It’s one thing for supporters to complain. It’s another for campaign operatives to pout. But it’s quite another for the candidate to do it. Yesterday, after a day of awful debate reviews, Barack Obama offered up this at a North Carolina campaign stop (where his presence, by the way, may indicate he’s given up on winning Pennsylvania):

She was taking every opportunity to get a dig in there. That’s alright. That’s her right. That’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit.

There are a few problems with this tactic. It set him up for the “whine” charge delivered by Bill Clinton. And today Hillary said that Presidents “can’t run away:”

We need a president who is going to be up there fighting every day for the American people and not complain about how much pressure there is, and how hard the questions are.

Obama’s complaints also amplified the candidates’ respective performances: he basically conceded that she sliced-and-diced him. (And saying he’s done debating makes him look even worse.) They also threw a monkey wrench into the evil-ABC-moderators conspiracy theory. Apparently, it wasn’t that the questions were too obscure, but that Hillary was too tough.

The real danger here, though, is that Obama and his faithful friends have added to the list of explanations that will take hold if he loses in Pennsylvania next week. Snobgate is a bad enough reason for a potential loss: it would cement doubts about his appeal to working class and rural voters. Now he and his boosters have (inadvertently) pointed out another flaw: his inability to prepare for tough questioning and to defend himself effectively. The combination of these concerns is precisely what Hillary Clinton wants those critical superdelegates to focus on.