In The New York Times today, Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy write about the Clinton campaign's plans for general-election attacks on Donald Trump. I'm moderately optimistic, especially given what we read a few days ago at the Huffington Post about the amount of anti-Trump material that seems to be untapped:

Multiple Republican campaign sources and operatives have confided that none of the remaining candidates for president have completed a major anti-Trump opposition research effort. There are several such efforts being run by outside conservative organizations. But those efforts are still gathering intel on the businessman after having started late in the primary season....

"I think everyone was and is waiting for someone else to do it," said [a] Republican campaign official....

... it is treated as a truism among Republicans that a vast reservoir of damaging opposition research remains untouched. It's a suspicion that Democrats aren't challenging. Indeed, one Democratic opposition research said that they’ve spent the past eight months compiling material on Trump as he’s risen up the ranks....

That researcher estimated that of all the material they’ve compiled -- court and property records, newspaper clips and videos -- approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

But Chozick and Healy say there's some concern in the Clinton camp:

Even as Democrats prepare to take on Mr. Trump, there remains deep anxiety that the messages may not break through.

In January, Clinton advisers were startled after Senator Ted Cruz of Texas released an ad that alleged that Mr. Trump had used eminent domain to try to bulldoze an elderly widow’s home in Atlantic City, making way for a parking lot to accompany one of his namesake casinos.

The woman won the legal battle and remained in her home, but the ad, which Mr. Trump disputed, did not dent his support.

I wonder if the problem was the ad itself. I have a theory about why a lot of attacks on Trump fail: They put Trump front and center, and he comes off as an exciting disruptor, a gadfly who gets under his enemies' skin. Attacks on Trump actually aggrandize Trump.

Let's look at that Cruz ad: