1115.org

A perfect example of the substance-free reporting brought to you by the chimps in the White House press corps is this bizarre fixation on code names.

‘Renegade’ Joins Race For White House - WaPo (6/16/07):

Sen. Barack Obama has a new tag: “Renegade.”That’s what Secret Service agents are calling the Illinois Democrat, in the time-honored tradition of giving “secret” code names to presidential candidates and other protected dignitaries. As is custom, the Obama moniker reflects something of the man himself (though he might prefer “progressive” or “independent”).

As if. How about “Middle Man?”

And because I don’t want to write two separate Obama posts at the same time, I’ll add to this his non-apology apology for the D-Punjab shot at Hillary Clinton:

“It was a screw-up on the part of our research team,” Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, said during a meeting today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters. “It wasn’t anything I had seen or my senior staff had seen.”
[...]
“The research team thought it would be clever to put that at the top.”

All the way down at the bottom, you have:

“I take responsibility for it, as does our campaign.”

As long as you know that this came directly from low-level staffers and not Obama or his top people, he’ll take responsibility. Way to step up. But here’s the overarching question for anyone who actually believes this: Before he even openly declared his intent to run for the Democratic nomination, Obama ha. emphasized raising the level of political discourse. He has run as a new type of politician who is above politics-as-usual. He’s built his whole brand, and its resulting cult of personality, around it. How could any Obama supporter, much less the ones who had enough of the Kool-Aid to decide to work long hours for minimal pay, think that the boss would be OK with last week’s attack on Hillary, not to mention the lie they told about Bill Clinton? It seems to me that staying on the high road, basis as it is for the whole Obama campaign, would merit a kind of standing order not to engage in this type of communication? And if it is as important as Obama says it is, why didn’t these staffers get fired for tarnishing the brand?

This stuff is either important or it’s not. Are “a new kind of politics” and “raising the level of discourse” core principles or are they Obama’s version of “compassionate conservatism” and “restoring honor and dignity?” Even the most ardent Obama supporters should want to know the answer to that question.

UPDATE 12:30pm PDT: The hypocrisy is apparently unlimited. From an earlier interview with top Obama adviser David Axelrod:

Axelrod says the team will do as much research into its own candidate as its rivals. “We have a long record—actually a longer record in public life than several of the other candidates—and the first order of business is when representations are made about that record, we are completely informed as to what Barack has said and done and written,” says Axelrod. “You’d be foolish to have a campaign without that operational capacity.

“Second, it’s important for us to know what other candidates have said and done because you need to understand where there are similarities and contrasts. The difference is about using your opposition research as a kind of offensive weapon on a day-to-day basis to try to besmirch your opponents.”

No one wants to defend Obama today?