David Gergen: McCain’s “Moses” ad is code for calling Obama “uppity”

It’s on: House GOP’s oil protest to resume tomorrow

More than a dozen Republicans have already committed to being there; Pete Hoekstra, leveraging the buzz the GOP got in the blogosphere on Friday for its use of new media, sent forth the good word this afternoon via Twitter. No word yet on what they’re planning, but if you’re not yet convinced that the wind is at their back on this, go read the transcript at Newsbusters of Stephanopoulos beating his head against a wall trying to get a straight answer out of Pelosi on why she won’t allow a vote on drilling.

Brazile: Of course Obama injects race into the campaign

But Obama also admitted that, despite what Obama senior adviser Robert Gibbs told reporters, there was a racial dimension to his Missouri remarks in which he said McCain and the Republicans would make an issue of the fact that he doesn't look like presidents who have been on the dollar bills.

"I don’t think it’s accurate to say that my comments have nothing to do with race," Obama said. "Here's what I was saying and I think this should be undisputed: That I don’t come out of central casting, when it comes to presidential races. For a whole range of reasons. I’m young, I’m new to the national scene, my name is Barack Obama, I am African American, I was born in Hawaii, I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is that I’m sort of unfamiliar and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am, where I come from, what my values are and so forth in a way that might not be true if I seemed more familiar."

Obama’s oil flip-flop about place as well as issue

Barack Obama has proven himself slippery on oil for the second time in his campaign.  In April, he accused his opponents of taking money from oil lobbies, when in fact Obama himself not only did the same thing but had oil executives as major bundlers to his campaign.  Now he’s reversed himself on drilling, and he did it in a remarkable place — Florida:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama said today he would be willing to open Florida’s coast for more oil drilling if it meant winning approval for broad energy changes.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage - I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done,” Obama said.

Of course, this comes shortly after Obama called off-shore drilling “the latest scheme”, telling his supporters that drilling wouldn’t solve anything.  How shortly?  48 hours! Here’s Obama in Springfield, Missouri, insisting that drilling wouldn’t work:

Now the latest scheme is well, we’re going to drill offshore. Now, I want to be absolutely clear to everybody about this. If I thought that I could provide you some immediate relief on gas prices by drilling off the shores of California and New Jersey, I - I … I understand how desperate folks are. I met a guy who couldn’t go on a job search that lost his job, couldn’t go on a job search because of the high price of gas. Just couldn’t fill up his tank. I met a teacher in South Dakota who loved her job as a teacher on an Indian reservation, she had to quit because the drive was too far, it was taking up too much of her paycheck. I know how bad people are hurting. So If I thought that by drilling offshore, we could solve our problem, I’d do it.

So what happened in the following 48 hours to convince Obama to drill? He probably looked at the polls, especially in Florida. The Sunshine State had fiercely opposed off-shore drilling for decades, and would normally be a safe place to rail against Big Oil and talk about alternative energy sources. Not any longer, though; 60% of Floridians now support off-shore drilling, ten percent of whom acknowledge that their position has changed with the rise in gas prices.

NYT proclaims Obama “careful” on race?

And let’s not forget his June appearance in Jacksonville, where he accused the Republicans and the McCain campaign of preparing to scare people because, “did I mention he’s black?”  Careful?  Obama has been about as irresponsible with his charges of racism as he possibly could be.  McCain has stayed far away fromany attack points that could possibly be perceived as racist, as Jake Tapper wrote, and yet Obama smeared him anyway.  When McCain defended himself forcefully, though, the New York Times credits that as the start of the “furor”.

The Obama campaign is the one selling fear and smears.  It didn’t take much to provoke it from Obama himself, either.  Whenever McCain attacks his policies or his lack of experience, Obama shows himself as thin-skinned and reactionary, willing to toss rhetorical bombs that he can’t support.  That’s the antithesis of “careful”.  Given the incendiary nature of the accusation, it’s the epitome of recklessness, and it says quite a bit about the man who so carelessly throws that smear at his opponents.

WaPo: Obama … not careful

Quote of the day

STEWART: …When you talk to them, do you feel like, when he says the crazy things that he says–and he says crazy things–is he playing to his base? Is this just a politician? Because, wasn’t that the mistake we made with Saddam Hussein? His braggadocio, his all those things, were of necessity, because he has to play to this base. Are we misinterpreting their belligerence, and thinking it’s baiting us into a war, when it’s just a way to stay in power?

WILLIAMS: Well, that’s exactly what it is.

Calm down, you neo-conservative warmongers.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's no more a threat than Congressman Joe Blow back in Cleveland, trying to appeal to the good folks who make up his base. So suggests Brian Williams.  Hat tip jazr.  Fresh from his trip to Tehran, where he scored a big exclusive with the Iranian president, Williams sat down with Jon Stewart on last night's Daily Show.

STEWART: Sort of Jew. When you talk to them, do you feel like, when he says the crazy things that he says--and he says crazy things--is he playing to his base? Is this just a politician? Because, wasn't that the mistake we made with Saddam Hussein?  His braggadocio, his all those things, were of necessity, because he has to play to this base. Are we misinterpreting their belligerence, and thinking it's baiting us into a war, when it's just a way to stay in power?

WILLIAMS: Well, that's exactly what it is.  There's universals in politics.  He's playing to his base like a politician in Cleveland [NB: on behalf of Dennis Kucinich, I resent that!]  You can go through the transcript, and he, you were joking, he says all but "death to America."  At one point he said to me, and I'm paraphrasing very loosely, the atomic bomb is so 20th-century.  He wanted us to know there --

See, it's really our fault.  Poor Mahmoud wouldn't be making trouble were it not for our being his enemy.  And the harmless little fuzzball [with his 6,000 centrifuges] is no more a threat than was Saddam Hussein, the guy who gassed thousands of Kurds to death and was sitting on 550 tons of yellowcake.  I tell you, Ahmadinejad's no more capable of making nuclear weapons than another guy with bad hotels,  Kim Jong-il.  What's that?  North Korea did develop nuclear weapons, despite the bad decor?  Never mind