Barack Obama just completed a conference call with reporters -- ostensibly, he was there to brag about his endorsement by Rep. Paul Hodes. "Paul overcame a lot of the predictions that he couldn’t beat an incumbent because he was a fresh new voice and spoke the truth and people appreciated that he could be an agent of change."

And then he took questions, and national reporters really only wanted to hear Obama talk about one subject. Mike McAuliffe with the New York Daily News noticed how Obama had compared Hillary Clinton's debate answer about diplomacy to the Bush-Cheney approach. Does he really believe that?

A beat.

Obama: “I don’t just believe it, I think that’s the record. The Bush administration’s policy is to say that we will not talk to these countries unless we meet explicit preconditions. And that is the question that was asked at the debate.” He continued: “You’ll have to ask Sen. Clinton: what differentiates her position from theirs?”

Obama elaborated. “If I sit down with a leader of Iran I will send them a strong message that Israel is our friend and that we will assist in their security and that we don’t find nuclear weapons acceptable… that’s not going to be a propaganda coup for Iran, but what it does do is allow us to send a message to the rest of the world that we are willing to sit down and talk. [What she said] during the debate and subsequently was that she would not meet with various leaders unless certain preconditions were met. Now, if that’s not what she means, she should say so. But that was the question that was posed at the debate. You need to get clarification from her if they are walking back from the position that we stated."