Obama's clumsiness

I don't want to write too much about this, but it was stupid of Obama to deliver the line about not looking like the guys on the dollar bills.

As Josh Marshall argues, the McCain campaign's plausible deniability on the Spears/Obama/Hilton ad isn't actually all that plausible. But as the occasion for Obama himself to make a fresh accusation that the McCain campaign is exploiting racism, it's pretty thin gruel.

Obama was definitely talking about the black thing with the dollar bill remark, but a prominent spokesman tried to walk it back afterwards by arguing he wasn't. That compounds the error by lying about it. Ramesh Ponnuru is right to point out that Obama has said basically the same thing before, and he knows he's got a good case because he's sending his NRO hordes over to the Washington Post site to make a big deal about it.

Now, predictably, the McCain campaign is turning around accusing Obama of being the one making race an issue, and I don't know why the Obama camp would want to have this out right now. The ad was getting panned or ridiculed by pretty much everybody already.