News out­lets are report­ing on a new Spanish-​language Obama ad that com­pares McCain’s atti­tude toward immi­gra­tion to Rush Limbaugh’s. As a few people have noticed, that’s pretty bla­tantly mis­lead­ing, since McCain has gen­er­ally (though not com­pletely) been in favor of reform­ing immi­gra­tion, while Lim­baugh has come out stri­dently against it. The ad does the truth the fur­ther dis­ser­vice of pulling Limbaugh’s words out of con­text. Here’s ABC’s Jake Tapper on the sum of Obama’s sins:

The greater impli­ca­tion the ad makes, how­ever, is that McCain is no friend to Lati­nos at all, beyond issues of fund­ing the DREAM act or how NCLB money is dis­trib­uted. By link­ing McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twist­ing Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extrem­ist anti-​immigration voices, the Obama cam­paign has crossed a line into mis­lead­ing the view­ers of its new TV ad. In Span­ish, the word is erróneo.

It seems odd (read: polit­i­cally dumb) for Obama to release a mis­lead­ing ad at the very moment that he’s reap­ing the sym­pa­thy of a media envi­ron­ment that turned against John McCain for his mis­lead­ing ads.

So what’s going on here?

To under­stand it, you’ve got to remind your­self that the big dog that hasn’t barked this elec­tion–at least since the days of the GOP pri­mary (remem­ber those?)–is immi­gra­tion. And that’s because both McCain and Obama are in favor of “comprehensive immi­gra­tion reform,” i.e. a set of reforms that will include some form of amnesty for cur­rently ille­gal immi­grants. (For what it’s worth, I, along with most Amer­i­cans, am in favor of the idea.)

The prob­lem for McCain is that the Sarah Palin-​loving Repub­li­can right (along with the odd Mickey Kaus) hates com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform. I mean, really hates. Most observers agree that McCain nearly lost the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion because of his pro-​immigration stance. And so I sus­pect the Obama cam­paign is using the Lim­baugh ad to very clev­erly–and, yes, unfairly, but as they keep telling us, pol­i­tics ain’t bean­bag–paint McCain into a corner.

Look at it this way: McCain basi­cally has two choices now. On the one hand, he can com­plain about the unfair­ness of the ad. But that risks the kind of atten­tion on this issue that McCain very clearly does not want. He may want the pun­dits to back him up about Obama’s decep­tion, but he doesn’t really want people like Jake Tapper remind­ing their view­ers how pro­gres­sive on immi­gra­tion he really is. On the other hand, he can let the ad go, and leave it to Lim­baugh and Drudge to cry foul. But that’s not going to go over well with the His­panic voters at whom the ad is aimed. Either way he loses.

I can’t say I have much sym­pa­thy for McCain’s predica­ment, and that’s not just because I want Obama to win this elec­tion. I actu­ally do care some­thing for the truth and I think Obama’s wrong to stretch it. But McCain has a dilemma here only inso­far as he’s not will­ing to stand up for an issue he’s pre­vi­ously sup­ported. It’s only a prob­lem if he’s not will­ing to risk break­ing with the right-​wing base of his party. Given that that’s a will­ing­ness he hasn’t shown much stom­ach for since some­where around 2004, don’t expect much to change in the next 50 days.