I have been saying for some time that Barack Obama’s greatest weakness on the campaign trail is that he’s prone to saying incredibly stupid things when he speaks off the cuff. This week is no exception. Here’s his latest groaner.

“So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”

This one’s been all over the news, with the McCain campaign saying that Obama’s unfairly playing the race card and Obama’s campaign saying that he wasn’t playing the race card at all, that his statement had nothing to do with race at all, and that he was just saying that he wasn’t one of them.

You know who they are – those hated Capitol veterans like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, who was such a Beltway Insider that he was one of them even before there was a Beltway!

You think I’m kidding. I only wish I were.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” [Obama spokesman Robert] 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.”

That, folks, could only have been more graceless if he had traveled back in time to April, 1864 and asked, “Well, aside from the loud noise and the smell of gunpowder, how’d you like ‘Our American Cousin’, Mrs. Lincoln?”.

If Barack Obama manages to win this election it’s going to be because the MSM and his glassy-eyed followers managed to drag the corpse of his campaign across the finish line. It sure as heck won’t be due to his great insight, his scintillating intelligence, his detailed policies, his extemporaneous speaking skills, or his humble mien.