Candidates on the campaign stump regularly take shots at their opponents. Most of it’s topical and much of it is joking. It’s part of the way that you get to see how a candidate thinks about their position in a race without necessarily including the trappings of media consultants and rigid messaging. That’s not to say it doesn’t include that, but something like this from Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards with regard to their self-identified weaknesses is probably pretty free of David Axelrod and David Plouffe’s editing.

So I said, ‘Well, I don’t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.’ So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ‘I’m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.

If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ‘Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’

Let me put this a different way. Candidates will develop their own critiques of the race separate from the one(s) their staff and advisers want them to make. And sometimes they get in front of an audience and make them.

Given that Obama prefaced those lines with a clear indication that the anecdote was meant to be funny, ““Folks, they don’t tell you what they mean,” I’m going to guess that he was out on his own today. But who knows, it might just be that I find these remarks so genuinely funny that I don’t want to credit his advisers with cooking it up. So, has anyone seen Obama use this critique elsewhere since Monday night?