Obama throws Gibbs under the bus

Remember Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs? I wrote about him last week:

[O]ne can’t help but get a little cynical hearing Obama talk about “changing the tone” and all that bullshit, while hiring a well-known smear-meister best known for his work trashing other Democrats.

Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical.

Obama repudiated the hardball tactics of his own staff. And he made it seem he was clueless about a major story dealing with his own campaign.

In a front page New York Times interview published Friday, Obama suggested that his marching orders to stay on the high road were ignored, quite a public flogging.

Obama, in his two-week old campaign, is offering himself as the antidote to a cynicism he asserts is poisoning U.S. politics. One of Obama's stump lines goes something like this: His rival in the Democratic primary "is not other candidates," he says, "it's cynicism."

Gibbs and Wolfson mixing it up is campaign business as usual. The back-and-forth, however, exposed Obama to a risk -- being called a hypocrite.

Obama decided not to handle matters internally, however.

"I told my staff that I don't want us to be a party to these kinds of distractions because I want to make sure that we're spending time talking about issues," Obama told the paper. He added, "My preference goinard is that we have to be careful not to slip into the game as it is customarily played."

Now Obama's desire to retain the high ground may not survive the heat of combat the closer we get to the primaries. But it was baffling to get down in the muck this early in the process.

Still, Obama didn't smack down Gibbs private, he did so publicly, in about the highest-profile publication in the country (and its front page).

That's called "sending a message".

(p.s. I'm still cynical, but receptive.)