Pat Dollard | Young Americans

By: Kenneth P. Vogel - (Politico)

Just hours after his campaign issued a first statement Friday ripping the addition of Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket, Barack Obama backed away from that statement — or at least its tone — and said that his own campaign had misrepresented him.

Obama often speaks of how important his staffers are to his bid and would be to his administration, and he’s praised them for covering for each other’s mistakes. But in the heat of the campaign, he’s publicly called them out for everything from missing an event to misrepresenting his policy positions to using his office to aid a donor.

When asked about his campaign’s attack on Palin, attributed to top spokesman Bill Burton, at a Friday afternoon media availability at a Pennsylvania biodiesel plant, Obama referred to a statement he and running mate Joe Biden had since issued that hardly touched on policy issues and called Palin “an admirable person and … a compelling new voice.”

Obama disavowed his campaign’s first response, telling journalists that “I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments,” he said.

Earlier in the same availability, however, he told reporters that John McCain “wants to take the country in the wrong direction. I’m assuming Gov. Palin agrees with him and his policies” — echoing Burton’s claim that “that’s not the change we need; it’s just more of the same.”

The latest disavowal of his staff’s comments on his behalf or in his name continues a tactic Obama employed repeatedly during his contentious battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

When confronted about a campaign memo during the primary that criticized Clinton’s ties to India, referring to her as “D-Punjab,” Obama called it “a screw-up on the part of our research team” and said “it was stupid and caustic.”

And when the late Tim Russert asked Obama at a Las Vegas debate about his campaign’s efforts to push the storyline that Team Clinton was stoking racial tensions, Obama said “our supporters, our staff, get overzealous. They start saying things that I would not say.”

But, he added, “it is my responsibility to make sure that we’re setting a clear tone in our campaign.”

Obama’s penchant for publicly rebuking his staff stands in sharp contrast to his declarations about how important they are to his management strategy, as well as the all for one, one for all mentality that he encourages in them.

Addressing his campaign at his Chicago headquarters days after clinching the Democratic nomination in early June, Obama lauded his team members for working hard, setting aside their egos and not blaming each other for snafus.

“You lifted each other up. You covered for each other,” Obama told the roomful of staffers in a speech the campaign posted on its website. “You made up for each other’s mistakes. You didn’t blame each other when things went wrong,” he said, adding that his “old organizing mindset” was that “if people were willing to submerge their egos and just focus on bringing their particular gifts and passion and energy and vision to a common task, that great things can be accomplished.”

And at the Las Vegas debate, Obama said he relies on his staff to neutralize his disorganization, which he said was his greatest weakness.

“I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it, because I will lose it,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience. “I’ve got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff. And that’s not trivial; I need to have good people in place who can make sure that systems run. That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s why we run not only a good campaign but a good U.S. Senate office.”

Clinton seized on Obama’s comments to question his ability to hold government accountable, invoking Harry Truman’s mantra “The buck stops here” to contrast her approach.

Obama had said earlier in the debate that “being president is not making sure that schedules are being run properly or the paperwork is being shuffled effectively. It involves having a vision for where the country needs to go.”

Obama has, in fact, faulted his staff on scheduling, telling a firefighters group during a telephone call that he couldn’t make it in person because his “staff had already scheduled some things and they couldn’t wiggle out of it. They heard from me a little bit because I wasn’t happy I couldn’t be there personally.”

But Obama also has delegated blame on important policy questions.

His campaign asserted earlier this year that the manager of his 1996 state Senate campaign — his first bid for public office — filled out a questionnaire in Obama’s name that “accidentally mischaracterized his positions” by taking more liberal stands than he held on gun control, the death penalty and abortion.

Politico, however, later determined that Obama played a greater role than his presidential campaign suggested in filing an amended version of the questionnaire with similar answers to those questions.

And in his 2006 best-seller “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama writes that during his 2004 U.S. Senate primary, when his opponents were challenging his commitment to abortion rights, his staff oversimplified his stance by promising on his website that he would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.”

And after he raised eyebrows by proclaiming in a July speech to a prominent Jewish group that he supports Jerusalem remaining Israel’s “undivided” capital, Obama suggested his staff was responsible.

“We had some poor phrasing in the speech, and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given,” Obama told Fareed Zakaria on CNN, though Obama had made similar statements about an undivided Jerusalem before.

Obama also blamed his staff for underestimating how much money since-convicted businessman Tony Rezko had raised for his earlier campaigns and for a letter from his office urging city and state officials to fund a Rezko project.