We have a new dance: the Obama four-step!

Jim Geraghty, over at Campaign Spot (NRO), chronicles the dance, but leaves me to name it.  Thanks Jim!

Step 1 – Insist that Governor Palin’s family is off-limits (Geraghty):

Barack Obama, Sept. 2:

“We don’t go after people’s families; we don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate, and it’s not relevant,” he added. “Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Step 2 – Have a campaign underling drag the family back out of off-limits-land (Geraghty again):

Howard Gutman, on the Laura Ingraham Show, Sept. 5:

“If my daughter had just come home at 17 years old and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant, we have a family problem,’ I wouldn’t say, ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take this private family problem … I’m going to go on the international stage and broadcast it to the world’,” he said.

Gutman later added: “If you take a daughter who’s got this emotional strife and subject her to the most intense scrutiny of the world at this time in her life, I think you’ve put your career above your family.”

Never mind that Governor Palin had to bring her daughter’s pregnancy to light because some of Obama’s best friends in the blogosphere were insisting that Bristol Palin was Trig’s mother.  Never mind that much of that “intense scrutiny” came from said bloggers who spread already debunked sludge.  Honestly, this is the most ridiculous nonsense I’ve ever read, and what makes it all the more galling is that Gutman knew he could get away with it.

That brings us to Step 3 – Respond to the outcry over your operative’s comments with a “who, me?” shrug (Geraghty one more time):

Surprise, surprise, here’s the response from the Obama campaign:

“Obviously these comments do not reflect our frequently stated, crystal-clear view that families of the candidates should be off limits, and we hope that supporters on both sides will act accordingly,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in an e-mail, pointing out that Gutman has apologized in a statement to ABC News.

Step 4 – Have the underling offer a half-apologetic apology (ABC News):

I am writing about certain comments I said on the Laura Ingraham Show.  The comments were largely taken out of context, although by the end, I plainly went too far, for which I apologize.

. . .

My comments began and were intended to focus on the fact that the critiques of others were not necessarily related to gender.  That such comments could reflect that candidates — male or female — often decide that, because of circumstances involving their children, it was not the time to run for national office, which would necessarily cast much scrutiny on their families and make it harder for children and the family unit to deal privately with issues.

In other words, Governor Palin should have expected that Andrew Sullivan and his buds would have thrown more sludge at her than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

No matter; the four-step is complete, and the issue continues to live on for Sullivan et al to use in a desperate attempt to blunt the McCain-Palin momentum.

It won’t work, but it will continue to expose the bobots as the most vicious and unscrupulous bunch of all time.