You can’t be serious.

Yesterday in Missouri, Obama predicted McCain and the GOP would use racially-tinged attacks against him.

“What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

An Obama spokesman denied that the line about “dollar bills” was related to the Democrat’s race.

That comes from Jonathan Martin at Politico, who’s properly skeptical that the Lamb didn’t mean to insinuate what he clearly meant to insinuate. I e-mailed Martin with the link to Ed’s post from last month noting that Obama’s language then was almost identical to his language last night, with the notable exception that the race charge was made much more explicitly. We’ll see if Martin updates. Flashback to June 21:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid.

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Here’s a clip from yesterday. Judge for yourself from the audience’s encouragement whether they took his meaning.

Update: The quote from Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. Unadulterated crap:

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said the senator was not referring to race.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said Thursday. “There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

Update: More crap, slightly adulterated this time, as Team Barry tries desperately to undo a very stupid mistake.

“This is a race about big challenges—a slumping economy, a broken foreign policy, and an energy crisis for everyone but the oil companies. Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they’re using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign, and those are the issues he’ll continue to talk about.”