Is it better to be nasty or to be nice? As winter finally turns to spring, this is a question a lot of Americans will be asking themselves. For one thing, it’s a good theme to ponder in the last week of Lent. And for political junkies – at the moment a category that seems to include most of the country’s voting age population – it is one of the big choices to chew over in the few weeks of hard slog left before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.

For much of the race, niceness seemed to be winning. The central premise of Barack Obama’s campaign, after all, is his promise to lift America out of the partisan feuds of recent decades. That positive pledge captured the imaginations of millions of Americans, especially younger ones, in ways that caught an older, more cynical generation of political operatives by surprise. Niceness appeared to be confirmed as the reigning spirit of the age when Hillary Clinton, whose initial campaign message could be summed up as “toughness”, was only able to make a comeback in New Hampshire after showing her softer side.