Can't Have It Both Ways

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama, crying foul over a video made by the Tennessee Republican Party last week, said Monday that his critics should “lay off my wife.”

In the four-minute video produced by the state GOP and now available on YouTube, Michelle Obama is shown delivering a speech in February during which she said: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” The ad then features Nashville voters saying why they are proud of their country.

Asked about the video Monday, Obama told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the ad is “low class.” The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination warned that the Tennessee GOP “should be careful” and said he finds it “unacceptable” for them to use his wife in a video.

“The GOP, should I be the nominee, I think can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record,” Obama said, with his wife sitting next to him. “If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family….

“Whoever is in charge of the Tennessee GOP needs to think long and hard about the kind of campaign they want to run, and I think that’s true for everybody, Democrat or Republican….

“But I also think these folks should lay off my wife,” he added.

In a news release that included a link to the video, Tennessee’s GOP said “the Tennessee Republican Party has always been proud of America.” It urged radio stations to play “patriotic music” during Michelle Obama’s visit to Nashville last Thursday.

Tennessee GOP Communications Director Bill Hobbs told FOXNews.com that the party was “kicking around some ideas what could we do to make a little noise” in advance of Michelle Obama’s fund-raising trip to the city. Hobbs said the idea was conceived and executed in a matter of hours, was produced in-house with “a Sony Handycam and a laptop,” and not a dollar was spent buying ad time for the video to air.

Hobbes said the video doesn’t criticize Michelle Obama at all, but merely raises an issue that had already been scrutinized by the public.

“We contrasted something she said in a public campaign speech at a public event that was covered by the news media,” Hobbs said. “It’s not like we’re the first people to raise this issue. We just made a light-hearted video. … Senator Obama has a pattern of requesting certain things that are uncomfortable to him as off-limits … She is on the campaign trail, so I don’t think she is off-limits. He sends her out to do campaign speeches and fund-raisers, and then says we can’t criticize the things she says. I think that’s ridiculous.”

Michelle Obama first made the remark in February and repeated it a couple times at campaign events before later saying she meant she was proud of how Americans were engaging in the political process and that she had always been proud of her country.

Obama said his wife “loves this country. For them to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her is, I think, just low class. I think that most of the American people would think that as well.”

Tennessee’s Republican Party was roundly criticized in March, including by John McCain, for issuing a news release that used Obama’s middle name — Hussein — and showed a photo of him wearing what it said was “Muslim attire.”

The release ultimately was removed from the party’s Web site at the urging of the state’s two Republican senators and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, who said he “rejects these kinds of campaign tactics.”

Click here to see the Tennessee Republican Party ad entitled “Proud.”