Marathon Pundit: Obama: The buck stops with my staff

Writing under the subhead "News Analysis," the Chicago Tribune's John McCormick takes Barack Obama to the woodshed for not taking responsibility for screw-ups in his campaign.

Is this the type of leader a President Obama would be?

McCormick writes that the latest Obama-nation was the Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab) documents.

Free registration is required for the Chicago Tribune story:

Obama's research director, Devorah Adler, for example, was tied to a controversial 2005 Democratic National Committee research memo distributed to reporters on a not-for-attribution basis about then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. It suggested he had participated in "anti-civil rights and anti-immigrant rulings" as a judge and had failed to win mobster convictions as a prosecutor.

Obama's campaign declined to say whether Adler had seen the India documents before their release or whether she is part of the senior staff. "We're not going to get into the internal machinations," spokesman Bill Burton said.

Obama's communications director and one of his closest advisers, meanwhile, was once employed by a group that ran a television ad shortly before the 2004 Iowa caucuses that used a picture of bin Laden to criticize Dean's foreign policy credentials at a point when Dean was the Democratic front-runner.

At the time, Robert Gibbs was working with a shadowy group called Americans for Jobs, Health Care & Progressive Values. The so-called 527 political group paid for the ad, but refused to disclose in a timely manner who was financing the effort because federal law did not require it to do so.

A labor union that had endorsed Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt later disclosed it financed that commercial.

Let me add some more about Obama's "new kind of politics." The campaign may be based in Chicago, but it's run by men and women with long ties to the Washington political culture.

And if Obama's staff is letting him down, then he should fire the troublemakers. Say what you will about President Bush, but he doesn't blame his staff for his problems.

"The Buck Stops Here" desk sign is the one President Harry S Truman kept on his White House desk, and it can be seen at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri.

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