The Obama team should get their message straight

Today, Obama denied that there was any racial reference when he said that the GOP and McCain would attack him because he didn't look like the presidents on the currency.

n an interview with the St. Pete Times and Bay News 9 for Political Connections, Barack Obama brushed off the charge from the John McCain campaign that he was injecting race into the campaign:

"I was in union, Missouri which is 98 percent white - a rural, conservative. and what I said was what I think everybody knows, which is that I don't look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates. But that I think that what people are really concerned about, what they're looking for is fundamental change on the economy, things that are going to help their families live out the American dream.

'There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this. What this has become I think is a typical pattern from the McCain campaign, whether it's Paris Hilton or Britney or this phoney allegation that I wouldn't visit troops. They seem to be focused on a negative campaign what I think our campaign wants to do is focus on the issues that matter to American families."

What does a president look like who came from central casting? Which presidents, on the currency or not, looked like Hollywood picked them out? LBJ? Nixon? Ugh. Lincoln, on both a coin and a bill, certainly didn't look like someone Hollywood would have picked.

That's just malarkey. And Obama's chief strategist proved it with his remarks on Good Morning America.

"He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday. "It is not about race."

But Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, acknowledged on "Good Morning America" Friday that the candidate was referring, at least in part, to his ethnic background.

When pressed to explain the comment, Axelrod told "GMA" it meant, "He's not from central casting when it comes to candidates for president of the United States. He's new to Washington. Yes, he's African-American."

Notice the exact same phrase about coming from central casting. They must have sat around and picked that out as they tried to figure out what Obama could have had in mind other than race. Then Axelrod had to open his mouth and admit that he was also talking about being African American. And thus he's admitted that Obama was trying to accuse McCain and the GOP of frightening voters by saying that Obama is African American. Just what the McCain people have been complaining about.

Obama was caught with the race card hidden in his sleeve and now their lame excuses just expose what they were doing. Given that Obama's real task is to bring over white swing voters (he already has almost the entire African American vote), it can't help for the coverage for the past couple of days (and probably over the weekend and Sunday shows) to touch on race this way. Whatever hope Obama had of remaining the seemingly post-racial candidate after the whole Jeremiah Wright story has now diminished even further.