Hillary and Bill Clinton's recent comments about Obama being potentially great as a vice presidential candidate employ the same strategy, in essence, as the far right wingnuts' neverending repetition of "Barack Hussein Obama".

It's all about word association, and its use in going negative while maintaining plausible deniability of going negative.  Granted, these are negative to very different degrees, but the implication is pretty clear that they're portraying Obama as more veep material than presidential material.  And if pressed by journalists on that count, they can use a similar, "Well that's not what I'm saying, you're the one who's saying that" defense of their comments that Cunningham did of his.

It's the same word association game with the Jesse Jackson comment, the idea they put out that Latinos won't vote for a black candidate.  These are designed to leave a residual impression in the minds of voters that "Obama is too black to win", as repeating Hussein is designed for "Obama is too Muslim".  And as the swift boat ads were designed for "Kerry is a fraud".

It's a page straight from the Karl Rove playbook, albeit executed much more subtly.  And the Obama campaign should not be afraid to call the Clinton camp out on it and say, "Democrats should not stoop to running their campaigns like Republicans".