Chris Matthews appeared early yesterday morning on MSNBC to breathlessly announce that the previous evening's ABC presidential debate -- almost universally deemed by the media a rough one for Barack Obama -- had once again opened a path for Hillary Clinton to seize the nomination. This is a regular occurrence for Mr. Matthews. Every time Obama so much as sneezes, Chris scrambles to cover his bets, which were once all on Hillary.

Before said breathless announcement, however, Matthews did rather thoughtfully address the central difficulty of Obama's modus operandi, which itself permits these recidivist claims about the nagging potential of a Clinton nomination. And that difficulty is the Illinois senator's determination to practice a "new politics" -- all that kinder, gentler jazz, the one in which when Clinton, or anyone else, comes after him with a knife, he not only refuses to retaliate with a gun, he pretty much turns the other cheek.

It is, no doubt, a unique way of running a presidential campaign, at least for this long of a duration. Many have tried it before, only to quickly acquiesce to the old, retaliatory mudslinging ways. But Obama is hanging in there, and in so doing it earns him reviews such as Thursday's blistering version from the New York Times [1]:

"The result was arguably one of Mr. Obama’s weakest debate performances. He at times appeared annoyed as he sought to answer questions about his former pastor, his reluctance to wear an American flag pin on his lapel and his association in Chicago with former members of the Weather Underground."

His annoyance is often framed by media commentators as an emotion stemming from an inability, rather than reluctance, to answer, once again, questions about his former pastor, electoral bitterness, flag pins and now, added to the almost comedic mix, some 1960s radical of trifling acquaintance.

Undoubtedly -- or at least there's no doubt of this in my opinion -- Obama needs to tighten his responses. On every occasion that I hear him asked one of these tiresome things, for the umpteenth time, he launches into pauses and hesitations and stutterings as though it's the first.

This is perplexing. He should either deliver a terse, fluid explanation of the same and exact wording each and every time, or, as an alternative course, throw into the inquisitor's face what George W. Bush did repeatedly in 2000 about his former drug use: "I've already answered that question and I ain't a goin' to no more. Next question."

Anything but pauses and hesitations and stutterings. It is those, and not the answers themselves, that prompt journalists to write about what they interpret as his "weakest debate performance" yet.

Nevertheless there's some real question about the Times' use of that superlative. In one way it was his strongest debate performance yet, inasmuch as it reinforced in voters' minds his demonstrated determination to avoid the old politics of retaliatory tactics.

If ever there was a debate in which Obama could have easily ridiculed and returned fire, it was Wednesday's. Instead he remained reasonably cool and tried to remind ABC News with a durable patience that far surpasses mine that the world's future hinges on something a bit weightier than a 99-cent lapel pin. In fact it was his opponents -- the use of the plural is deliberate -- who looked ridiculous, and they required no outside assistance.

What's more, as uncomfortable as the new politics may appear at times, voters seem to be responding favorably. Indeed, the more Hillary wields the old politics, the lower her numbers go. As pollster John Zogby has observed [2]: "This is not a year for negative campaigning and Clinton's pounding of Obama ... does not seem to be working."

That's the understatement of the primary season, because in Pennsylvania she's gone from at least a 20-point lead of just a few weeks ago to a statistical tie today. Every observer knew the numbers would tighten as the primary approached, but not one of them to my knowledge predicted a dead heat four days out. It is now not unreasonable to speculate that Obama could actually pull off an upset in the Keystone State.

And that, as even many of Hillary's advisers and supporters have conceded, would, at long last, be all she wrote.