Politics of Hope?

Senator Obama is telling his supporters to find their Republican neighbors and "argue with them and get in their face," the Associated Press reports. Mr. Obama is also getting nasty in his campaign: a study released this week by the University of Wisconsin's Wisconsin Advertising Project found that nationwide, following the political conventions, "56 percent of the McCain campaign ads were negative, while 77 percent of Obama's ads were negative." So much for the politics of hope that aimed to unite America rather than divide it.

Politics isn't beanbag, and these columns have nothing against negative advertising. But for all of Mr. Obama's talk about wanting to bring Americans together behind a common purpose, it is shaping up as quite a polarizing general election campaign that he and his supporters are running.