Obama's "Dos Caras"

From the Wall Street Journal, Nick Timiraos writes:

Immigration is flaring up again in the presidential campaign, and Barack Obama on Wednesday released a new advertisement that tries to tie John McCain to his longtime critic, Rush Limbaugh.

After a primary campaign where Obama and McCain proposed to get tough on border security, the candidates this time are attacking each other for failing to secure an immigration deal that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. The rapid turnabout comes as both candidates court Hispanic voters in key southwestern battlegrounds.

“They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance,” the television ad’s announcer says in Spanish. A picture of Limbaugh flashes on screen with quotes that the radio host said Wednesday had been taken out of context. The quotes read: “Mexicans are stupid and unqualified” and “Shut your mouth or get out.”

McCain’s presidential bid collapsed when he championed a comprehensive immigration bill that provided for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, which many in his own party blasted as amnesty for immigrants. But the ad ties McCain to efforts to quash the immigration bill.

“They made us feel marginalized,” the ad says, while accusing McCain and “his Republican friends” of having two faces, “one that lies just to get our vote and another…that continues the failed policies of George Bush.”

...Obama’s hard-hitting ad comes after the Illinois senator has dismissed a barrage of attacks by the McCain campaign as distractions, and he has promised that he would not respond in kind, instead telling supporters he would counterpunch by “telling the truth.”

But any suggestion of a Limbaugh-McCain alliance is shaky at best. Limbaugh has had a cool relationship with McCain, actively opposing his primary campaign and hesitating to endorse the Arizona senator after he appeared to lock up the Republican nomination.

The talk show host harshly criticized Obama on Wednesday night in an email to the Politico, where he called Obama a “disgrace” for “stoking racism.”

“He runs race-baiting ads and lies about what he has done and what McCain has done,” Limbaugh said.

Where's FactCheck.org on this one?

Hello? Hello?

Limbaugh hit back hard.

"Obama is now stoking racism in the country," Limbaugh wrote in an email. "Obama is a disgrace - he wants the public to think he is Mr. Nice Guy while his thugs are in Alaska looking for dirt on Palin and he runs race-baiting ads and lies about what he has done and what McCain has done."

As for the quotes, Limbaugh said they were taken out of context.

The first, "stupid and unqualified," was from the NAFTA debate of the mid-90s, he recalled. Limbaugh, a NAFTA proponent, said in the fall of 1993 he got a call from a listener who was upset at the potential loss of American jobs.

In response he said, "If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people--I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs, let the kinds of jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do--let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."

Explaining his comments, Limbaugh writes: "I was referring to jobs in MEXICO. I was not discussing immigrants, illegal or otherwise."

On "shut your mouth," Limbaugh produced an April 2006 transcript from what he described as a parody of Mexican immigration laws.

The talk show host read a list of stringent rules, adding "shut your mouth and get out," before revealing to listeners that the guidelines were those set by the Mexican government for immigrants.

I don't think the Obama campaign's blitzkrieg is going to be effective.

Putting out information from Sarah Palin's hacked personal e-mail account is only going to cause supporters to rally around her.

Sending out the surrogates to play the race card smacks of desperation.

And this ad is truly bizarre.

What a mistake to lie about Limbaugh!

Obama is really firing up conservatives.