There comes a time in every successful political campaign when the incumbent tires of taking the high road while his or her challenger throws jabs below the belt. It is only then, when the incumbent starts fighting back, that a campaign gets interesting. Well, it's time for telcos to start making it interesting.

Twice in less than a week during well-attended trade shows, the leader of a carrier came to the podium with positive words for an uplift-starved audience only to be dissed by competitors moments later.

Last week it was Dick Notebaert who stood before a crowd--that likes to think of itself as avant-garde--at pulver.com's VON Conference and talked of common ground, mutual goals and fair compensation as it related to Internet neutrality. Moments later, Jason McCabe Calacanis, CEO of upstart Weblogs--a pipsqueak, really, in the world of communications until it was acquired recently by AOL--basically laughed at Notebaert and said, "I think I will kill myself after that Net neutrality discussion. What is this, 1997?"

This week, after a rather uninspired but at times humorous opening keynote address at TelecomNext, in which Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg spoke primarily in positive tones about the future of content and entertainment services and the need to adapt to a new environment, his adversary from the cable world, Glenn Britt, president and CEO of Time Warner Telecom, essentially called Seidenberg's ilk a bunch of competitive scaredy-cats who can't get 10 feet from the apron strings of regulators before crying for help.

Britt called it "industrial engineering," but the description holds.

Perhaps it's best for telco leaders like Seidenberg and Notebaert to stay above the fray. After all, the carriers kept the public high road for most of the CLEC era, and they won that battle. But it sure would make for a more interesting campaign if a little dirt were thrown in both directions.

It started to get interesting on Tuesday. AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, an industry pit bull, began to hit back by reminding us that cable rates have risen 32% over the last several years, while carrier rates have come down.

Whitacre said the cable industry's days of escalating prices is over. "IPTV will create a new [era] for consumers. It will result in lower prices from cable companies, and that's something they have not been used to," he said.

And a good, down-in-the-dirt competitive battle is something we could all get used to.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@prismb2b.com.