The Audacity Of Hope? (aka Fug You Florida & Ohio?)

You cannot stop the AP's Phil Elliott, you cannot even hope to contain him.

Elliott, in Washington the other day for about 38 seconds, manages to sniff out a story (along with Nedra Pickler) about Team Obama seeing a path to the presidency even without wins in Florida and Ohio.

The first three graphs:

Barack Obama's campaign envisions a path to the presidency that could include Virginia, Georgia and several Rocky Mountain states, but not necessarily the pair of battlegrounds that decided the last two elections — Florida and Ohio.

In a private pitch late last week to donors and former supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe outlined several alternatives to reaching the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House that runs counter to the conventional wisdom of recent elections.

At a fundraiser held at a Washington brewery Friday, Plouffe told a largely young crowd that the electoral map would be fundamentally different from the one in 2004. Wins in Ohio and Florida would guarantee Obama the presidency if he holds onto the states won by Democrat John Kerry, Plouffe said, but those two battlegrounds aren't required for victory.

We'll let "real" electoral strategists debate the realities of Plouffe's remarks.

But we do know two things: First, GOP FL/GOP OH are going to have a field day with this story. And should.

Second, how does Team Obama let these remarks leak? We can almost hear the screaming in Chicago now.