A couple of you told me I should use my morning sit-down with Patty Murray to ask something like this:

When do the gloves come off?
Posted by Free Lunch on September 9, 2010 at 9:30 AM

Well, I asked right off the bat, telling Murray that the polls show her slipping, many of our readers are alarmed, and a number want to know: When do the gloves come off? Here is what Murray said in response:

The gloves are off. We have a choice in this state now to elect somebody who's doing due diligence, hard work, making thoughtful, long term solutions that will help our middle class families get back on track and someone who's going to do the same thing that got us into this—who wants to pass the Bush tax cuts, in full, for the wealthiest, supports the policies of sending our troops to war without paying for it, who wants to repeal Wall Street reform. And I know, because I've been there through all of this, that we cannot go back to that. So this is a very serious election, and, to your point, gloves off.

What about Rossi ads like this one, which try to blame Murray for the Great Recession and position Rossi as someone who saw it all coming, "told you the truth" about it, and now needs to be elected in order to fix a huge problem that Murray not only created but also ignored? It's a foray into revisionist history, of course, but based on polls, it's working. Murray replied:

It's the gambit of pretending that the world started the day President Obama took office, and it ignores that entire history that I just gave you. When the Bush administration asked for a bailout and we were heading into, I think it was October-November of two years ago, we were losing 700,000 jobs a month. We now are moving to a point where we are gaining—not nearly as much as any of us would like to see—but we are putting jobs back in the plus side. He wants us to think that the world started the day President Obama took office, and every vote since then had no history to it whatsoever. And that—I just—it's not right.

But, I replied, as an election-year strategy it's obviously somewhat successful. So how do you untangle the issue for voters?

Well, I think that that is what we're trying to do in our campaign. And I think that President Obama is starting to do a better job of that—of laying out the history of where we are, and how we got here. It's a hard argument because... in order to explain where we are and where we've been it takes a lot of words, and reminding people, and bringing them through the history. Whole lot easier to take a snapshot of today and say 'This is where we are' and not think about it.

More Murray answers to come, but in the meantime, here's the latest attempt by Rossi to blame the Great Recession and the stalled recovery on Murray and the Democrats alone: