I'm not sure on all the details of this, hopefully Groucho, Mdana, Beeble and others can fill us in. But the gist of it is that Obama apparently implied last year that he'd take public funding if his opponent did. And now McCain is calling him on that. But fundraising is one of Obama's key advantages over McCain.

So is he in a no-win situation now? Either he looks like he's going back on his word or he gives up his key advantage? What's going to happen with this?

Though Clinton and McCain have both already called him a flip-flopper, he has said that he would not commit to it until he is absolutely certain that McCain would. He also said that he wasn't the nominee so it wasn't time to think about it yet. Nowhere did he outright say he would use private financing, yet both Clinton and McCain blasted him for it. He was trying to say that they should all wait until the nomination is figured out and at that point he wanted to have a discussion with McCain on it. Meanwhile, McCain is in trouble for flip-flopping on this issue and the FEC has called him out on receiving a rather unscrupulous loan when his campaign was bankrupt.

I hope that if Barack agrees to this, he also puts an escape clause for when McCain comes after him with 527 PACs using nasty, Swift Boat type of attacks. At that point, he should be allowed to open his private war chest and fight back instead of sitting back and taking it up the ass. All he has to do is put something along the lines of, "In the event of misleading attack ads from third parties such as political action committees or 527 organizations, I reserve my right to back out of this agreement and use private financing."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0108/7837.html

Pretty scumbagish activity from McCain. Using his fundraiser list as collateral for a loan? And his website's privacy policy says he will not sell their information to a third party?

Yeah, Barack is right. The wheels on the Straight Talk Express fell off somewhere on the way to the Republican nomination. McCain has been a hypocrite on this issue, a flip-flopper on waterboarding, a flip-flopper on the Bush tax cuts, etc. all in the sake of trying to get the Republican nomination.

Obama said that IF he is the nominee (which he isn't) and IF his opponent opts for public financing (which he hasn't) then he'd do likewise.

So there's no flip flop yet. Yet.