clinton who has adopted a more centrist ideology. Which is fine, it is who he is. The problem? The country has never responded well to a far leftist ideology. Not when it comes to money or defense. Young people and a liberal social movement helped drive Lyndon Johnson out of office during Vietnam. Who was he replaced with? Richard Nixon, no friend to liberal ideology. Just one example.

At the end of the day Obama’s ideology speaks of a world that is so ideal that even he won’t be able to campaign in it, how can he? We live in the world of venomous partisan bloggers, ,24/7 cable news networks and talk radio. We also live in America, a country where John Adams questioned the patriotism of Thomas Jefferson. Folks, Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Lets not pretend this is all new.

Obama’s clean-cut America is no different than Al Gore’s or John Kerry’s. They both ran campaigns where they sat back and chose not to attack. They couldn’t because they rhetorically setup worlds where they would be the “better man”. Clinton by contrast has been pretty honest. We knew going into this that when attacked she was going to be as vicious as her husband in the return.