I was really interested that during the debates Obama and Clinton played really nice together but lately things have changed. Obama’s campaign wrote up those memos that got a lot of play and the Senator himself was starting to dance around Clinton taking small jabs that were easily identified but still masked.

Yesterday Obama said something that is getting some play that was a direct dig at Hillary Clinton. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

“The only person who would probably be prepared to be our president on Day 1 would be Bill Clinton — not Hillary Clinton,” Obama said when asked about unnamed Clinton backers questioning Obama’s experience.

“I think that we’re all very qualified for the job,” the freshman senator said. “The question is who can inspire the nation to get us past the politics that have bogged us down in the past. That was true, by the way, in the ’90s as well as more recently.”

I doubt that was “off the cuff” it seemed like a rather tailored statement that can be easily backtracked. Obama or his campaign can easily say “Of course Bill Clinton is the most qualified, he was president, therefore he is the ideal option. That is not to mean we did mean to disparage the Senator, I was just making a valid point about experience.”

Obama is fighting the label of being “inexperienced” and so it is a good dig though I don’t know how well it plays. If you look at Clinton overall job experience it is a pretty long list compared to Obama’s.

Two amendments to the immigration bill were struck down by the Senate today.

The first was introduced by Sen. Kay Baily Hutchinson and would “require that illegal immigrants go home within two years in order to qualify for a renewable Z visa to live and work lawfully in the United States.”

The second introduced by Sen. Jim Webb which “would have allowed only those who had been in the country for at least four years to gain lawful status. The bill would make anyone here by Jan. 1, 2007 eligible for legalization.”

Bloomberg Drives Media Coverage

Craig Crawford’s Trail Mix: Biden’s Iraq Plan on a Roll

Campaign Finance Ruling Draws Opposite Views from McCain and Romney

Giuliani last September:

“The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don’t think he deserves it,” Giuliani said during a stop in Florida. “I don’t think President Bush deserves it. The people who deserve blame for Sept. 11, I think we should remind ourselves, are the terrorists - the Islamic fanatics - who came here and killed us and want to come here again and do it.”

Giuliani today from the Associated Press:

“Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before Sept. 11. Many people think the first attack on America was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993,” said the former New York mayor.
Giuliani argued that Clinton treated the World Trade Center bombing as a criminal act instead of a terrorist attack, calling it “a big mistake” that emboldened other strikes on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya and Tanzania and later on the USS Cole while docked in Yemen in 2000.

“The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond,” Giuliani said. “(Osama) bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it.”

I am sure its just the first of what is to come from Giuliani who is clearly going to use 9/11 and the War on Terrorism as the two most important and perhaps only real themes of the campaign at least for now.

“We’re all just waiting for this nincompoop to be gone. I think we’re all finally on the same page on that.”

- Noted by Howard Kurtz from Coulters appearance on Good Morning America this morning

Meanwhile Republican Sen. Voinovich & Luger appear to on the last leg of support for Bush and skeptical of the surge. Is the end of George Bush’s alliance with conservatives really over?