He is referring to the claim that Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta have made that both Clintons have a 20 year long plan for both of them to be president.

“I’m not in this race to fulfill some long-held plan or because it was owed to me,” Obama said the other day.

Asked if that were a reference to the Gerth allegation, an Obama spokesperson left virtually no doubt that it was, telling Newsday: “Barack Obama has not been mapping out his run for president from Washington for the last 20 years like some of his opponents.”

But the source that Gerth and Van Natta cited with supposed first-hand knowledge of this plan — historian Taylor Branch — has since vehemently denied that any such pact existed. “The story is preposterous,” Branch told The Washington Post, adding: “I never heard either Clinton talk about a ‘plan’ for them both to become president.”

I have no clue as to why this is going on, but it will destroy him in Iowa. While the most recent poll shows him in the lead there, his support is disproportionately young all around the country, and this has the potential to kill his campaign in Iowa. In addition to first timers to the caucuses being vulnerable to the tactics of the old party hacks (see Howard Dean’s problems in 2004), they also don’t show up to the caucuses reliably.

He is acting in a way calculated to make the Democratic stalwarts who know, and to a large degree run, the caucuses pissed off at him.

Mindlessly echoing Republican talking points is not being a uniter. It’s being a chump, and this time around even worse being a chump than being a DLC squish.

A chump can’t undo the dcamage the George W. Bush has done.