Throw the flag against: Hillary and Bill Clinton. Call: Unnecessary roughness.
What happened: The Clintons say that Barack Obama praised Ronald Reagan recently and lauded Republican ideas.
"He said President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did. And then the next day he said, 'In the '90s, the good ideas came out from the Republicans,' " Bill Clinton said in Nevada.
"It certainly came across . . . as though the Republicans had been standing up against the conventional wisdom with their ideas," Hillary Clinton said Monday in a South Carolina debate.
Why that's out of bounds: First, she denied in the debate Monday that she'd spoken about Reagan. But her husband had. Acting as if he's some low-level staffer or distant surrogate is disingenuous. Second, the Clintons greatly distort what Obama said during a Nevada newspaper interview. He said Reagan had changed the trajectory of American politics. That's beyond dispute. Obama did say that Republicans were the party of ideas for several years, but he also said they'd played themselves out and that their ideas didn't work. The Clintons ignored that part.
Penalty: 15 yards for knocking down Obama's words.
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