From an article of the same title by Tom Bevan in the Chicago Sun-Times:

...with Hillary Clinton leading Obama by an average of nearly 20 points in the six major polls taken so far this year, will Obama be able to close the gap over the coming year without playing hardball? And how can he attack Clinton without looking small himself and undermining the core rationale for his candidacy?

I put that question to Obama's senior strategist, David Axelrod, before Obama's presidential announcement last Saturday in Springfield.

"If you have a difference over an issue that's something different than a gratuitous personal attack," Axelrod said. "But the real point is the premise that if you can inspire people and if you can give them something real to believe in, you can advance your campaign without tearing everybody else down. And that is our premise and we're going to try and see if it works. If it does work, then we truly have changed our politics for the better. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. But that's the only kind of campaign that he [Obama] really can run."

So, I quickly followed up, Obama won't go negative?

"I . . . I . . . I don't . . . I would not say that he won't draw contrasts where contrasts should be drawn," Axelrod hedged. "But if you're asking me, do we have a strategy to tear people down? We don't. And maybe that's incredibly naive, and maybe that is not feasible in modern politics. But we believe it is, and we believe it's important to run a campaign like that."

Will he change the tone of political discourse or play hardball like all the rest? We'll see...

From an article of the same title by Kirk Johnson in the NY Times:

On the low rungs of the nation's political system in the state legislatures, Democrats are pushing close to real parity among men and women — a historic threshold that is changing more than mere numbers.

The new Democratic women, epitomized by the Woodbury Three, as they are known here, are focused on the bread-and-butter issues of the suburbs, like property taxes, schools and health care. They are the soccer-mom swing-voters of years past, now making the laws themselves, and that could end up changing both parties here and beyond.

While what happened here [Minnesota] was not repeated in Congressional elections, it was echoed in many other states, especially in the Northeast and West, where women made their biggest gains.

Nationally, Democrats picked up more than 320 seats in state legislatures — about 140 of them by women — and gained control of 10 chambers, 4 of them here in the Upper Midwest: the Minnesota House, the Wisconsin Senate and both chambers of Iowa General Assembly. Republicans gained control of the Montana House of Representatives.

Almost everywhere, women were crucial to those Democratic margins. In the New Hampshire Senate, which swung to Democratic control for the first time since 2000, women outnumber men almost two-to-one in the new majority caucus.

Republican women lost ground and saw their numbers slide everywhere but in parts of the South. There are now only 534 of them out of more than 7,300 party-affiliated state legislators nationwide, compared with 1,187 Democratic women, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan group.