As I posted earlier, the hot new liberal-attack meme, Could Romney Be An Actual Felon?, is already old and busted, and now Team Obama just looks pathetically desperate. I want to be very careful about underestimating Obama’s campaign, but the fact that they so quickly and unscrupulously seized on something so wildly dubious makes me wonder whether they’ve got any new attack-ideas left in reserve for the long haul to November.

While I highly doubt that Mitt Romney will receive the straightforward apology for which he asked yesterday after Team Obama decided to run with the “felony” thing, at least one Obama campaign spokeswoman tried to create some distance from it. An actual apology would be admission of misconduct, so that’s obviously a no-go,but maybe if they just back away, real slow and quiet-like, nobody will notice:

President Obama’s campaign spokeswoman on Air Force One backed away from yesterday’s suggestion that Mitt Romney had committed “a felony” by allegedly misrepresenting his relationship with Bain Capital on documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“[I]f he did violate, if he did mislead the SEC, there could be — that could raise questions, there could be legal questions that are raised about that,” Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said today.  “We’re not the ones who can answer that.”

You certainly could answer that — by oh, I don’t know, checking the facts, maybe — but if you don’t want to answer that, then don’t jump on the media bandwagon that’s insinuating it.

Obama surrogate Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor who’s been known to answer questions about Team O’s attacks on Mitt Romney just a little too truthfully for their tastes, conceded as much on MSNBC this morning. “…All this attack may be hurting the president’s brand a little bit, too. Like, I think our supporters went a little bit too far with the felony business. … I’m not sure it does us well to be saying it. It’s okay if the press says it.”