Having it both ways

The North Carolina Republican Party is running a new ad linking Obama to Jeremiah Wright, calling Obama "too extreme for North Carolina." Here's the ad:



John McCain has since "asked them not to run it." McCain added, "There's no place for that kind of campaigning - and the American people don't want it, period." I previously wrote about disgusting tactics used by the Tennessee Republican Party. In both instances, McCain gets to appear to take the high road by disowning the smears while also benefiting from the repeated plays the ad gets on cable news.

Well now Obama is calling McCain out. In an interview with the Huffington Post (a website looking more and more like BarackObama.com every day) Obama said, "Well, my understanding is that the Republican National Committee and John McCain have both said the ad is inappropriate. I take them at their word. And I assume that if John McCain thinks that it's an inappropriate ad that he can get them to pull it down since he's their nominee and standard-bearer."

Good for Obama, though it's disappointing that it took him to make this point.

Update: Case in point: The Los Angeles Times blog post on this story has this headline: "N.C. GOP defies McCain on ad depicting Obama and Wright." The implication, of course, is that McCain has fought hard to get the ad off the air, but the party just won't listen.