Paul Krugman delivers a special treat for the nutroots today, arguing that if the Dems take power they should be as vicious as they can be or, put in a more nutroot-friendly formulation, equally as vicious as he believes Republicans are:

Now that the Democrats are strongly favored to capture at least one house of Congress, they're getting a lot of unsolicited advice, with many people urging them to walk and talk softly if they win.

I hope the Democrats don't follow this advice -- because it's bad for their party and, more important, bad for the country. In the long run, it's even bad for the cause of bipartisanship.

There are those who say that a confrontational stance will backfire politically on the Democrats. These are by and large the same people who told Democrats that attacking the Bush administration over Iraq would backfire in the midterm elections. Enough said.

I especially liked this part:

There are those who believe that the partisan gap can be bridged if the Democrats nominate an attractive presidential candidate who speaks in uplifting generalities. But they must have been living under a rock these past 15 or so years. Whoever the Democrats nominate will feel the full force of the Republican slime machine. And it doesn't matter if conservatives have nice things to say about a Democrat now. Once the campaign gets serious, they'll suddenly question his or her patriotism and discover previously unmentioned but grievous character flaws.

This is truly delusional. If you go back, as Krugman suggests, and look at the Presidential election for the past 15 or so years, what you'll find is that regardless of the political noise surrounding the election, the candidate who ran the better race won.

I'm sure Krugman thinks that Michael Dukakis got "slimed" by Lee Atwater and Willie Horton in 1988, but the reality is that Dukakis was a candidate with serious vulnerabilites, many of which were compounded during the campaign by his own doing.

Four years later Bill Clinton prevailed over a rather inept reelection campaign by George H.W. Bush (albeit with the help a third party candidate). He also cruised to reelection over a lackluster effort by Bob Dole in 1996. Where was the vaunted Republican "slime machine" then?

In 2000, George W. Bush really had no business winning, and he did not because of "slime" but because Al Gore ran a very sub par campaign - which is another way saying he followed every last bit of Bob Shrum's advice. Gore flopped in the debates and ended up unable to carry his home state of Tennessee.

In fact, if there was any slime in 2000 it was the Democrats who were the guilty party, when an operative with ties to the Gore campaign dropped Bush's decades-old DUI on the Friday before the election. It almost worked, too.

Clearly, Krugman seems to be speaking about the 2004 campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans when he writes, "Once the campaign gets serious, they'll suddenly question his or her patriotism and discover previously unmentioned but grievous character flaws."

If you reread that sentence and take out the words "question his or her patriotism," it's a fairly accurate description of what Jim Webb and the Democrats are doing to George Allen in Virginia right now. Did Allen open that door with his "macaca" comment? Sure.

But the difference between the two is that in the case of John Kerry, you had more than a hundred of his fellow veterans come forward, on the record, saying they felt he was unfit to be Commander and Chief.

Furthermore, the back and forth over the details surrounding Kerry's medals obscured the fact that the real thrust of the objection of the Swiftees had to do with what John Kerry did after the war, not during it: his tossing of his medals (or someone else's) over the White House fence, his blanket condemnation of U.S. troops before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his 1970 trip to Paris to meet and talk with Communist leaders of North Vietnam. These three events aren't "slime," they are irrefutable facts. And whether Krugman likes it or not, they are absolutely fair game as a topic of discussion in a Presidential contest.

The point is that contrary to Krugman's myopic, one-sided view, politics is a rough business. Both sides know it, and both sides play it that way. Neither party has a monopoly on slime, nor does either side have a monopoly on virtue.