The audacity of hope? Or is it the naivete of hope?

Is it naïve to hope that an Obama-McCain campaign in particular, but also a Clinton-McCain campaign, will be relatively devoid of the worst Swiftboat-Jennifer Flowers-Gore “fabrications” style of personal attacks.

First, they are all Senators, and the fact that one of them will be going back to the Senate should encourage some level of collegiality in the campaign. None wants to be shunned on return. Second, given his alleged devotion to bipartisanship and history of pursuing good governance initiatives, will McCain give the same wink-and-nod to dirty tactics that Bush seemed to give via his alter ego, Karl Rove? McCain supposedly was a victim himself, too, in the 2000 primary. Will the Rove-Atwater rodents be able to get excited supporting McCain, a guy they probably, at minimum, don’t like too much (and might prefer to see lose instead of having the power of victory to take the party away from them). I would never be too sure of that, however: consider the likelihood that McCain gains with independents by being attacked by the likes of Coulter and Limbaugh. I would not put a carefully coordinated assault like that past the GOP. Never take things at face value with these people.

Both Obama and Hillary will be hard to attack without significant blowback in charges of, respectively racism and sexism. I can see the biggest effort by the anti-Clinton dead-enders against Hillary, but if she’s the one, we will see major erosion of the negativity about her during the course of the campaign anyway. She’s both impressive and charming in action, generating cognitive dissonance that undermines the largely fanciful re-telling of Hillary stories by the ax-grinding Limbaughs and David Broders. She’s probably right,too, that she’s taken it all for a long, long time and there isn’t anything new to dredge up. It could be hard for anything to gain real traction. It looks like both Obama and Clinton are a lot more ready to fight than Kerry was, too.

Could we actually have an election conducted over the real differences between conservative Republicanism and Democratic progressivism? The Republicans would love to keep the personality-character-beer buddy shell game going in order to avoid the merits of the candidates’ governing philosophies and policies, but they may not be able to pull it off this time.