What should one make of Barack Obama’s choice of targets?  Over the last several weeks, Obama has trotted out a number of straw-boogeymen for the midterm elections, starting off by demonizing George Bush, and then cycling through an ever-more-lightweight series of targets until he finally landed on the venerable Chamber of Commerce.  Rich Lowry captures this crescendo of pettiness at National Review:

Obama has become a master at the art of self-diminishment. He’s working his way down the food chain of targets for shrill attacks. He started at George W. Bush (who is out of office but at least a former president), descended to John Boehner (the House minority leader people have barely heard of), and finally alighted on Karl Rove (who is a political operative and pundit).

Rove’s offense is helping Republican outside organizations raise money for political advertisements. Obama excoriated him by name the other day. The equivalent would have been President Bush attacking a longtime Democratic politico like Bob Shrum or John Podesta. Bush’s sense of the dignity of the office kept him from ever sinking so low. Obama is not so inhibited.

The column actually focuses mainly on the McCarthyite tactics of Obama, about which Lowry delivers the most stinging of rebukes (emphasis mine):

On Face the Nation over the weekend, Bob Schieffer asked Obama adviser David Axelrod if he had any evidence that the foreign money the Chamber gets is anything other than “peanuts” for an organization with a $200 million annual budget. Axelrod shot back a killer rejoinder, “Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?”

And so the White House has embraced an epistemological standard worthy of the birthers.

Indeed.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

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