Bringing a gun to a knife fight

What Barack Obama said:

He warned that the general election campaign could get ugly. “They’re going to try to scare people. They’re going to try to say that ‘that Obama is a scary guy,'” he said. A donor yelled out a deep accented “Don’t give in!” “I won’t but that sounded pretty scary. You’re a tough guy,” Obama said. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said.

What the Republican National Committee said:

“Why is Barack Obama so negative? In the last 24 hours, he’s completely abandoned his campaign’s call for ‘new politics,’ equating the election to a ‘brawl’ and promising to ‘bring a gun,’ ” said the RNC’s Alex Conant.

Now, I guess I know what the RNC means. “New politics” is apparently supposed to mean refraining from playing hardball or giving as good as he gets when it comes to the Republican Smear Machine. Obama has been promising for a year to be a tougher kind of Dem; maybe the GOP hasn’t been paying attention.

But that said, I have to wonder: if a Democrat brings a gun to knife fight, wouldn’t that necessarily be a “new” kind of politics?