Obama Acts Like a Dem

While Hillary deals with the Ferraro fallout and her surrogates try a "we're rubber, you're glue" approach to "leadership", Barack Obama remains dignified and above the fray, focussing not on the self-inflicted controversies of the increasingly desperate Clinton camp but on his real opponent, John McCain.  Instead of adding to the divisiveness that Clinton seems to crave, Obama acts like a real Democrat and attacks the Republican, his real opponent.
AP via Yahoo! News:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday that Sen. John McCain reversed his position on President Bush's deep tax cuts in order to win the Republican presidential nomination, one of his sharpest criticisms yet of the Arizona senator he hopes to face this fall.

Criticizing GOP efforts to extend major tax cuts from Bush's first term and to eliminate the estate tax, Obama said: "These are all steps that John McCain rightly said were irresponsible when they first came up."

"He made a decision to reverse himself on that," Obama told reporters as he flew from Chicago to Washington for a series of Senate votes on budget issues.

"That was how, I guess, you got your ticket punched to be the Republican nominee," he said of McCain. "But he was right then, and he's wrong now."

Ouch!  If Obama keeps hammering McCain on his political opportunism and lack of core principles, McCain doesn't stand a chance.

McCain immediately went to the hackneyed GOP fall-back position: Dems will raise your taxes!

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a statement that if Obama is nominated, "the American people will have a clear choice: John McCain will cut taxes while Senator Obama will raise them, hurting our economy and costing jobs for hardworking Americans."

Apparently McCain thinks that the economy is just hunky-dory thanks to tax cuts for the rich.

Obama, of course, gave a well-reasoned rational response:

"We have identified the cuts that we think are available, or the changes in our tax code that are available to pay for our middle-class tax cut as well as our proposals to fund higher education and so on," the Illinois senator said.

He said, however, "There will be a lot of special interests and lobbyists that will resist the kinds of changes that I've proposed."

Asked if he would scale back his agenda if some of his proposed tax increases fail, Obama said, "I am a strong believer in pay-go," a term for avoiding new deficits by paying as you go. "So adhering to pay-go means that if I couldn't find the revenues or reduce spending in other areas, then I couldn't pay for my proposals."

Let's be clear. Barack will only restore the tax cuts that Bush gave to the wealthy, reduce taxes on the middle-class and raise revenue to truly address America's need for alternative energy. And save billions by getting us out of the bloody morass McCain wants to extend for a hundred years with no way to pay for it.

This is how a Democrat behaves. This is how our party's nominee leads.  Hillary's been fighting the wrong guy. Let's remember who we need to beat to win this fall.