Did David Axelrod fail Obama on self-oppo research?

Many progressive bloggers have been calling Hillary Clinton pollster and all-around eminence grisé Mark Penn an idiot who has major responsibility for costing her what could have been a Democratic nomination she had wrapped up by now.

That said, shouldn’t we hold Barack Obama campaign manager David Axelrod under the klieg lights of scrutiny now, too, with Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatening to become the lead anchor on his own bid?

It’s axiomatic that any major political campaign, and definitely a presidential campaign, does self-oppo research early, early on.

That is, the campaign manager plays devil’s advocate with his own candidate. He or she starts digging into his or her candidate’s own background, to see if they can dig up material that an opposing campaign might use against their own candidate.

Due to the length, micropolling and microadvertising of the modern presidential campaign, all fine-tuned for the GOP by Karl Rove, it’s mandatory you do something like this.

Obama campaign manager David Axelrod, though not of Christian background, is a Chicago native. He knows bare-knuckle politics without any tutoring from Rove.

Even giving Obama 50 percent of the doubt on his “I didn’t know” speech this afternoon, he had to have known something.

(For more on my take on Wright in general, here’s my Jeremiah Wright tag on my blog.)

But, that’s beside the point. Even if he told Axelrod that, as far as he knew, he had no skeletons in his closet beyond the youthful drug experimentation he mentioned in his book, Axelrod shouldn’t have accepted that as his final answer. And, being from Chicago, Axelrod had to hear something about Wright, I would think. (I am assuming Obama is being disingenuous about not knowing anything about this, given that 9/11 and Wright’s post-9/11 Sept. 16, 2001 sermon is nearly seven years old by now.)

I hate agreeing with Hillary Clinton on this, but she is right that this shows Obama hasn’t been thoroughly “vetted.”

This is the result of Jack Ryan imploding as Obama’s 2004 Senate opponent, followed by the eventual fill-in of the clownish Alan Keyes.

People who know Obama’s biography knows that, after killing opponents’ ballot petition drives, he had an unopposed initial election to the Illinois State Senate. In short, the only “vetting” he has ever had in a political campaign was his 2000 U.S. House primary run against Bobby Rush. And, Jeremiah Wright wouldn’t have been a factor in that election anyway.