Rare Obama Misstep

The Clinton campaign is playing the Obama campaign like a fiddle. What makes this all the more amazing is the fact that they are driving the debate from the passenger seat. Obama's handlers should have told him not to take the bait and answer her VP offer. Just ignore it. Change the subject. She is acting like the frontrunner when she's not but he or she who acts like the frontrunner becomes one.

And today Obama's camp is all wrong in producing a long memo
stating Hillary overstated her foreign policy experience. And your point is...? That she's not qualified to be Commander-in-Chief either? Why not donate all your millions raised to McCain then?

What Obama should do now is lead positively, with a concrete example of how he will be a bold and visionary leader on foreign policy. He can knock her padding her resume later.

He could, for example, say what everyone knows, that there will be no peace in the greater Middle East until Israel and the Palestinians feel it is in their best interest to make peace. Peace there will make us markedly more safe here at home. The closest we have come to them reaching a settlement in years was Bill Clinton's initiative back in 2001.

If I were him I'd say once elected I'd deputize Bill Clinton as my Special Envoy to the Middle East and tell him not come back until he'd hammered out a deal they all could agree on. (Then I'd joke that I didn't just want to send him there to get him out of my hair.)

If Obama would float provocative, bold ideas like that then the Clintons would be on the defensive and he'd be acting like the frontrunner that he is.

This isn't rocket science. It's just the politics of perception.

Trey Ellis is the author of "Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood"