For a campaign that is supposedly based on judgment and the "politics of hope," I'm a bit taken aback by Obama's willingness to engage in this kind of moral equivalency:

During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published.

Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton in a photograph provided today by the Obama campaign.

The idea that a photo of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Wright at a White House breakfast is anywhere in the same ballpark with Obama's 20-year relationship with the controversial pastor is downright silly and insulting to voters' intelligence.

This comes on the back of Obama's speech last week comparing Geraldine Ferraro's public comments and his grandmother's privately expressed fears to Rev. Wright's public, hate-filled, anti-American rants from the pulpit of the nation's largest UCC church. As Charles Krauthammer writes this morning about the comparison between Grandma and Rev. Wright: "Does he [Obama] not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?"

If Obama wants to have an honest discussion about race in America, he should start by doing away with that type of moral equivalency. Leaking a photo of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Wright at an event 10 years ago strikes me as a lame effort at politics-as-usual damage control and exactly the kind of moral equivalence Obama should be staying away from.