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Gas-Tax TussleA policy fight breaks out in the Democratic race.

By John DickersonPosted Friday, May 2, 2008, at 12:29 PM ET

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To show that Obama was out of touch with regular people—can't hit that nail too many times—the Clinton campaign sent reporters a YouTube clip of a voter questioning the candidate's position. "What's wrong with a short-term fix?" asks the elderly woman. "A lot of us are short-term." The clip doesn't include Obama's answer, and when I asked a Clinton aide for it, I got a quip: "He told her she was clinging to her position out of bitterness." (Even when they're joking, the Clinton team is on-message, flicking at Obama's remarks about people who live in small towns.)

Embracing intellectual obtuseness and deflecting criticism with charges of elitism is a tactic George Bush often deployed while campaigning. It's striking to see Clinton do it because she has been a regular and harsh critic of Bush's blindness to expert opinion. It's even more striking to hear her aides actually sound like Bush administration officials. When I asked Communications Director Howard Wolfson if the Clinton team could offer any intellectual ballast for the gas-tax vacation, given that so many policymakers had criticized it, he said, "The presidency requires leadership. … There are times when the president does something that the group of experts, quote unquote, does not agree with. Presidents get advice and then act, and that is what Senator Clinton is doing." Or, as George Bush used to put it: A leader leads. Even if off a cliff.

The Obama campaign, for its part, is trying to make the dispute over the gas tax "a proxy for the fight in the entire campaign," as one aide put it. Happy to talk about anything other than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama has attacked the gas-tax holiday at every stop for the last several days. He hopes that voters will reward him for telling truths against his political self-interest, a claim he often makes for himself but that he doesn't always back up. He needs to court blue-collar voters, yes, but he's willing to potentially alienate them when a policy is just too dumb to support—or hope that they'll understand that.

Obama and his aides also hope their attack exposes Clinton's vulnerability with voters who think she's dishonest—particularly independents and Republicans who can vote in the Indiana primary. That's why Obama's ad in response to Clinton's spot criticizing him for not backing the plan was called "Truth." On Friday, Obama released a second ad that hammers Clinton directly for pandering. He also made the attack the center of his press conference Friday morning, claiming the gas-tax hike would cost Indiana 6,000 jobs.

The risk for Obama in playing up his Washington-outsider message is not just that downscale voters paying nearly $4 a gallon won't give him credit for his principled stand. Republicans are going after him too, trying to paint his opposition to the gas-tax respite as a Mondale-like affection for tax increases. If the pattern of the last few weeks holds, Clinton will use those Republican attacks to argue that Obama is vulnerable in the general election to the GOP saw that he's an old-style liberal.

And so heading into the biggest remaining contests of the primaries, both candidates are trying trick shots. Clinton, who is running as an expert on the economy, seeks to win by taking a stand against economic experts. Obama, who has spent the week playing basketball, drinking beer, and looking like a regular guy, is trying to win by doubling down on a position that the regular guy might not like. The conventional calculus would suggest that Clinton's pander will work. Her losing policy might net her a political win, even if she failed with the coffee grounds.