Trial Balloon

This is one of those campaign flaps that seems too silly to comment upon yet too memorable to ignore.

In this clip, the former presidential candidate and current Obama surrogate demeans and generally assails John McCain's military service.

This is a very odd road that the Obama has now chosen to go down. Attacking McCain's military credentials was never anything that any of the Republican contenders would have ever dreamed of doing in the primary a few months back.

But like any well executed special op, the commander has to have 'plausible deniability'. So in the case of Wesley Clark's obtuse comments, I'm sure that Obama "had no idea" what arguments Clark would be making. Just like he had no idea about Reverend Wright, or Reverend Phleger, or William Ayers, or Tony Rezko I'm sure.

As we've seen in the Democratic primary many times by now, a surrogate of a candidate will go out and make an argument or comment that was then later revealed to be unauthorized only after the negative repercussions started to roll into the campaign headquarters, of course.

Obama has now indirectly denounced the comments of Wesley Clark accordingly.