Obama Calls Out Bill Clinton

On "Good Morning America" today, Barack Obama takes on the other half of the Clinton team, the non-candidate who has been contesting him in the primaries:

"The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts--whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.

"This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."

So now we have the unprecedented spectacle of a Presidential candidate being double-teamed and responding directly to both Clintons who have been challenging him.

"I understand," Obama concedes, "that there are going to be sharp elbows in a primary and certainly there's going to be some rough and tumble in a general election" but claims that Bill Clinton has gone too far.

He is not alone in that opinion. The new Newsweek reports that leading Democrats, including Sen. Ted Kennedy and House Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, are telling the ex-President to "pipe down."

The man who coordinated Clinton's impeachment defense in 1998 and is now a senior Obama adviser argues that "recent events raise the question: if Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could."

Obama has apparently decided to stop waiting for an answer to that and start providing his own critique.