Now about that kitchen sink, the strategy of which has temporarily replaced that of the exit. Obama seized on the phrase as ammo for a counterpunch: “The Clinton campaign has been true to its word in employing a kitchen-sink strategy.” Obama explained away his setbacks in the Texas and Ohio primaries with, “The kitchen-sink strategy I’m sure had some impact.” His campaign staff soon seized on an opinion expressed by Geraldine Ferraro, a political feminist pioneer and a Clinton supporter, that Obama’s race was giving him an advantage: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” (Some of my readers took umbrage at this, too: “Get this,” Sam Pakenham-Walsh, member of the Nitpickers League, said in an e-mail message, “we no longer use the subjective tense! Has all our education been for naught?” Because Ferraro’s statement posed a condition contrary to fact, her “if Obama was a white man” should have been were.

Later that month, however, the welcoming, wide-mouthed sink became a sinister repository of innuendo: The Times reported plans for “unleashing what one Clinton aide called a ‘ kitchen sink’ fusillade against Obama, pursuing five lines of attack” that CNN’s Anderson Cooper dubbed the Clinton “ kitchen-sink strategy.” That was a phrase defined back in 1996 by The Washington Times, covering Bill Clinton’s legal defense as a “tactic in which lawyers routinely throw in every possible argument that could bolster their case, however absurd.”

That trope was picked up in early February, with Candy Crowley of CNN reporting that Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were making “ kitchen-sink speeches,” throwing every hot topic into one amorphous batch of oratory. The latest round of sinkmanship began late last year among Republican candidates, as a Huckabee aide complained that the Romney camp was throwing “everything but the kitchen sink” at the new man from Hope.

The kitchen table conjures an image of a warm and friendly place for a family to hold earnest discussions, but the kitchen sink is a metaphor for a mess.

Time sink define