Maureen Dowd knocks Obama for being too soft:

When he wants to, Mr. Obama can rouse the crowd to multiple ovations, as he did yesterday when he talked with a preacher's passion about the "quiet riot" of frustration of blacks in this country, on issues like Katrina, in a speech before black clergy at Hampton University in Virginia.

But often he reverts to Obambi, tentative about commanding the stage and consistently channeling the excitement he engenders. At times, he seems to be actively resisting his phenom status and easy appeals to emotion. When he should fire up, he dampens. When he should dominate, he's deferential. When he should lacerate, he's languid.

Futilely, he chafes at the notion that debates and forums are rituals for showing a sense of command with a forceful one-liner, a witty takedown or a "shining city on a hill" moment. He keeps trying to treat them as places where he can riff, improvise, soothe, extrapolate or find common ground. He skitters away from the subtext of political contests, the need to use your force to slay your opponents.

It's ironic that Dowd is arguing, in essence, that Obama should dumb down his message into red-meat soundbytes to better attack his opponents and excite the base.

In addition to the challenges this might pose to a candidate trying to "change our politics," the problem may be that Obama is just not that great of a debater. He's a good writer and a good speech-giver (though I've heard from reporters who've traveled with him for extended periods of time that he's much more hit and miss than most people realize). But that doesn't necessarily translate into being a good debater - especially in a format as crowded and confined as the current one.

Obama can certainly try to tighten his message and sharpen his attacks, but in the end he has to be who he is. The worst thing he could do - which we've seen candidate after candidate do over the course of the years - is to try and make himself into something he's not. Right now, one of the most attractive things about Obama to many people is that he doesn't go for the cheap applause line.