They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. That's the Chicago campaign way.

Yikes!

After making nice in the last debate, and inspiring me to wax rhapsodic about the promise of a clean campaign, tonight's CNN Democratic debate looked more like a cage match with Clinton, Obama, and Edwards doing everything but hitting each other over the noggins with folding chairs. Things got as nasty and pointed as they've been to date.

And as with any triangular personal dynamic, )except maybe the Three Muscateers) the situation inevitably evolves into 2 against 1 alliances. Where Edwards and Obama had previously seemed to gang up on Clinton, this time around Edwards and Clinton joined forces to pointedly press Obama on his past and his other supposed negatives.

For essentially the first time, Obama got hit with questions over his legislative record both in the Senate and during his tenure in the Illinois legislature.

Seeming to dump the entire oppo research file on Obama at once, Clinton even brought up the Rezko business that's been bantered about here in Illinois for some time. (which I predicted would happen) (background here. Media Matters notes some important discrepancies in the reporting of this issue as well.

More here , here, and here).

Some ninnys, such as Newsweek's Howard Fineman, have tried to launch the story line that any fighting between Obama and Clinton will "tear the Democratic party apart".

I think that's largely a bunch of crap, as I feel that a majority of Dems are perfectly happy with either candidate as nominee, and that once the choice has been made, they'll gladly and enthusiastically rally around the nominee, no matter who it may be.

The media also is obsessed with trying to convince us that race is a huge factor in all this, even when the only people who seem to think so are the pundits themselves. They simply can't stop telling us all about how they see race when they devine all their various poll numbers and tea leaves that they rely on. No mention that maybe people simply vote for who they'd like to see as president.

That can't be. To them everything is demographics and race. They insist on hammering incessantly on the notion that everyone is divided by race, that race is the ultimate determiner of how an individual votes. It's a factor, but they act as though it's nearly law.

They insist that blacks were somehow waiting to see if Obama could win among whites before they would decide to support him. As if all blacks vote exactly alike or need to have "permission" from white voters before they support Obama. The idea is ridiculous. There's little to no evidence of this, and it probably started as the musings of some pundit or another and they simply decided it was a good story line and so it's become accepted as fact among the media.

This is actually a disservice to all of us, in my opinion.

Aside from that, what were your impressions of Monday night's Dem debate if you caught it?

Do you think infighting between the primary candidates will "tear the Democrats apart" as Fineman supposes, thus hurting their chances in the general?