Say Anything Blog

Slate columnist John Dickerson took a train ride with Barack Obama and wasn’t very impressed by what he saw:

At the next train stop, I’m going to stand behind Senator Obama when he speaks. When he’s decrying the trivial distractions in politics, I think he may be crossing his fingers behind his back.

As the Senator’s campaign train wound from one speech where he denounced tit-for-tat politics to the next speech where he denounced tit-for-tat politics, his campaign hosted a conference call to engage in the practice the candidate was busy denouncing. I suppose it would have been an even greater act of chutzpah for the Obama campaign to host the conference call while Sen. Obama was denouncing that kind of behavior, but not much more of one.

Obama campaign aides scheduled the call to talk about Hillary Clinton’s fantastical story about her breakneck race to shelter under sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia. You might think this would be the last story the Obama campaign would be pushing, because in Wednesday’s debate the Senator mistakenly suggested his campaign had only discussed the issue because reporters had brought it up, not because they were trying to take advantage of Clinton’s extended work of fiction. To push the story again now would make Obama look even more insincere about that claim. …

While the candidate was denouncing the distractions, his aides were promoting them. Three veterans of the Bosnia conflict joined for a conference call to explain just how crucial this particular distraction was, and why we should ignore Senator Obama’s guidance and get obsessed with this issue.

I don’t really have a problem with Barack Obama bashing Hillary over what Dickerson calls her “extended work of fiction” now being called the Tuzla Dash.  Hillary lied, and she deserves to be called out on it.  But Barack Obama’s people taking Hillary to task for her lies even as Obama himself bemoans very relevant attacks on him for his associations with people like Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers is a level of hypocrisy few candidates ever manage to reach.

It’s a Clintonian level of hypocrisy.

Obama started this primary season with the glow of an audacious candidate for “hope” and “change,” but he’s going to end it exposed as just another power-hungry liberal willing to do whatever it takes to get into office.