You have to love this loony, unpredictable Democratic circus--I mean, contest. Just when you think the end's in sight, for example, someone goes and gangs your best-laid schemes agley.

Unsurprisingly, that someone would be Hillary Clinton.

On Friday, if you'll remember, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean delivered an "enough already" message to the superdelegates. "I think that there's 800 of them and 450 of them have already said who they're for," he told CBS's Harry Smith. "I'd like the other 350 to say who they're for at some point between now and the first of July so we don't have to take this into the convention." Coming on the heels of similar statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Dean's declaration was yet another reason, I argued, to believe that the Obama-Clinton battle would conclude in June. "There you have it, folks: a (loose) July 1 deadline," I wrote, "Mark your calendars." A report today in the Politico--"Dem Elite Working for June Solution"--only confirmed my hunch.

So I wasn't surprised this morning when I received a schedule from the Clinton campaign detailing Bill's plans to visit Oregon, a a May 20 state, and Montana, a June 3 state, over the next two days. Hillary has long said she intends to campaign through the end of primary season. But I did do a double-take when I spotted this headline in the Washington Post: CLINTON VOWS TO STAY IN RACE TO CONVENTION. Seeking to silence the mounting drumbeat for her to bow out and avert a party crisis, Clinton is apparently now claiming that she will not only remain in the race until end of regulation, but will fight through August--presumably even if the superdelegates break for Obama in June. Her rationale: the disqualified results from Florida and Michigan. "I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started, until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan," she said. "And if we don't resolve it, we'll resolve it at the convention--that's what credentials committees are for."

Should we believe her? As the Jed Report notes, we've heard this "I'm going all the way to the convention" talk before--and it's almost always a "leading indicator of a doomed candidacy." First there was John Edwards, who told ABC on Jan. 6 that "he will stay in the presidential race through the party's convention in late August, even if he fails to win any of the early presidential primary states." After losing South Carolina on the 26th of that month, Edwards was still gung-ho. "This thing is going for a long time," deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince said on Jan. 28. But Edwards dropped out two days later. Then came Mitt Romney. Despite being overpowered by John McCain in the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" contests, Romney pledged that night to fight until the Republican convention. "We're going to keep on battling," Romney told supporters. "We're going to go all the way to the convention. We're going to win this thing and we're going to go to the White House." He also withdrew within two days. Finally, there was Mike Huckabee. On Feb. 22, Huckabee claimed that wins in Texas on March 4 would convince him to continue through the summer. "If we win Texas, I think it changes the dynamics of this race," he said. "It could well go all the way to the convention. If the convention delegates pick the president, chances are they would pick the most conservative. I would be the one they would end up picking." Instead, he bowed out on March 4.

Does this precedent apply to Clinton? Sorry Obamaniacs, but not really. A loss in Pennsylvania--highly unlikely, considering she currently leads by an average of 16 points--might spur a sudden withdrawal, but barring that, she's in it for the long haul. The best analogue is probably Huckabee, who plodded along until the math made victory absolutely impossible; he skedaddled the moment McCain hit the magic 1,191 majority. If Clinton's convention talk is anything more than bluster--and I suspect that it is--it now seems that she'll stick around even after Obama hits 2,025 (my previous point of no return). That's because 2,025 represents a delegate majority only if Florida and Michigan aren't counted. With the Sunshine and Great Lakes States included, that number rises to something like 2,208. So judging by her "convention chatter"--and her claim that "we cannot go forward until Florida and Michigan are taken care of"--don't expect Clinton to cave until the convention rolls around, or Obama snags enough supers to hit the higher mark. Whichever comes first.

That is, unless she has more surprises up her sleeve.

My NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Hirsh has a terrific piece in this week's dead-tree magazine about how John McCain's personality would influence American foreign policy if he's elected president. The basic premise is that McCain's record is mixed: he's rarely less than passionate--something "to admire," according to Hirsh--but has vacillated over the years between "the pragmatist: worldly-wise and witty, determined to follow the facts to the exclusion of ideology—a man willing to defy his own party and forge compromise, even with liberals like Ted Kennedy (on granting illegal immigrants some amnesty) and John Kerry (on normalizing relations with Vietnam)" and "the zealous advocate, single-minded about pressing his cause, sometimes erupting in outrage at detractors and willing to stand alone—without any allies at all, if need be." If the latter description sounds familiar, that's because it is: we've just endured seven years of George W. Bush, a president who "sees [causes] in largely black and white terms... and rejects too much of the gray," as Hirsh puts it. The questions going forward, he says, are a) Will we get more of the same from President McCain? and, if so, b) Is that what America needs?

One caveat before I post an excerpt from the story. Hirsh's questions are crucial, but there's one he missed: Does America even realize what they may be getting with McCain? After months of talking with voters, I suspect not. McCain's record as a pragmatist is familiar--to the delight of many independents and the consternation of some conservatives. But his hotheaded reputation doesn't reach much beyond the Beltway. Democrats are working hard to caricature McCain (unfairly, I think) as a bloodthirsty warmonger, and in some ways, the charges are similar. That said, war is a question of policy. A candidate's temper is a question of character. So while the former is a turn-off to anti-war types, the latter has the potential to alienate anyone who thinks a fiery disposition is "unpresidential"--a much larger swath of the electorate. What would that take? Probably a YouTube clip (along the lines of "Bomb Iran") showing McCain shouting at foreign diplomats or storming out of Senate meetings--both incidents described in Hirsh's story. But until then, McCain's temper will remain fodder for Beltway chatter and newsmagazine profiles, not kitchen-table conversations in Peoria--so I don't see it having much influence on his campaign.

Anyway, here's Hirsh: 

Not surprisingly, after the speech last week at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain's campaign could not talk enough about international cooperation—what McCain had called a "new compact." "He has such a deep relationship with so many Europeans and those in other regions, including Asia and the Middle East," said one adviser, Rich Williamson, who added that McCain has kept up his global profile by "going each year to the Munich Security Conference."

It was all very reassuring. There's just one problem: John McCain doesn't always behave according to his own statesmanlike script. In fact, while attending that same Munich conference in 2006, the Arizona senator had another one of what have come to be known as McCain Moments. In a small meeting at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, McCain was conferring with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister of Germany—one of America's most important allies—when the others heard McCain erupt. He thought the German was being insufficiently tough on the brutal regime in Belarus. Raising his voice at Steinmeier—who's known for speaking in unclear diplomatese—McCain "started shaking and rising out of his chair," said one participant, a former senior diplomatic official who related the anecdote on condition of anonymity. "He said something like: 'I haven't come to Munich to hear this kind of crap'." McCain's old pal Joe Lieberman jumped in. "Lieberman, who reads him very well, put his hand on McCain's arm and said gently, 'John, I think there's been a problem in the translation.' Of course Lieberman doesn't speak German and there hadn't been any problem in the translation … It was just John's explosive temper."

... 

McCain himself has long been aware of what he called, in his 2002 book "Worth the Fighting For," his "legendary" temper. "I am combative, there is little use in pretending otherwise," he wrote. While he insisted then that people tend to exaggerate his anger (most people with tempers say the same), he admitted that it "has caused me to make most of the more serious mistakes of my career." But it is not just McCain's anger that worries his detractors; it's the fierce righteousness that is joined to it. During his first Senate run, in 1986, McCain grew so tired of hearing complaints about his anger that he thundered to his staffers ("as they struggled to keep straight faces," recorded author Robert Timberg): "I don't have a temper! I just care passionately." The participant who witnessed McCain's 2006 spat with Steinmeier agrees with this distinction. "He is, plain and simple, the most openly emotional politician in the United States," he says. "Other people have had tempers. Eisenhower had a famous temper. Clinton has a temper. Reagan had a temper. But it's that McCain is so emotional. He does jump to conclusions." In the Senate, McCain is known for getting up and walking out if he doesn't like what he's hearing.

...

Which fights is he likely to pick as president? As a Vietnam veteran, tempered in the failure of that war, McCain has made many thoughtful and careful judgments about the use of force during his more than 20 years in the Senate. In 1983, as a congressman, he called for the withdrawal of the Marines from Beirut—defying a president he professed to admire, Ronald Reagan. He voted against intervention in Haiti and in favor of a cutoff of funds for the "Black Hawk Down" mission in Somalia. He was leery of a ground war against Iraq in 1991, though he ultimately voted for it. But since then, McCain has also shown a willingness to use force that suggests he has escaped from his Vietnam-bred caution.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

WHO'LL STOP THE PAIN?
(John Heilemann, New York)
Two months have passed since Edwards dropped out—tempus fugit!—and still no endorsement. Why? According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton’s plan (and by extension Edwards’s) for its insurance mandate. The implications of this story are several and not insignificant... It bears on the questions du jour among Democrats who see their once-uplifting primary campaign descending into self-destructive mayhem: How can we put this thing to bed? How can Clinton be stopped from putting the party through three more months of hell? Where are those vaunted “party elders” who can convince her that it’s sayonara time?

NEW BACKING FOR OBAMA AS PARTY SEEKS UNITY
(Jackie Calmes, Wall Street Journal)
Slowly but steadily, a string of Democratic Party figures is taking Barack Obama's side in the presidential nominating race and raising the pressure on Hillary Clinton to give up. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is expected to endorse Sen. Obama Monday, according to a Democrat familiar with her plans. Meanwhile, North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group -- just one has so far -- before that state's May 6 primary, several Democrats say. Helping to drive the endorsements is a fear that the Obama-Clinton contest has grown toxic and threatens the Democratic Party's chances against Republican John McCain in the fall.

MORE: Superdelegates: A Guide to the Undecided (Avi Zenilman, Politico) 

SHOULD CLINTON DROP OUT?
The New Republic says yes: When Obama or Clinton eventually claims this nomination--and it increasingly looks like that won't happen until June--he or she will have only a short time to formulate general-election narratives; the period for testing arguments and laying groundwork will be impossibly compressed. And that compression will prove especially problematic on issues, such as national security, on which Democrats must tack back to the center. When a candidate prepares policies and rhetoric for the fall, it's clearly better to do it in subtle, little nibbles rather than grotesquely large bites. But, with Clinton and Obama fighting for the allegiance of liberal-minded primary voters, they won't make these important adjustments for months. All of which is to say that it's about time for the Democratic Party to panic. If it wants to win this election, it needs this race to end as soon as possible. Every day spent on the primaries represents an opportunity cost and diminishes the chances for ultimate victory.

The Washington Post says no: No doubt the Democrats have gotten themselves into a fix with rules that may leave the final decision to unelected superdelegates -- but why is the answer to that less democracy? Why not give as many voters as possible a chance? We understand Democrats' concern that Mr. McCain benefits most as their candidates tear each other down. Recent polls show the favorable ratings of both Democratic candidates declining, Ms. Clinton's more than Mr. Obama's. Making the case that you're better qualified inevitably involves, to some extent, explaining that the other candidate is less so. But instead of continuing to blur the line between civil discourse and destructive denunciations, the candidates and their campaigns could talk more substance... The list of issues to hash out is endless, and doing so in polite political combat could produce a stronger Democratic candidate for the fall and a better-informed electorate.

BARE-KNUCKLE POLITICS
(Andrew Gumble, Los Angeles Times)
On every occasion in American history when the race for the White House has been close enough to be contested, the candidate with fewer votes has prevailed... Given this long history of dogged, dirty, win-at-any-cost electioneering, Clinton's determination to keep fighting in the face of seemingly insurmountable electoral arithmetic makes a lot more sense. When her surrogates argue that carrying big states such as California and Ohio is more important than being ahead in the overall popular vote, or when they argue that pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, they are following a well-worn playbook compiled by both parties down through the years -- which is to say and do anything that might push your candidate ahead. In the end, the key to winning is not the number of votes but the efficacy of a candidate's political campaign.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Pssst. Did you realize that John McCain is... an American?

Shocking, I know. But if McCain's latest television ad--the first, we're told, of the general election campaign--is imparting some other, more revealing bit of biography, I must have missed it. Consider the evidence. The spot, called "624787" (more on that later), opens with an image of the Arizona senator pounding a podium, shot heroically from below. "Keep that faith," he says. "Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield. Stand up." It's as if McCain is pitching slogans for Alcoholics Anonymous, or an athletic sneaker. I half-expected him to add, "Just do it." The senator quickly clears up any confusion, though, as the camera cuts to a crowd: "we're Americans, and we'll never surrender." How flattering. The cheering echoes ominously, and the image lingers on a sign that reads "JohnMcCain.com." Nothing more American than product placement.

The next movement is similarly vacuous. On the soundtrack, Powers Boothe, beloved in the Stumper household for his turn as the unctuous, scheming pimp Cy Tolliver on HBO's Deadwood, bellows a series of unenlightening rhetorical questions. "What must a president believe about us?" he asks, his voice rich with hammy bombast. "About America? That she is worth protecting? That liberty is priceless? Our people, honorable? Our future, prosperous, remarkable and free?" Apparently, Millard Fillmore thought defending America was a bore, and Woodrow Wilson fully expected that we'd bow down before our Teutonic rulers in due time. On screen, theatrically lit images of McCain--in profile, scanning the horizon, resting his fingertips on a table, saluting--float alongside "uplifting" phrases like "American Values," "Path to Future" and "Time for a Real Hero." Shortly after Boothe asks "what must we believe about that president?" ("What does he think? Where has he been? Has he walked the walk?"), McCain's face dissolves in a burst of light, and we're left with black-and-white footage of a soldier supine on a cot:

Interviewer: "What is your rank?"

John McCain: "Lt. Commander in the Navy."

Interviewer: "And your official number?"

John McCain: "624787."

The exchange, of course, represents, in a terse, Hemingwayesque manner, McCain's military service and years spent as a POW in Vietnam. But like the rest of the commercial, it's not really saying anything. Instead, the footage, the slogans, the flags, the blandishments (priceless, honorable, prosperous, remarkable and free) and the word "America," repeated or displayed at least five times over the course of a minute (including twice in the comically tautological tagline, "the American president Americans have been waiting for"), are meant to convey an impression of McCain as unquestionably, unquestioningly, overwhelmingly American.

I suppose there's a positive case to be made for such an effort. While the Democrats cannibalize each other, McCain has the luxury of defining himself in the most favorable light. That said, everyone already recognizes (and honors) his service. Which is why I can't help but see the rather unrevealing "624787" not as a biographical ad but as a contrast ad. Remember, McCain's likely general election opponent is Barack Obama, whose Achilles Heel, Republicans have decided, is patriotism. You know the drill: the American flag pin, the "non-salute," Michelle's gaffe, the false Muslim rumor, the middle name, the pastor. McCain can't say Obama is a Muslim, or an angry black man, or even unpatriotic; in fact, he's been quick to publicly oppose such tactics when other Republicans indulge (even as his staff has circulated anti-Obama web videos). But he can keep reminding voters that he's really, really American and let their imaginations do the rest. Boothe's questions, in this context, serve not just to elevate McCain but also to stoke fears about Obama: "What does he think? Where has he been?" and, as if channeling Hillary Clinton, "Has he walked the walk?" Let Obama and his followers be "the ones that we've been waiting for," the ad implies. McCain is content, instead, to be "the American president Americans have been waiting for."

In case you doubt the Obama connection, look at where the ad is airing: New Mexico, an extremely close swing state packed with Latinos. Traditionally Democratic, they overwhelmingly prefer Clinton to Obama--and might be persuaded, say observers, to back the pro-immigration reform McCain in the general election. At this rate, we fully expect to see an ad in which McCain soars o'er purple mountains majesty on the wings of a bald eagle by May. And throw in an apple pie while you're at it.
 

According to Rasmussen's daily Presidential Tracking Poll, twenty-two percent (22%) of Democratic voters nationwide say that Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race for the presidential nomination, and an identical number—22 percent--say that Barack Obama should withdraw. But while a solid majority of Democrats, 62 percent, aren’t ready for the contest to end, a full six percent tell pollsters that they wish both Clinton and Obama would quit.

Viva Mike Gravel.

Stumper freely admits that he's no economics whiz. Thankfully, NEWSWEEK's Daniel Gross is. Here's his (not-so-enthusiastic) take on McCain's fiscal program:

By virtue of his history as a deficit hawk, a foe of earmarks, an opponent of the Bush tax cuts, and the presence of reality-based advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, McCain deserves some benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the brains behind the economic operation seems to be former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas A&M economist-turned-senator who confidently forecast in 1993 that the Clinton program of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy would be "a one-way ticket to recession." And the sections on McCain's Web site about domestic policy reveal, as Matt Yglesias noted, "a nearly astounding level of vacuity."

Reading McCain's economic agenda, and listening to his speech, it appears that the problem with the last eight years is that we haven't seen enough tax breaks for the wealthy, that economic royalism hasn't been pursued with sufficient vigor, and that the middle and working classes haven't been stiffed sufficiently.

[SNIP]

McCain's housing speech, delivered in Orange County, Calif., ground zero of the housing crisis, was a mixed bag. He provided a good description of the problem. But his solution to an era in which financial deregulation set the stage for federal bailouts, rampant speculation, and reckless lending is ... less regulation. "Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting, and tax impediments to raising capital." Bizarrely, he has also joined the chorus arguing that mark-to-market accounting—the rules that require companies to, you know, tell investors the actual market value of assets they hold--should be revisited.

The Federal Reserve and the Bush administration have justified the extraordinary help offered to investment banks and investors by saying that it matters less how we got here and more how we deal with the situation as it is. For McCain, however, it's all about the journey. Poor decisions should not be rewarded-unless those poor decisions are made by really rich people who run investment banks and hedge funds. While "those who act irresponsibly" shouldn't be bailed out as a matter of principle, it's OK to take extraordinary measures to help banks prevent "systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy." Obama and Clinton-and the Bush administration, through its various efforts to ease the mortgage crisis-have argued that it might be possible to spare further systemic risk if something was done to buck up the fortunes of homeowners. Bollocks, says McCain. People should just put up more money for down payments and work harder to keep current with their mortgage payments.

Straight talk? No doubt. At a time of rampant economic insecurity and low consumer confidence, at the end of a business cycle in which median incomes didn't rise and the percentage of working people with health insurance fell, McCain won't succumb to the easy temptation of saying that government policy can help improve the situation. But smart politics? I wonder. What's left of the Republican Party is becoming increasingly downscale, and many swing states have been ravaged by the housing crisis (Nevada, Florida) and globalization (Ohio, Michigan). Besides, he's already got the Let-Them-Eat-Cake vote sewed up.

READ THE REST HERE.

 

First it was Harry. Then it was Nancy. And now Howard is getting in on the act.

Yesterday, Stumper predicted that the Democratic battle royale between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would end in June, after the final primaries in South Dakota and Montana. As proof, I cited recent statements from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"Superdelegates will choose... before the convention in August," said Pelosi.

"It will be done," added Reid, smiling serenely.

"As superdelegates go," concluded yours truly, "[Reid and Pelosi] hold some sway."

But while congressional leaders are influential and all, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee--i.e., the organization in charge of this loony process--has the potential to change (or, um, end) the game. And now it appears as if that's what Howard Dean (the aforementioned DNC boss) wants to do. First, in an interview yesterday with the Associated Press's Nedra Pickler, Dean--who said he's worried that "there'll be some nasty fights if it goes to convention, and people will walk out"--confessed that he has been "talking to a fairly significant number of, by and large, nonaligned people about how we might resolve this." At the time, he refused to go into detail, but Pickler reported that the plan "likely involves encouraging superdelegates to pick a candidate shortly after the voting ends."

Scratch that "likely." Less than 24 hours after chatting with Pickler, Dean today revealed exactly what kind of resolution he has in mind. Asked by CBS's Harry Smith if he "want[s] the superdelegates to have some sort of vote immediately [after June 3] so that you'll know months in advance of the convention what the outcome is,” Dean replied, in effect, yes. “Well, I think the superdelegates have already been weighing in," he said. "I think that there's 800 of them and 450 of them have already said who they're for. I'd like the other 350 to say who they're for at some point between now and the first of July so we don't have to take this into the convention.”

There you have it, folks: a (loose) July 1 deadline. Dean's been relatively mum on the subject--and has taken some flack for his silence--but, according to an aide, he's been having "numerous conversations with over 60 leaders inside and outside of the Democratic Party" behind the scenes and now plans to "encourage the superdelegates to make their choice known once the voters in the remaining states have had their say." So mark your calendars. It looks like the end's in sight.

On Wednesday, I delivered what I believed to be bad news for Obamaniacs: that their man, like his rival Hillary Clinton, was passively attempting to poach county caucus delegates. Earlier, I had reported that Iowa county delegates pledged to Obama were receiving robocalls from the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the coming county conventions (when such delegates can switch their allegiances). Now, I wrote, at least one Clinton delegate in Texas had received a postcard from the Obama campaign urging him to "Support Barack Obama at your county convention!" (which takes place this Saturday). "That means that both Obama and Clinton are, in effect, asking their rival's delegates for support," I added. "If neither Obama nor Clinton clinches the nomination by the end of primary season in June, they'll be forced to spend the summer jockeying for any possible advantage--and this is exactly the sort of passive, gray-area poaching that you can expect to see."

But that wasn't the whole story.

While the Clinton camp was heartened by the report--which essentially allowed them to say that if they were wrong to poach, so was Obama--Team Obama was not. Obama spokesman Bill Burton quickly contacted me to say that the postcard in question was mistakenly sent to a Clinton delegate--not, as I previously believed, to the entire list of Texas county delegates, regardless of affiliation. "The Texas Democratic Party gave us a list of delegates that indicated him as an Obama delegate--which is why he got the errant post card," he says. "The suggestion that we have a passive strategy of trying to flip Clinton's pledged delegates by sending one postcard to one guy is pretty ludicrous on its face."

I absolutely agreed--if that was, in fact, what happened. So I did some digging. This morning, I finally got to the bottom of the brouhaha--or as close to bottom, it seems, as anyone can get.

Turns out that the Obama campaign was correct to claim that the Clinton delegate in question, Christopher Cohen, was misidentified on their working list as an Obama supporter. I have obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and double-checked his entry. Not only that, but three other Clinton supporters who have contacted me to complain about receiving Obama postcards are ALSO identified on the aforementioned spreadsheet as Obama delegates. So the Obama campaign was, in fact, working off a flawed list, and that explains why Cohen and his fellow Clintonites received Obama postcards, which the Obama camp maintains were intended only for their own delegates.

That said, Cohen and the two of the other delegates in question are listed correctly--that is, as pro-Clinton, not pro-Obama--on the website of the Travis County Democrats. Why the discrepancy? Blame the middleman. According to spokesman Hector Nieto of the Texas Democratic Party, "the information that we gave to the campaigns was information given to us by the individual precincts. We then sent that information to a contractor to key it in to a spreadsheet. There's a possibility that an error was made when the information was keyed in." In other words, the precincts reported the correct candidate affiliations to the state party, but an outside contractor likely screwed up when entering those affiliations into a single spreadsheet --meaning that the Clinton and Obama campaigns received lists that incorrectly displayed at least a few Clinton delegates pledged to Obama (and perhaps vice versa).

I was basing my original item on the affiliations posted to the Travis County Democrats website, which list Cohen (and two other delegates who received Obama postcards) as Clinton supporters; at the time, it appeared that Obama was knowingly asking his rival's delegates for support. But now it's clear that the Obama campaign received a spreadsheet indicating that these three delegates were pro-Obama, and thus it's only fair to conclude that Obama is not, as my headline suggested, playing the passive delegate-'poaching' game. Only Clinton--with her robocalls, which started in Iowa and continue in Texas--is on the prowl.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

PARTIES DIFFER ON WHOM ECONOMIC AID SHOULD HELP
(Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times)
Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic candidates for president, claim to have proposed a more activist role for government than either President Bush or the likely Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democratic rhetoric makes the contrast appear even sharper. But while their philosophies might seem starkly different, in reality both parties have come to the conclusion that major government involvement is needed to rescue the financial and housing markets. The ideological clashes are less about whether the government should intervene in the economy, and more about whom it should try to rescue. “Democrats are more likely to propose protecting individuals, and Republicans are more likely to propose protecting markets,” said William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington that champions smaller government. Despite differing approaches, Democrats and Republicans may end up in a similar place because it will be difficult to protect individuals without protecting the markets, and the markets will remain fragile if individuals suffer huge declines in their personal wealth.

LOANS AND LEADERSHIP
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
All in all, the candidates’ positions on the mortgage crisis tell the same tale as their positions on health care: a tale that is seriously at odds with the way they’re often portrayed. Mr. McCain, we’re told, is a straight-talking maverick. But on domestic policy, he offers neither straight talk nor originality; instead, he panders shamelessly to right-wing ideologues. Mrs. Clinton, we’re assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats babies. But her policy proposals continue to be surprisingly bold and progressive. Finally, Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox. Do these policy comparisons really tell us what each candidate would be like as president? Not necessarily — but they’re the best guide we have.

AS CANDIDATES WARM TO BUSH TAX CUTS, ECONOMISTS WARN OF LONG-TERM EFFECTS
(Lori Montgomery, Washington Post)
When President Bush pushed big tax breaks through Congress in 2001 and 2003, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and other Democrats in opposing them as fiscally reckless. But now that McCain and Clinton are running for president, neither is looking to get rid of the cuts. Instead, they are arguing over which ones to keep. The same is true of Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who recently blamed the Bush tax cuts for driving the nation toward recession. But he, too, wants to preserve about half the cuts, and pile on new ones. The direction of the tax debate is frustrating deficit hawks in Washington, who worry that none of the candidates is charting a course toward a balanced budget... Far from acting as an economic tonic, the tax cuts "are neither sustainable nor beneficial" without massive cuts in government spending far beyond what Bush or any candidate to succeed him has proposed... The most popular cuts -- those known as "middle-class" tax cuts -- are more likely to slow economic growth than promote it.

AFTER BUSH
(Adrian Woodridge, The Economist)
On the face of it the presidential election will give America the best chance it has had to resolve its internal disagreements about American foreign policy. The two versions on offer could hardly present a clearer choice. But the task will be much more difficult than it appears. A Democratic president will have to weigh huge domestic pressures to bring the troops home against the danger of creating regional chaos in Iraq. Withdrawing troops too suddenly could bring catastrophe in the region and political humiliation at home. Jimmy Carter's failure in Iran destroyed his presidency and helped to sideline the Democrats as a political force for a decade. Does a future Democratic president want to risk a similar debacle? Mr McCain will face a reality test of his own. He is nothing if not stubborn; nobody survives five-and-a-half years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam without a steely will... But even a man who proudly describes himself as a “son of a ***” cannot buck public opinion. The American public has turned sharply against military assertiveness, so Mr McCain's hawkish instincts on foreign policy are hurting his chances of winning the White House. And even if he can pull it off, he will have a tough time of it: both houses of Congress will almost certainly have bigger Democratic majorities.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
(Eugene Robinson, Washington Post)
The NBC-Journal poll, released Wednesday, found that the percentage of voters with negative views of Obama increased by four points in the past two weeks, from 28 percent to 32 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage with positive views of Obama declined by two points, from 51 percent to 49 percent. It's hard to attribute this slippage to anything other than the controversy over Wright's sermons. All in all, it wasn't what you'd call a great fortnight for Obama. Surprisingly, though, Clinton's was considerably worse. The percentage of voters holding negative views of her increased by five points, from 43 percent to 48 percent, while the percentage of voters who had positive views of Clinton declined a full eight points, from 45 to 37 percent...What's not unambiguously explained in the polls is why Clinton, basically a bystander, took a bigger hit in popularity than the guy who had the pastor problem... Here's a hypothesis: The fact that Clinton's poll numbers suffered more than Obama's might have something to do with the way her campaign gives the impression of being willing to do anything it takes -- anything -- to win the nomination.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

When it comes to economic policy, Stumper's expertise can be summed by this memorable exchange from NBC's Emmy-winning comedy 30 Rock, in which NBC head honcho Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) discusses finances with perpetually harried comedy writer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey).

Jack Donaghy: So what do you do with your money? Put it into a 401K?
Liz Lemon: Yeah… I’ve gotta get one of those.
J.D.: What? Where do you invest your money, Liz?
L.L.: I have, like, 12 grand in checking.
J.D.: Are you… an immigrant?

In case you're wondering, I'm the Liz Lemon character.  

Which is why I don't feel particularly qualified to assess, in granular detail, all the talk of "FHA mandates" and "capital-gains rates" and "internal risk management protocols" flying back and forth between the candidates today. At least not in any way that would be helpful to you, dear readers.

CLICK THROUGH FOR HIS TAKE... 

Yesterday, I gave careful consideration to Chris Bowers' prediction that "the campaign [will be] over" on May 7, the day after North Carolina and Indiana vote--and decided that it was, well, wrong. Since then, a handful of readers have asked when I think the Democratic nominating contest will wrap up. My answer?

June.

As I wrote yesterday, the political poo-bahs known as superdelegates--the ones who will put either Obama or Clinton over the top--are highly unlikely to break for one or the other before the remaining Democratic primary voters have had a chance to cast their ballots. As a senior House aide recently told Noam Scheiber of the New Republic, they "don't want to be seen as elites coming in and overturning the will of the people." That leaves two possibilities: either a) the superdelegates step in after the primaries and declare a TKO or b) the slugfest continues for unabated for 80 days, until the convention in Denver finally, mercifully ends their (and our) suffering. 

I say June because the last primaries are on June 3, and pretty sure that superdelegates will pick Option A over Option B. Now, not everyone agrees with me. Brendan Nyhan, for one, thinks that "most party elders would prefer that Hillary withdraw but don't want to pay the cost of pushing her out of the race." His reasoning: not only are "the collective benefits of pushing Hillary out much larger than the individual benefit to any one party leader... but it's difficult to coordinate a joint effort to push her out." That's probably true, but the overtime alternative may be worse. Call it the Summer of Hate.  With no voters left to win over, Clinton and Obama will spend more than two months struggling, as I've already written,

"to navigate a weird, unprecedented lull in the action as long as 2004's entire primary season. They will woo superdelegates in secret, underscoring how irrelevant actual voters have become, and attack each other in public, hobbling the eventual victor. Raising money will be tough--enthusiastic primary season supporters will resist forking out for a general election campaign that may never happen. And while Obama and Clinton pour salt on the party's wounds, Republican nominee John McCain will continue to do what he's done for the past four months--rake in the dough, consolidate his support and make his case to the American people."

This nightmare scenario is already causing jitters--which is why two people considerably more influential than Nyhan are suddenly echoing my prediction of a June end date. The first is Nancy Pelosi. After the Bay Area congresswoman came under fire this week from a claque of 24 wealthy pro-Clinton Democratic donors for seconding Obama's assertion superdelegates should follow the "will of the voters" (i.e., the pledged delegate count and/or the popular vote) when choosing a nominee, her spokesman released a statement saying that she "is confident that superdelegates will choose between Sens. Clinton or Obama — our two strong candidates — before the convention in August." Then came Harry Reid. Asked by the Las Vegas Review-Journal if the "race can be resolved before the convention," he broke into a "serene and mysterious smile." "Easy," he said. Here's the rest of the "conversation":

Q: How is that?

Reid: It will be done.

Q: It just will?

Reid: Yep.

Q: Magically?

Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.

Despite his Vito Corleone tone, Reid, in case you've forgotten, is senate majority leader. And Pelosi is speaker of the House. As superdelegates go, they hold some sway. Unfortunately, though, it looks like we'll have to wait three months before finding out exactly how much.

Where's the Goracle when you need him?

NEW YORK, NY--At 9:15 this morning, Barack Obama delivered a "major" economic address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in downtown Manhattan. That was Obama's entree du jour--the message he wanted the media to relay to the American people. Usually, it would've worked; the best way to force the press to cover policy--or anything, really--is to lay it obligingly on their Big Apple doorstep. But unfortunately for Obama, I don't expect to hear much about regulatory restructuring on Hardball tonight, because something tells me that today's appetizer will prove much tastier for the punditry than the main course.

Its name: Michael Bloomberg. 

Here we go again. Back in November, Obama and Bloomberg hastily arranged a breakfast sit-down at the New York Luncheonette on E. 50th Street--and the Bloomie-obsessed press immediately started wagging its cable/talk radio/tabloid/Internet tongue "about the possibilities, the angles, the common interests" (in the words of MSM queen bee Mark Halperin). Much of the speculation--and speculation is all one has when forced to "report" from the sidewalk outside a diner--centered on the possibility of an Obama-Bloomberg ticket, and whether Bloomberg, a billionaire many times over, could finance the bid out of pocket. As I wrote at the time, such innuendo was asinine: "to pick a billionaire running mate and then take massive sums of his money would make Obama look 1) weak, as if he needs a "sugar daddy" and 2) corrupt, as if he were selling the vice presidency to the highest bidder. Neither charge would be true--but that wouldn't stop Republicans from repeating them ad infinitum."

But four months later, as Bloomberg's decision to introduce Obama today revives the "dream-ticket ruckus," I have to admit: maybe there's something to Obama-Bloomberg '08. The old arguments in favor of the pairing still hold up. Both Obama and Bloomberg are focused, as the Illinois senator noted in remarks, on ending "Washington['s]... old ideological battles" and "bring[ing] people together to seek pragmatic solutions." And Obama could easily refuse Bloomberg's billions and still overwhelm John McCain financially.

But more intriguing is what's happened in the months since Bloomberg and Obama first met--and how well Hizzoner suits the new moment. For starters, the nation's economic meltdown has rocketed to the top of voter concerns. Who better than Bloomberg--both an astronomically successful private-sector entrepreneur and an undeniably effective steward of the nation's financial capital--to lend executive and economic heft to Obama's ticket? And then there's the pesky issue of the Jewish vote. (Sure, a black-Jewish ticket may turn off some folks. But there's a reason it's called a "dream ticket.") In recent weeks, remarks by Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and his military advisor, Gen. Tony McPeak, have reinforced doubts--however unfounded--among some Jewish voters (many of whom were already dismayed by Louis Farrakhan's relationship with Obama's church) about Obama's pro-Israel bona fides. (Obama lost to Clinton among Jews in the vital swing states of New Jersey and Florida by margins of 26 and 32 percent, respectively.) Although not ostentatiously religious, Bloomberg was raised in a kosher home, celebrated his bar mitzvah, created an endowment for his hometown synagogue, donated millions to Jewish causes in the U.S. and Israel and, according to ABC News, "emphatically supports the Jewish state and has traveled there numerous times." He's one of America's two most prominent Jewish politicians--and something tells me that the other one, Joe Lieberman, isn't raring to ride the Obama train.

Hints of a power coupling were few and far between at this morning's event. In his introductory remarks, Bloomberg evoked Abraham Lincoln (rumor has it the ol' railsplitter once gave a speech at Cooper Union, too) and said it was his "honor to welcome another man from Illinois." "I'm glad he has chosen to come to our city to speak out on the economy," Bloomberg said. "I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions on what he has to say. This is New York after all. I'm not sure all of us will agree with every idea, myself included." But despite the jokey "discord," the pols made sure, at one moment, to fan speculation of a united future. After Bloomberg mentioned his November meeting with the Illinois senator--"It is my pleasure to introduce [him], and not just because he picked up the check when we had breakfast together"--Obama quickly picked up the thread. "I have to tell you," he said, "the reason I bought breakfast is because I expect payback of something more expensive." He paused, savoring the unspoken suggestion as the audience applauded. "I'm no dummy," he added, grinning ironically. "I figured there are some good steakhouses in New York." Whether Obama was angling for an endorsement or a rib-eye, it seems clear from Bloomberg's continued presence at the senator's side that Democratic frontrunner is not the only one interested in payback. 

UPDATE, 1:46 p.m.: Ambinder has a smart take:

The best way to look at an Obama-Bloomberg ticket is by noticing their complimentary traits. Obama isn't much of an administrator or a details guy by his own admission, while Bloomberg is so concerned about Your Health and Welfare that he studies intently the ins and outs of congestion pricing and trans-fats. He's a prime minister-type -- although he brings an outsider's sense of efficiency to the bureaucracy. Let Obama be the vision guy; Bloomberg could be the brass-tacts [sic] administrator.

Also, if Obama and Bloomberg are looking for a good steak, Stumper recommends the tagliata di manzo--aged, grilled, sliced and topped with roasted garlic and rosemary--at Pepolino on West Broadway in Tribeca. Quiet Tuscan trattoria, not too trendy. Perfect for a rendezvous.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

DOUBLE NEGATIVE
(David Greenberg, New Republic)
The issue of negative campaigning and its proper bounds is now dominating the Democratic campaign. In recent weeks, the neck-and-neck race has degenerated into a miasma of trivial flaps... Each side, angling for any edge, gins up pseudo-controversies. In response, each feigns indignation, claiming the other is hitting below the belt. These skirmishes have yielded no discernible advantage. But the bickering has, troublingly, validated a piece of conventional wisdom among a liberal commentariat that was already tilting heavily toward Obama: that Clinton is "ruthless," "vicious," even "Nixonian"--an unscrupulous appendage of her husband's "machine" (a word seldom used about the far better oiled Obama apparatus). As Obama's guru David Axelrod would have it, "They are literally trying to do anything to win this nomination." You hear it said everywhere, from blogs to high-toned op-ed pages. But this virulent meme is untrue, and--quite apart from the current contest--anyone who cares about liberalism and its future should be worried by its spread.

GOP LOOKS TO 'MCCAIN DEMOCRATS'
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
According to data provided by the Gallup Organization at Politico’s request, in a hypothetical contest between McCain and Obama, McCain wins 17 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic, while Obama wins 10 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.  In a potential contest with Clinton, McCain wins 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners while Clinton wins 8 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.  By way of comparison, exit polls in 2004 reported that George W. Bush won 11 percent of Democrats and John F. Kerry won 6 percent of Republicans... McCain’s potential to win more crossover votes than either of the Democrats, a finding that also surfaces in surveys conducted by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics and in private GOP polls, could upend the political calculus for the November general election.  Equally important, Gallup finds that McCain wins independents against either Democrat—48 to 23 percent against Clinton, and 40 to 31 percent against Obama.

HILLARY'S LAST HOPE
(Lawrence Lindsey, Wall Street Journal)
Let the early primary votes stand, and select delegates according to the outcome. On a statistical basis, this is clearly the right result for Florida. The easiest solution for Michigan is to simply award the 45% of the vote uncommitted or for another candidate to Mr. Obama. This appears to be the intent of those voters, as well as the likely result of a rematch. It would reduce Mr. Obama's current edge in pledged delegates to 115 from 167. It would also reduce the adjusted popular-vote margin, that converts caucus votes to primary votes, to an edge for Mr. Obama of 466,000. If Mrs. Clinton wins Pennsylvania by the margin polls now suggest, the two candidates would be essentially tied in popular votes, with an Obama edge in delegates of about 80. That would leave the remaining primaries and the superdelegates to decide the outcome of an essentially tied race. 

HILLARY'S FLIGHT OF FANCY
(Ron Fournier, Associated Press)
To be sure, Clinton is not the first American to pad a resume. She's not even the only candidate for president to do so. Obama has exaggerated his role in reaching a compromise in the Senate on immigration as well as his authorship of a bill to address the housing crisis. Voters need to weigh such distortions when they consider whether the freshman senator from Illinois truly is a new breed of politician. What makes Clinton's situation unique — and the Bosnia embellishments so damaging — is the fact that the New York senator has built her candidacy on the illusion of experience. Any attack on her credentials is a potential Achilles heel. As first lady, she did not attend National Security Council meetings, did not receive the presidential daily briefing on terrorism and other threats and did not have a top level security clearance. Her foreign trips were glorified goodwill tours, a collection of photo opportunities and sightseeing trips. Still, Clinton was an exceptionally active first lady who knows more than most about what it takes to be president. So it must drive her nuts when Obama and his allies dismiss her role. Their condescension must make it harder for Clinton to accept the fact that hers was a largely ceremonial job, especially after her ill-fated attempt to overhaul the nation's health care system. And so the best explanation for her Bosnia embellishment may be this simple, and this human: She's overcompensating.

OBAMA FACES QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS RELIGION
(John McCormick and Manya A. Brachear, Chicago Tribune)
Before Sen. Barack Obama took the stage here Wednesday, the crowd was led in prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. And as the Illinois Democrat ended his speech, he offered a "God bless America." As Obama returned to the campaign trail after a brief respite, news and questions about his controversial former Chicago pastor continued to circulate, while the activities before his appearance seemed to try to reinforce that he is a Christian and a patriot. An audience in Indiana had also been led in prayer on the Saturday after the flap over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. first spread on the Internet. But such overt religious showings have been relatively rare during the 13 months Obama has campaigned for the presidency.

You say "racist." I say "sexist." You say "McCarthy." I say "stained blue dress." Welcome to the increasingly braindead Democratic primary contest, where the infinitesimal substantive differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were exhausted months ago and now nary a day passes without one candidate slamming the other's honesty, character, readiness or electability.

Observers have spent the past few months fretting that the longer this snipping and sniping goes on, the harder it will be for the party to unify around an eventual nominee. Now the worrywarts have some statistics to "support" their suspicions. According a Gallup survey released this morning, 28 percent of Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain over Barack Obama in the general election, and 19 percent of Obama supporters would chose McCain over Clinton."The data," says Gallup, "suggest that the continuing and sometimes fractious Democratic nomination fight could have a negative impact for the Democratic Party in next November's election."

I don't doubt that this contest is more polarized than what we've seen in the past. When race and gender replace ideology and policy as points of distinction, the battleground becomes personal, not political; the longer the campaign, the more time each side has to suspect (and accuse) the other of racism or sexism. Needless to say, those exchanges, amplified by a drama-addicted media, wreak more havoc than disagreements over ethanol or education. According to a recent Pew poll, for example, 20 percent of white Democrats and 14 percent of Democratic women say they would defect to McCain if Obama were the nominee. So even though I expect many of these turncoats to untwist their knickers in time for Election Day--especially after their candidate of choice spends months campaigning for his or her victorious rival (or even running on the same ticket)--I think it's safe to assume that a greater number than usual (which is about 10 percent, according to Gallup) will cross party lines.

To which I say: grow up. Elections aren't about spite. They're about picking a president. If you truly think that McCain would make a better POTUS than Obama, go ahead and defect. But I doubt that nearly 30 percent of Clinton's Democratic base would rather elect a Republican who disagrees with them on Iraq, taxes, the economy and education than a Democrat whose views match their own (and their candidate's). Ditto for the Obamaniacs who threaten to jump ship. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe not electing Clinton or Obama will be more important to these people than steering the country in their party's desired direction. If so, and if these defectors propel McCain to victory in November, it won't be the media, in the end, that diminishes the importance of "the issues"--it will be the voters. And that would just be childish.

UPDATE, March 27: According to Obama spokesman Bill Burton, the post card in question was mistakenly sent to a Clinton delegate--not, as I previously believed, to the entire list of Texas county delegates, regardless of affiliation. "The Texas Democratic Party gave us a list of delegates that indicated him as an Obama delegate--which is why he got the errant post card," he says. "The suggestion that we have a passive strategy of trying to flip Clinton's pledged delegates by sending one postcard to one guy is pretty ludicrous on its face." If that's what happened, I absolutely agree. I'm double-checking with the Texas Democratic Party to confirm that the delegate in question was listed as a Clinton supporter and find out whether others also received the mailing. I'll post another update when I hear back.

UPDATE II:  No word from either campaign, but here's what the Clinton supporter in question has to say.

UPDATE III, MARCH 28: So I've finally gotten to the bottom of this--or as close to bottom, it seems, as anyone can get.

Turns out that the Obama campaign is correct to claim that the Clinton delegate in question, Christopher Cohen, was misidentified on their working list as an Obama supporter. I have obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and double-checked his entry. Not only that, but three other Clinton supporters who have contacted me to complain about receiving Obama postcards are ALSO identified on the aforementioned spreadsheet as Obama delegates. So the Obama campaign was, in fact, working off a flawed list, and that explains why Cohen and his fellow Clintonites received Obama postcards, which the Obama camp maintains were intended only for their own delegates.

That said, Cohen and the two of the other delegates in question are listed correctly--that is, as pro-Clinton, not pro-Obama--on the website of the Travis County Democrats. Why the discrepancy? Blame the middleman. According to spokesman Hector Nieto of the Texas Democratic Party, "the information that we gave to the campaigns was information given to us by the individual precincts. We then sent that information to a contractor to key it in to a spreadsheet. There's a possibility that an error was made when the information was keyed in." In other words, the precincts reported the correct candidate affiliations to the state party, but the outside contractor hired to enter those affiliations into a single spreadsheet screwed up--meaning that the Clinton and Obama campaigns received lists that showed at least a few Clinton delegates pledged to Obama (and perhaps vice versa).

ORIGINAL ITEM AFTER THE JUMP... 

Here's a dispatch from Holly Bailey in southern California, where John McCain this morning delivered a "strikingly personal" foreign policy speech. Holly's absolutely right to note that in a "change" election, taking essentially the same position as the Bush administration on Iraq is not the easiest way to appeal to war-weary voters. McCain clearly hopes that the sacrifices he and his family have made on behalf of the country--his years as a POW in Vietnam, he forebears' military service, his sons' enlistment--will distinguish him from the current president and remind the American people that his willingness to "stay the course" represents a battle-scarred  veteran's' begrudging acceptance of reality and not the bloodthirsty belligerence of a chicken hawk. With the Democrats all-too-eager to paint him as the "100 Years of War" candidate--a misleading claim--getting personal is probably McCain's best defense.

On the heels of his trip to the Middle East and Europe last week, John McCain is in Los Angeles today, where he delivered a much anticipated speech outlining his views on the nation's foreign policy goals. The presumptive Republican nominee didn't say much new. Speaking before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain, as he has in the past, admitted the U.S. has an image problem around the world and suggested the way forward is to have a more cooperative foreign policy with international allies. "Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed," McCain told the group. "We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies."

The most striking thing about the speech was the personal tone that McCain used when speaking about conflict--perhaps a nod toward critics who say the senator, if elected, will merely continue the same path as the Bush administration when it comes to waging war. He talked of the sacrifice he and his own family had made on behalf of the country--noting when his father went to war after Pearl Harbor that he barely saw him for four years. "I detest war," said McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies...Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us."

Yet this was not a game-changing speech for McCain. The senator did not back down from his steadfast support of the war in Iraq, and, in a clear jab at his Democratic rivals, said advocates of troop withdrawal were pushing a course that would draw the U.S. into a "wider and more difficult war" full of "greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date." He said it would "strengthen" the country to confront "radical Islamic terrorism." "Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House," McCain declared.

A significant problem for McCain is that he is trying to accomplish something that President Bush has tried to do for years, which is to convince a war-weary American public that leaving Iraq would be worse than staying and continuing the fight. In an election year so focused on "change," McCain is struggling to distinguish himself from the Bush administration when it comes to Iraq. Asked earlier this week in San Diego how his position on Iraq is different from Bush, McCain didn't answer, instead reminding the reporter that he went against the wishes of his party in advocating a change in strategy and in leadership (i.e., the removal of  Former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld) when it wasn't politically popular. Will voters remember McCain's previous stand against Bush come November, especially when their positions are so similar today? That's a question that could decide the election.

First came Super Tuesday, with 24 contests and nearly 1,700 delegates up for grabs. Then it was the Texas two-step and primaries in Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island on March 4. Now, according to Chris Bowers of Open Left, the latest, greatest Decision Day 2008 ® is May 6, when the good voters of North Carolina and Indiana cast their ballots for either the Hopemonger from Illinois or the Iron Lady from New York.

"If Obama sweeps Indiana and North Carolina," writes Bowers. "The campaign is over." 

It's an interesting prediction. For starters, there's absolutely no chance that the curtain will fall earlier. Clinton currently boasts an average lead of 16 points in Pennsylvania, so despite the fervent finger-crossing of Obamaniacs nationwide, she ain't goin' nowhere before May. That said, the Indiana/North Carolina pairing not only represents a bigger delegate prize (187) than Pennsylvania (158), but it's also expected to be closer contest--meaning that the conflict-obsessed media will put more stock in the results. ("Something unusual appears to be developing in the Democratic presidential race in [Indiana]," wrote the Washington Post earlier this week. "A fair fight." Case in point.) Which is why an Obama twofer would signal Clinton's demise, according to Bowers. "May 6th is the first date when Obama can reach 1,627 pledged delegates, or 50% + 1 of pledged delegates," he says. "Right now, he needs 173.5 pledged delegates to reach 1,627, or 49.7% of the 349 to be determined between April 22 and May 6." In Bowers' view, if Obama can win half of the delegates at stake in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina, he will simultaneously capture the majority of pledged delegates--an important symbolic victory--and erase Clinton's Pennsylvania gains, forcing the New York senator to contemplate a "final option" that involves "winning the support of more than 70% of the remaining superdelegates." That, he says, "would be game, set, match."

The only problem: it won't be. There are two reasons to be skeptical. One, it's far from certain that Obama will reach the 1,627 milestone on May 6. According to Slate's handy Delegate Calculator, if the returns in Pennsylvania and North Carolina hew to current polling averages, and Indiana results, as expected, in a tie, Obama would fall five or six short of the pledged-delegate majority. And while it's easy to imagine Obama exceeding this tally--the latest PPP poll predicts a 20-point win in the Tarheel State, for example, which would put him over the top--it's impossible to imagine Clinton actually conceding that such an accomplishment (or concern that her continued presence is hurting Obama for November) has any significance."This is a very close race and neither of us will reach the magic number of delegates," she told Time's Mark Halperin yesterday. "We're both going to be short, and when you think about the many millions of people who have already voted, we are separated by a relatively small percentage of votes. We're separated by, you know, a little more than a hundred delegates" As long as Clinton sets 2,025 (and not 1,627) as the finish line--and Florida and Michigan remain unresolved and the pledged-delegate/popular-vote disparity remains close--she'll stay in the race. And frankly, she has point. There's no precedent (see Kennedy in 1980 or Reagan in 1976) for a candidate with thousands of delegates, half the vote and a rival who's yet to clinch the nomination to simply say "sayonara" in the midst of primary season.

Which means that nothing short of a May 7 "Superdelegate Stampede" to Obama will end the race before June. Could that happen? I doubt it. While I suspect that these political poo-bahs, reluctant to overturn the "will of the people," will break for the pledged-delegate/popular-vote leader in the end--a la Clinton supporter Maria Cantwell--they're also highly unlikely (for the same reasons, really) to weigh in before all of the people express their will at the ballot box. As Clinton said yesterday in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, "Over the next months millions of people are going to vote. We should wait and see the outcome of those votes.” And so the slugfest rightfully, inexorably continues--even though we're 95 percent sure how it's going to end.

When politicians start mining the sports world for comparisons, sportswriters strike back. Newsweek's Mark Starr, who became acquainted with the skater while covering the 1994 Winter Olympics, weighs in on what some Democrats are calling the "Tonya Harding option":

Never for a moment have I doubted that politics was as rough-and-tumble as anything I see on the sporting fields. Still, for all the name-calling and smear tactics of presidential campaigns present and past, never have I witnessed such a low blow as the one inflicted on Hillary Clinton last night. And this one apparently didn't come from the Obama camp, but from anonymous Democrats, who compared the New York senator to Tonya Harding. According to ABC's Jake Tapper, they believe she is pursuing "the Tonya Harding option"--kneecapping your rival so that he can't win. Maureen Dowd took the notion a step further in today's New York Times, suggesting that Clinton knows she can't win the nomination and her only hope for the presidency she so desperately covets is to make Obama unelectable against McCain--so that she can reemerge as the party's savior in four years.

Calling Sen. Clinton "a monster" is one thing, but giving a name and face--especially that name and that face--to the monster is far worse. I don't know Sen. Clinton, but I sure do know Tonya, whose career I covered extensively. And she was a true guttersnipe, a compulsive liar and cheat.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

GENERATION SQUEEB
(Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone)
The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and policy. So instead of talking about the fact that Barack Obama once introduced a bill to give a tax break to a Japanese company whose lawyers donated fifty grand to his Senate campaign, we're freaking out for five minutes about the fact that Obama's pastor thinks America spread AIDS on purpose in Zambia. And instead of talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton took $110,000 from a New York food company she later helped by introducing a bill to remove import duties on tomatoes, we're ranting and raving about Gerry Ferraro's paranoid ramblings about Obama's blackness. We can't keep our eyes on the ball and really think about the serious endemic problems of our system of government because we're too busy freaking out like a bunch of cartoon characters over silly, meaningless bulls**t. And then forgetting about that same bulls**t ten minutes later, so that we can freak out all over again about something else later on.

IN OBAMA'S NEW MESSAGE, SOME FOES SEE OLD LIBERALISM
(Alec MacGillis, Washington Post)
As Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, "a down-the-line liberal," as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. "The evidence is that the more [voters] have been learning about him, the more his coalition has been shrinking," Clinton strategist Mark Penn said. The double-barreled attack has presented Democratic voters with some persistent questions about Obama: Just how liberal is he? And even if he truly is a new kind of candidate, can he avoid being pigeonholed with an old label under sustained assault?

HILLARY OR NOBODY?
(Maureen Dowd, New York Times)
While the cool cat’s away, the Hillary mice will play. As Barack Obama was floating in the pool with his daughters the last few days in St. Thomas, some Clinton disciples were floating the idea of St. Hillary as his vice president. She can’t win without him, said one Hillary adviser, and he can’t win without her.  A couple of weeks ago, when Hill and Bill mentioned the possibility of a joint ticket, it was an attempt to undermine Obama and urge voters and superdelegates to put Hillary on top; the implication was that this was the only way Democrats could have both their stars, and besides, it was her turn. The precocious boy wonder had plenty of time. But with the math not in her favor, her options running out, Bill Richardson running out and her filigreed narrative of dodging bullets in Bosnia and securing peace in Northern Ireland unraveling, could Hillary actually think the vice presidency is the best she’ll do?

THE MAVERICK AND THE MEDIA
(Neal Gabler, New York Times)
It is certainly no secret that Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is a darling of the news media. Reporters routinely attach “maverick,” “straight talker” and “patriot” to him like Homeric epithets... What is less obvious, however, is exactly why the press swoons for him. The answer, which says a great deal about both the political press and Mr. McCain, may be that he is something political reporters really haven’t seen in quite a while, perhaps since John F. Kennedy. Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.

WHY HILLARY'S LAST STAND WILL BE NORTH CAROLINA, NOT PENNSYLVANIA
(John Heilemann, New York)
Why is the Tarheel State ostensibly so important? Because, of the nine states (including Puerto Rico) still waiting to hold primaries, it’s the only one in which African-Americans make up north of 10 percent of the population — thus it’s the last opportunity for HRC to score a ringing, unequivocal upset against BHO. (Indeed, blacks are expected to make up as much as a third of the Democratic primary electorate in North Carolina.) Can she do it? Maybe so. Although polls showed Obama ahead by double digits there a month ago, his lead has dwindled to within the margin of error in the most recent major survey... Such a feat would do little to change the math that makes it nearly impossible for Hillary to finish the primary season ahead of Obama in pledged delegates or the popular vote. But it would surely buttress the argument that she and her people are adamantly making to the remaining undecided superdelegates: that buyer’s remorse is setting in among Democrats as they learn more about her rival; that they are slowly waking up to the fact that she and not Obama would be the stronger runner against John McCain.

For weeks, Hillary Clinton was mum on the issue of Jeremiah Wright, Jr., Barack Obama's former pastor.

Not anymore.

On March 21, Patrick Healy of the New York Times reported that Team Clinton had told allies not to "talk openly" about Wright's incendiary remarks--even though they could potentially boost the New York senator's bid. The reason? Fear that "it could create a voter backlash and alienate black Democrats." Besides, Healy added, paraphrasing the Clintonites, "cable television is keeping the issue alive."

But now that the foam has fallen from Bill O'Reilly's mouth--at least in part--it seems that Clinton herself is all too eager to break the self-imposed silence. In an interview today with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the former First Lady told reporters and editors that she--unlike someone we know--would have stampeded from the pews had her pastor made remarks as wrongheaded as Wright's. "He would not have been my pastor," she said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend." She then went on to characterize Wright's statements as "hate speech":

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that. I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

That, in a nutshell, is Clinton's closing argument. Not so much the stuff about how she wouldn't have "chosen" Obama's church, which is reasonable enough. Wright's remarks were, you know, offensive; I wouldn't have stayed either. But Clinton's real goal here isn't to distance herself from a hypothetically offensive minister--it's to control the MSM's coverage of the campaign. Notice the convenient timing: just when the press was fixating on her Bosnia fib. Clinton knows that the moment she mentions Wright--especially to say that Obama was wrong to remain in his flock--hacks like me (and, more importantly, Chris Matthews) will slobber all over it. The result is endless hours of CNN, MSNBC and FOX News replaying the all-too-familiar clips of the good Reverend raising the roof and railing against white America, with Clinton's anti-Wright quote flashing on screen every six seconds or so. Which means that the working-class whites of Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and North Carolina are reminded, yet again, of Obama's "hate"-ful black minister--and Clinton gets to show that she's on their side of the culture war.

It didn't have to be this way. When asked about Wright, Mike Huckabee took the high ground; Clinton, who essentially accused Obama of condoning anti-white hate speech, did not. The reason: Huckabee isn't running against Obama. Clinton's only remaining case for the nomination is, of course, electability. It's no secret that her staff sees the Wright flap as a key part of that rationale. Last week, for example, the Times reported that "Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they had spent recent days making the case to wavering superdelegates that Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Wright would doom their party in the general election." But as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic has written, there's a difference between arguing that Obama is unelectable and actively trying to render him unelectable. The former is hypothetical; the latter, actual. The best way to prove that your opponent can't be elected? Ensure that he isn't elected. That's why Clinton is suddenly broadcasting Obama's association with Wright--and her opposition to it--directly to the citizens of the upcoming primary states (via the obliging media). By actively stoking the racial resentments that Wright aroused and legitimizing the Republican argument against Obama (even after Obama addressed both), Clinton is hoping that she can convince the remaining voters to reject her rival--and thereby prove to the superdelegates, once and for all, that he is, in fact, unelectable.

The thing is, politics may be politics, but it's hard to see how re-demonizing Wright helps Clinton in the end. Sure, she'll sway a few more working-class whites. But at what cost? Alienating black voters, who currently support Obama nine to one, and perhaps losing their presumed general-election support? Angering the half of the party that's already pissed at her for regurgitating Republican attacks on Obama? Encouraging reporters to reexamine the people she's "chosen" to associate with? A week ago, Clinton aides told Healy that they wouldn't mention Wright publicly because "a race-based argument against Mr. Obama’s electability was unappealing and divisive and cut against the image of the Democratic Party and its principles." That much hasn't changed. But apparently Clinton's appetite for destruction has.

UPDATE, 4:50 p.m.: Also, does Clinton really want to compare Wright to Don Imus? At a press conference this afternoon in Pittsburgh, she repeated her remarks on Wright and reminded listeners that she "gave a speech at Rutgers last year saying enough was enough, it’s time to stop the culture of degradation… It is not a license to discriminate or to embarrass. It’s not a license or excuse to demean or humiliate our fellow citizens.” This seems a little off to me. Wright is a beloved preacher who made offensive comments while expressing his earnest outrage--outrage that many blacks share--with institutional inequality in America. Imus is a wealthy white shock jock who called the black women basketball players of Rutgers "nappy-headed hos" because he thought it was funny. Right-wingers love to cry reverse racism when an African-American says something derogatory about white people, but I think it's pretty clear that 200 years of oppression means that blacks and whites are not on the same playing field here. And I'm not sure Clinton wants to suggest otherwise.

By Holly Bailey 

It's a dilemma that pops up every four years: reporters, stuck on buses and planes all day with endless access to junk food but no time for exercise, fret about the pounds they pack on covering the presidential campaign.

Normally the realization that Pringles is not a part of a healthy diet doesn't kick in until closer to Election Day, but reporters covering John McCain's presidential run may have gotten the big hint already. McCain, who is campaigning in Southern California this week, was leaving an event outside San Diego Monday when the press bus got stuck pulling out of parking lot. The problem: it was too heavy. The front wheels ended up slightly suspended in the air (imagine a less dramatic version of the bus jump from the movie "Speed"), while the back end rode so low to the ground it literally wasn't moving. As the bus blocked a lane or two of traffic, campaign aides fretted about what to do.

For the record, this reporter was tailing the motorcade in a rental car, while NEWSWEEK's photographer, greatly amused at the situation, shot pictures of the scene (above) and shouted helpful suggestions on how to remedy the predicament: "Make them get off the bus! Less weight!" In the end, nobody had to disembark. A random set of McCain fans, hanging out in the alley hoping to score the senator's autograph, jumped behind the bus and gave it several healthy heave-hos, and the press again was on its way. Indeed, many reporters on the bus later claimed to have had no idea there was any problem whatsoever. "What?" one innocently claimed. "This happened today?"

When it comes to whether or not she plans to poach Barack Obama's pledged delegates--i.e., the delegates won in primaries or caucuses--Hillary Clinton has been sending some seriously mixed messages.

Here at Stumper headquarters, I've made a habit of tracking statements by the candidate or her campaign on the subject. Let's just say I'm starting to get dizzy. On March 10, I reported that Clinton responded to a question from NEWSWEEK's Suzanne Smalley on how she can win despite the unfavorable delegate math by arguing that "there are elected delegates, caucus delegates and super-delegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to." Clinton, of course, was right; pledged delegates don't have to stand by their man--or woman. But that wouldn't stop Obama supporters from screaming bloody murder. Coming in the wake of Feb. 19 report on Politico.com, which cited "high-ranking Clinton official" confirming that the "campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination" and Stumper's own interview with Elaine Kamarck, a Clinton-supporting member of the DNC's Rules Committee, who predicted that both Dems will "try to raid the other candidate's delegates," the New York senator's suspicious statement led us to conclude that "when push comes to shove this summer, it's going to be every man for himself." Still, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer maintained that "we have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama."

But Singer's stance got a little shakier later that week. On March 14, I reported that Iowa county delegates pledged to Obama were receiving robocalls from the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the coming county conventions (when such delegates can switch their allegiances). Claiming that the Iowa Democratic Party had provided the campaign with an incomplete list of delegate affiliations, Singer said that "the point of the call is to identify our delegates." But a quick check with the IDP revealed that "80 percent" of the county delegates were, in fact, linked to their chosen candidates on the lists sent to the campaigns--including at least one Obama supporter, Lance Jenkins, who specifically reported receiving the Clinton robocall. Noting that the call included 30-45 seconds of Clinton talking points, I concluded that the campaign was likely threading a needle. "If this is "delegate poaching"--which, I remind you, is totally legit--it's the mildest, most passive form imaginable," I wrote. "Keep track of how many delegates you have and, by getting your message out, maybe pick up a few." That said, it still seemed like an effort to sway a rival's supporters. At the time, I wondered if "these 'identification with benefits' robocalls [would] reappear in the run-up to the convention."

I'm wondering no more. In an interview yesterday with the editorial board of the Philadelphia Daily News, Clinton was again asked how she plans to win the nomination if she trails Obama in the pledged-delegate tally and popular vote at the end of regulation. And again she signaled that her opponent's pledged delegates are up for grabs. "I just don't think this is over yet, and I don't think that it is smart for us to take a position that might disadvantage us in November," she said. "And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They're just like superdelegates... There are different ways to become a delegate, there are delegates from caucuses, there are delegates from primaries, and there are the appointed delegates, they're all equal, they all have an equal vote--those are the rules of the Democratic Party." You don't say.

At this point, I seriously doubt that Clinton is just, you know, explaining the rules to us rubes. Has she admitted that she will pursue Obama's pledged delegates? No. But as the Daily news concluded, she "sure implied" as much. Who knows how the former First Lady plans to sway her opponent's flock. Perhaps with passive, Iowa-style robocalls. Perhaps, as Kamarck suggested, by launching a "very elaborate, very expensive war room" where her staff will make "an intense effort to move people from one camp to the other." Or perhaps by simply hoping that, after wins in Pennsylvania and, say, Puerto Rico, Obama's supporters will magically realize the error of their ways and come crawling back.

But whatever tactics Clinton is considering, her identical, repeated responses to the "how do you plan to win?" question leave no doubt in my mind:

To the inhabitants of Hillaryland, pledged delegates are fair game.

UPDATE, 11:30 a.m.: On a conference call this morning with reporters, according to the Politico, Clinton adviser Harold Ickes said “there’s no party rule” binding delegates to their candidate. “Obviously, circumstances can change,” he continued, that can cast doubt on a candidate’s viability. But spokesman Phil Singer quickly jumped in. “We are not seeking or asking pledged delegates for Sen. Obama to flip over," he said, "So please don’t make any mistake about that.”

Note the "are not seeking or asking." Delightful. As one commenter put it:

Clinton Doublespeak Translation Time: (A) "There are no rules that say we can't steal pledged." (B) "But don't worry we won't steal them." (C) "But we could steal them if we wanted to."

So what's happening here? Chris Orr at the New Republic sums it up nicely:

The larger question, of course, is why the Clinton campaign keeps going out of its way to raise this point even after they have explicitly, and adamantly, claimed they have no intention of going after Barack Obam's pledged delegates...I think the best, perhaps only, explanation is Josh Marshall's "fog of nonsense" thesis: By repeatedly raising the possibility of pledged delegates flipping (and getting people discussing improbable scenarios such as the above), they muddy the waters. They make it seem possible that the delegate math isn't as incontrovertibly against them as it is, that something might change, that it's still early in the race, that "anybody can vote for anybody," that nobody knows anything. 

UPDATE, 12:20 a.m.: Amid all the hubbub about poaching, it bears repeating that (as I wrote on March 10) "pledged delegates are hand-picked supporters, so it's nearly impossible to imagine them flipping in the middle of a race--especially one that's this competitive." Despite her "efforts" in Iowa, Clinton actually LOST one delegate. And as Marc Ambinder notes, "even in 1992, only one delegate, as I recall, switched away from Bill Clinton amid the series of potentially disastrous controversies he weathered during his march to the nomination." In other words, it's not clear that the potential benefit--minuscule delegate gains--would outweigh the politically disastrous effect that poaching would have on at least half the party. More reason to believe the whole "fog of nonsense" idea...

While I was on vacation, NEWSWEEK's Sarah Elkins spoke to Ron Paul about why he's still running for president--even though, with 14 delegates, he trails John McCain by 1246 and has admitted that "victory in the conventional political sense is not available in the presidential race." It's a fascinating interview. Excerpts:

ELKINS: At this point, the most obvious question is: why are you still doing it? Life on the trail is exhausting, and John McCain has already won the Republican nomination. What keeps you going out there?
Ron Paul: First off, I don't really feel exhausted at all. There were certainly times when I was [exhausted], when there were six or eight or 10 primaries to campaign for. But right now I feel really rested because I came back to Texas and paid attention to my congressional race, which we won easily with 70 percent of the vote [Paul won the GOP nomination, and does not face a Democratic opponent this fall]. So I had time to rest and rethink things, and I feel really good about [the race]. Right now, out of 11 [original Republican presidential] candidates, I'm still out there. We have time and we're still in the race, picking up delegates here and there, and the troops are still very enthusiastic ... I think what I've done over the years is different from other people running for office, because most of the time people run for only one reason, which is to win a political office. They go out and they take polls and figure out what they need to say because the goal of winning comes before anything else. In my case, winning is important, but I need to win on principles that are important to me. If I win on other peoples' principles, I lose.

OK, but at some point you've got to think "enough is enough." When do you decide it's time to throw in the towel?
I will keep campaigning for as long as people are supporting me and the money is there and that's what they want. I feel badly about just quitting. We have 30,000 voters on our list in Pennsylvania, and if I just quit tomorrow--and people can make a case for that: how long should I do this?--I would feel badly. I would feel as though I had let them down. So for me, it's indefinite.

You said earlier that your "troops" are still very enthusiastic, but they've got to be at least somewhat discouraged. What seems to be the general mood among your supporters right now?
It's a mixed bag. I would say 95 percent are just happy with what we've done and continue to do. Of course, others are discouraged and say, "Well, we should have done better, we should have done better," but the rest are so energetic. They say we should keep going and they almost believe some kind of miracle is going to happen [laughs]. I try to keep them grounded in reality. But we are going to the convention, and my job is to tell [my supporters] not to be discouraged. For me, I never expected any of this to happen a year ago. I'd say overall it's been 100 times more successful than I ever dreamed.

You mention going to the convention. Is that something you are definitely expecting to do?
Yeah, sort of. I never thought it was about to happen, actually. I've always assumed it was not likely. But I think from the [Republican Party's] viewpoint, it couldn't hurt them. It would be wise on their part to give me a little time at the convention--what would it hurt to let me talk about monetary policy? I would be polite, and that is an important issue, especially given that the dollar is on the ropes.

Will you encourage your supporters to back McCain in the general election?
I'm not going to tell them what to do, but I honestly can't imagine any of them supporting him. That would be a tough sale. The odds of him all of a sudden coming to one of our rallies and being cheered on are not very high.

You doubt your supporters will vote for McCain, but it's generally political protocol for someone in your position to endorse the party's nominee. Will you throw your weight behind McCain?
I think that's very unlikely. The analogy I've used is that Goldwater led a movement, but that didn't mean that every Goldwater person later voted for Nixon. The Goldwater people backed Reagan. You don't have to support people who you don't believe in just because they are in the party...

READ THE REST HERE.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

ONE BRUISING SCENARIO FOR CLINTON
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
There remains at least one scenario where Mrs. Clinton could win. It is an increasingly unlikely one and one that could traumatize the Democratic Party. Still, it gives succor to her supporters, and presumably Mrs. Clinton herself, and is something to keep in mind watching the two of them head toward the endgame of their contest. First of all, Mrs. Clinton not only has to win Pennsylvania on April 22, she has to swamp Mr. Obama there. And she has to go on and post a convincing win against Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state where the two appear evenly matched. Results like those would serve to underscore concerns among some Democrats that arose after Mrs. Clinton had beaten Mr. Obama in Ohio, suggesting he was having trouble getting blue-collar white voters into his column. It is one constituency that aides to Mr. McCain see very much in play this fall. Along the same lines, Mrs. Clinton would get some wind if she trounces Mr. Obama in the June 3 contest in Puerto Rico. Mr. Obama has had trouble in competing for Latino voters... But these two factors alone would would not be enough. What Mrs. Clinton is going to need is for Mr. Obama to suffer a collapse in polls in hypothetical match-ups with Mr. McCain at the time superdelegates are being pressed to make up their minds.

THE LONG DEFEAT
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance... For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group. For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance. When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE
(Spencer Ackerman, American Prospect)
To understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place? To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

OBAMA'S TEST: CAN A LIBERAL BE A UNIFIER?
(Robin Toner, New York Times) 
Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year? Also, and more immediately, if Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination, how will his promise of a new and less polarized type of politics fare against the Republican attacks that since the 1980s have portrayed Democrats as far out of step with the country’s values? To many political strategists, the furor over the racial views of Mr. Obama’s former pastor is only the first of many such tests the senator will face if he is the nominee.

INDIANA SHAPES UP AS STATE OF PARITY FOR DEMOCRATS
(Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post)
Something unusual appears to be developing in the Democratic presidential race in this state: a fair fight. Wedged between Illinois, which is Sen. Barack Obama's home state, and Ohio, which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton dominated on March 4, Indiana may be the one state remaining on the primary calendar where both candidates begin with a roughly equal chance of coming out ahead. That fact alone makes it stand out from states such as Pennsylvania, where the playing field for the April 22 contest offers big advantages to Clinton (N.Y.), or the Oregon race a month later, which clearly tilts toward Obama.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Ah, outrage. There's nothing like it to keep political partisans up at night. Two particular offenses to dignity are driving the conversation today--one for Barack Obama, and one for Hillary Clinton--so we here at Stumper headquarters thought we'd take a deep breath and weigh in on the brewing "controversies." Or "fracases." Or "spats." Or "imbroglios." Or whatever.

First up is Clinton. Back in 1996, the then-First Lady organized a solo trip to war-torn Bosnia. It was a laudable effort; she toured the front lines in lieu of her husband and brought relief both comic (Sinbad) and musical (Sheryl Crow) to the troops. Recently, however, Clinton has taken to citing the trip as evidence of her vast foreign policy experience, telling audiences in Ohio and elsewhere that she was sent to places that the president could not go because they were "too dangerous"--a claim that Sinbad, for one, was quick to rebut. "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you,'" he told the Washington Post earlier this month. Clinton's response? To inject even more drama into the story. Speaking at George Washington University last week, she regaled the crowd with a tale of "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

The problem? The story is kinda sorta false. From the Washington Post's indispensable Fact Checker:

Had Hillary Clinton's plane come "under sniper fire" in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including The Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the first lady. "As a former AP wire-service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," Pomfret said. According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996 and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

In case you don't trust a dirty journalist--and really, who can blame you?--there's this video, from CBS's contemporaneous report on the trip, to prove that Clinton is, well, fibbing:

Notice the marked absence of sniper fire or frantic running for safety. Predictably, the Obama camp circulated the clip to reporters this afternoon under the heading "Must-See Video," noting that the Post had awarded Clinton "four Pinocchios" for stretching the truth. "Let’s just say that Geppetto would not be proud," wrote spokesman Tommy Vietor. "The Tuzla story, now thoroughly debunked, joins a growing list of instances in which Senator Clinton has exaggerated her role in foreign and domestic policymaking."

Should we be as outraged as Vietor? Eh. In a conference call this morning, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson admitted that "it is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke in regard to the exit from the plane." That much is inarguable. But in her memoir, Living History, Clinton DID write that "due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children"--and she wasn't running for president when the book was released in 2003. What's more, the senator has described the event similarly many times since, and her recent slip was not, as Vietor suggests, included in her "prepared remarks," but rather a transcript of her speech released more than an hour after last week's event. So we're willing say that it was an off-the-cuff, politically expedient exaggeration, and not part of an insidious pattern of falsehood. Think Al Gore--not, like, Eliot Spitzer.

OUTRAGE-OMETER: Five out of 10.

Now for Obama. On his blog, Gordon Fischer, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairman and current Obama adviser in the Hawkeye State, wrote this morning that  former President Bill Clinton's comments in front of a North Carolina VFW Hall, which Obama supporters heard as impugning Obama's patriotism, were "a stain on his legacy, much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress." The Clintonites quickly pounced. On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer called it the "most personal attack yet," saying the Obama campaign is being "fueled by insult and slander." Fischer immediately apologized, and Vietor released a statement saying that "comments like this have no place in our political dialogue." But Team Clinton wouldn't loosen its grip, insisting that no apology was necessary because Fischer's statement was "in keeping with the tenor of the Obama campaign."

How angry should we be? Not very. Despite the constant, predictable cycle of surrogate gaffes, manufactured outrage and under-the-bus maneuvers, the candidates themselves have been pretty civil this time around. It's simply ridiculous to say the Obama campaign--one of the more strenuously positive in recent memory--has been "fueled by insult and slander." Same goes for Clinton's. Have things gotten heated from time to time? Sure. But in the words of Clinton supporter James Carville, that's politics. "This sort of hyper-sensitivity diminishes everyone who engages in it," he recently wrote. So unless you think that Fischer's admittedly lewd remark somehow reflects his boss's thinking, there's no reason to get your knickers in a twist.

OUTRAGE-OMETER: Two out of 10. 

That said, Obama HAS given us all something to be outraged about. While Stumper slaves away in cloudy, 45-degree Brooklyn, the Democratic frontrunner is spending three days on the beach in--wait for it--St. Thomas. Walking along the shore Sunday, Obama was soon spotted by a family of U.S. tourists, including a six-year-old girl who had just finished an Easter Egg hunt. The two posed for a photo together. No politics involved--the Virgin Islands voted on Feb. 9. Just sun, surf and sand.

So unfair.

OUTRAGE-OMETER: Ten out of 10.

It's no secret--at least to people who are paying attention to this year's presidential contest--that Hillary Clinton's case for the Democratic nomination has grown, well, thinner over time. Her first hope was to catch rival Barack Obama in the race for pledged delegates with wins in big states like New York, California, Ohio and Texas, but it quickly became clear to everyone involved--including her staffers--that Obama's massive caucus-state blowouts had made it mathematically impossible for the New York senator to erase his 150-delegate lead by the end of regulation. Next, her advisers turned to the popular vote, arguing that a win there might give the party leaders known as superdelegates a reason to choose her over Obama. The only problem? Now that effort to schedule revotes in Florida and Michigan have collapsed, the vox populi arithmetic appears nearly impossible as well. With 10 states (or an estimated five million people) left to vote, Clinton would need an unprecedented "57 percent to 43 percent overall victory, including expected defeats in states counting for well over 1 million votes," to surpass Obama in the ballot battle, according to the Politico's Ben Smith. Snowball, meet hell.

Clearly, the Clintonites could use a new type of calculus. Enter Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. Last night on CNN "Late Edition," Bayh, an avid Clinton backer, suggested that superdelegates consider "who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes" when choosing which candidate to support. "[It] is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” said Bayh. The underlying principle is nothing new. As Amy Chozick reports in today's Wall Street Journal, "the Clinton campaign has been using the big-state argument on and off since Super Tuesday" to plead that, while Obama has won among "affluent voters in caucuses and primaries in states with small populations of Democrats -- such as Idaho and Wyoming -- and among African Americans in Republican states unlikely to turn blue in November," Clinton's victories "in big states such as California and Ohio make [her] a stronger candidate to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain." But Bayh's Electoral College equation superimposes a layer of tidy quantifiablility over the whole argument, which is supposed to make it sound more convincing. Numbers, good. Subjectivity, bad.

But is Bayh's calculus actually convincing? Logically, no. Practically? We'll see. The actual electoral vote tally--219 for Clinton, not counting Florida and Michigan, versus 202 for Obama--is pretty meaningless. As Slate's Jeff Greenfield has argued, it's stupid to assume that primary contests can provide a guide to the fall campaign; there's no chance that Obama will lose California (or New York) next November just because Clinton beat him there on Super Tuesday. That said, Bayh's equation is designed to symbolize a subtler measure of strength. As everyone knows, neither Clinton nor Obama will reach the magic number of delegates by the end of primary season in June, meaning that only the 330 or so remaining uncommitted superdelegates can put someone over the top. And despite what Team Obama says--that supers are morally bound to choose the candidate with the most pledged delegates--there is, in fact, no such rule. Superdelegates can do whatever the heck they want. The important thing for Bayh, then, isn't that Clinton leads Obama in overall "electoral votes"--it's that she has trounced (or is expected to trounce) him in the key, big-ticket electoral swing states, where she now runs stronger against McCain in local opinion polls. In Ohio, for example, Obama loses to McCain by an average of seven points; Clinton edges the Arizona senator by an average of 0.3 percent. It's a similar story Pennsylvania, where Clinton averages two points better than Obama versus McCain. In Florida, she leads Obama by four. Most of these results are within the margin of error, and, again, November is a whole different ballgame. But Bayh (and, by extension, Clinton) is hoping that at the end of primary season, the supers will do the "electoral math" and decide that Clinton, who runs stronger among blue-collar Dems and Latinons, has a better chance of retaining Pennsylvania and recapturing either Florida or Ohio--meaning that she's more, you know, "electable."

Like it or not, it's the sacred right of the superdelegates to make such a decision. Do I expect them to buy Bayh's new arithmetic? Not really. The vast majority of these poo-bahs are politicians, and the last thing they want is Obama's half of the party accusing them of overturning "the will of the people." But the electoral equation is Clinton's only remaining rationale--and there's no reason to think she won't keep hammering it until the last dog dies. Or at least until another one comes along.

UPDATE, 3:40 p.m.: The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn has a smart take on the subject:

I am not prepared to dismiss entirely the idea--floated on a few occasions by Clinton supporters--that she might be stronger in the states that matter most for the general election. If Obama's problems with Latino and blue collar whites persist, he might have a harder time than she would in Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennyslvania -- all states where Pollster.com has Clinton running stronger right now. (Obama also seems to put New Jersey into play.) That's a lot of electoral votes to cede. Even if you assume, as some Obama supporters do, that he'd run stronger in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain states, she'd come out ahead. The huge, elephant-size caveat here is that predicting November matchups this far out is very hazardous business. The new Gallup poll suggests Obama has already made up much of the ground nationally that he lost becuase of the Reverend Wright controversy.  And if Obama supporters decide to stay home on election day because they decide Clinton came upon the nomination illegitimately, I assume the poll numbers we're seeing now will look a lot worse for her. So, as I've said many times, the best strategy is probably not to weigh electability much--if at all. (And that goes for the superdelegates, too.)

Sound advice. But as the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder notes, "John Edwards, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid – if these folks came together and threw their weight behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton would probably drop out by the end of the week. But the party elders have in some cases explicitly abstained from making such a determination because in their minds, the racetrack is open and the horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around." It's up to the superdelegates to decide--and they don't think it's over. Neither should we.

As numerous pundits and prognosticators--including yours truly, circa last August--have pointed out, the defining dynamic of the deadlocked battle for the Democratic nomination is the divide between blue-collar, low-information "beer-track" voters, who tend to favor Hillary Clinton, and college-educated "wine-track" types, who flock to Barack Obama.

Apparently, no one told the brewmasters at Sixpoint Craft Ales in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Early last week--during my self-imposed Spring Break from Blogging--I stumbled across an announcement that the small local microbrewery had just released 30 kegs of what it called "a tribute to the inspiration that has been Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign": Hop Obama Ale. The Illinois senator is no stranger to serendipitous product placement. "Obama Girl" still scampers around in her skivvies. Jay Jay French, guitarist for the schlocky '80s hair-metal combo Twisted Sister, has re-recorded the band's hit "I Wanna Rock" as "I Want Barack."  And I'd be surprised if Obamaniacs Ben & Jerry aren't preparing to pack pints with Yes, Pecan! in time for Election Day. But a beer? Last fall, a local winery in Dubuque, Iowa produced an alcoholic beverage with the Obama logo emblazoned on the bottle. It was a white zinfandel. That tipple matches the demographic trends; a brewski, to put it mildly, does not.

But when it comes to drinking, demography isn't exactly the most important factor. Taste is. Which is why last Wednesday I broke my promise to abstain from all things political and dutifully trudged the two blocks from my Brooklyn apartment to Pacific Standard, one of the few bars to receive a shipment of Hop Obama (the release was limited to New York and Massachusetts). According to Sixpoint brewmaster Shane Welch, "Hop Obama is an indefinable ale that doesn't adhere to traditional style guidelines"--"in keeping with the Illinois senator's unifying theme." My goal: to find out, by sampling a pint (or two, or three) whether Welch's description was "just words"--a smart marketing scheme--or whether Hop Obama was actually "Obamaesque." All in the name of reporting, of course. The things I do for Newsweek.

So did Hop Obama live up to the hype? The proprietors of Pacific Standard, John Rauschenberg and Jon Stan, were clearly excited about the brew.  When Welch, a regular customer, mentioned in early March that he was cooking up an Obama tribute beer, Rauschenberg immediately reserved four kegs (the one-bar limit), ordered a smiling bobblehead Obama doll (see tap handle, above) and decided to donate a dollar from each $6 pint to the campaign. I plunked mine down, and a few seconds later, 16 oz. of deep amber booze were awaiting me on the bar. Right away, I noticed that Hop Obama does, in fact, resemble the senator--conceptually, at least. Made from five different types of European Crystal malts and three hop varieties from the Pacific Northwest, it's a hybrid blend of diverse strains, neither dark nor light in color. Time for the taste test. I took a sip. My first impression? Lots of hops, which means "exotic" citrus flavors (orange, mostly) and a blast of bitterness. But it was quickly counteracted by an unsubtle rush of maltiness--sweet traces of toffee and brown sugar, coupled with an almost sticky mouthfeel. Strong on character? Check. Light on details? Check. Striking a balance between bitter and sweet? Check. Tending, at times, toward the syrupy? Check. 

Tasted like Obama to me.

Apparently, my fellow Brooklynites--at least the ones in my Obama-friendly 'hood--agreed. The fourth and final keg of Hop Obama was kicked eleven days after the brew first appeared on tap at Pacific Standard. "It was by far out best-selling beer," says Stan. "Like, five times better than anything else on the list." According to Welch, the rest of the batch isn't expected to last through April. So let that be a lesson to you, Sen. Clinton. Unless you're content to cede your beer-track base to Obama, Stumper recommends brewing up a few cases of Hillaryish beer--ASAP.

And no, Brooklyn Brewery's "Monster Ale" doesn't count.

Hey everyone,

The headline says it all. After a week spent recovering from bloggeritis, I'm back in the saddle. A big thanks to Holly Bailey, Suzanne Smalley, Katie Paul, Arian Campo-Flores, Catharine Skipp and Richard Wolffe, who held down the fort while I was away. New posts coming soon.

Best,
Andrew
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

POLICY BRIEFING: Clinton, Obama and McCain on how they plan to revive the economy.

8 QUESTIONS THAT WILL SHAPE WHERE THE RACE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION GOES FROM HERE
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
What is the most likely outcome of the dispute over the delegations from Florida and Michigan? What remaining state contests will be most important and why?  What is Clinton's path to the nomination? Has Obama successfully dealt with the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.? Will the nomination battle go all the way to the convention? Will Democrats unite after the Obama-Clinton fight ends? Has McCain succeeded in uniting Republicans behind his bid? Would Clinton or Obama be the stronger foe against McCain?

SLOUCHING TOWARD DENVER
(Noam Scheiber, New Republic)
Each day Clinton and Obama spend consumed with the other is a day that moves John McCain closer to the White House. McCain's biggest asset is his political brand, which evokes a straight-talking, party-bucking reformer. Among his biggest liabilities is the suspicion he inspires among conservatives thanks to these same attributes. McCain apparently plans to spend the next few months making nice with his base. But anything he accomplishes on this front clearly diminishes his swing-voter appeal and, therefore, his chances in November. Ideally, the Democrats would be exploiting this tension like mad. They would highlight the anti-Catholic, anti-gay ravings of John Hagee, the evangelical minister whose endorsement McCain recently accepted. They would ridicule his chumminess with supply-side Neanderthals like Jack Kemp and his flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts. They'd dwell on McCain's less-noticed association with crony-capitalists during his tenure as Commerce Committee chairman. Instead, something close to the opposite is happening. McCain's courtship of the lunatic right and his ties to K Street have largely been hidden from view, while the Democrats' dirty laundry has been aired for swing voters. The upshot for Democrats has not been good.

A PRESENT FOR MCCAIN AS THE OTHER SIDE FIGHTS
(John Harwood, New York Times)
Feuding Democrats have handed Senator John McCain the gift of time. How well he uses it may determine his chance to beat them in November. At the moment, Republicans can savor protracted warfare between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. As the Democratic rivals trade attacks, Mr. McCain, already the presumptive Republican nominee, has crept ahead of both in national polls. Yet Mr. McCain’s advisers recognize their long-term challenges in a remarkably threatening political environment. Voters remain weary of the Iraq war, worried about the economy and disenchanted with the lame-duck Republican president. The Democratic fight is largely personal. But Mr. McCain, of Arizona, faces ideological strains as he leads Republicans beyond the Bush era. Meanwhile, Democrats have expanded their base, and they have the turnout figures and campaign cash to prove it. "All of the energy has been on the Democrat side,” conceded Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager. “That’s a hurdle for us.

WHY OBAMA'S SPEECH ON RACE WON'T HELP HIM BEAT MCCAIN
(John Heilemann, New York Magazine)
The hard guys of the Republican Party have no intention of trying to paint the hope- monger as a closet black nationalist. They intend to portray him as insufficiently allegiant to his nation. They will weave together Wright’s “God damn America” with Michelle Obama’s statement that this is the “first time” she has been “proud of my country,” Obama’s eschewal of the American-flag lapel pin, and a piece of video that captures him standing at a campaign event without his hand over his heart during the national anthem... Obama knows that this is coming. He has his answer ready: that a lot has changed in twenty years; that voters want to move past the kind of politics that “uses patriotism as a cudgel”; that they are burning, yearning, to declare, as he put it in his speech last week, “Not this time.” One hears him say these sorts of things and hopes, audaciously, that he is right. Then one sees the Republicans licking their chops and fears that he is not.

MORE: Native Son (George Packer, New Yorker)
For half a century, right-wing populism has been the most successful political force in America, aided greatly by the tendency of liberals to fall into the competing claims of identity groups. Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

BOTH OBAMA AND CLINTON EMBELLISH THEIR ROLES
(Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post)
Unlike governors, business leaders or vice presidents, senators -- the last to win the presidency was John F. Kennedy in 1960 -- are not executives. They cannot be held to account for the state of their states, their companies or their administrations. What they do have is the mark they leave on the nation's laws -- and in Obama's brief three-year tenure, as well as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's seven-year hitch, those marks are far from indelible. "It's not an unusual matter for senators to take a little extra credit," Specter said.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

By Katie Paul 

When even bedazzlingly bad celebrity fashion is getting in on the March Madness action, it’s only natural that politics would too.

Political junkies have been all atwitter of late analyzing each candidate’s picks for their NCAA Final Four brackets. Might the inclusion of a Pennsylvania team be a political ploy, we wonder? Are the would-be leaders of the free world savvy strategists? One columnist at college paper has gone so far as to assign each candidate a different basketball team alter ego. Barack Obama’s campaign staff is in for a $10 per person pool, while John McCain’s team is running a bracket contest of its very own on his Website, through which basketball buffs can win McCain campaign gear and—oh yes, by the way—donate to the campaign. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, deferred to her ‘basketball advisor,’ her husband, on this one.

In case you’re wondering, their picks are (in no particular order):

Barack Obama: North Carolina, Kansas, Pittsburgh, UCLA
Billary Clinton: North Carolina, Georgetown, Memphis, UCLA
John McCain: North Carolina, Kansas, Memphis, Connecticut

But wait, there’s more! If you relish the competitive spirit, but thought your office mates were talking about shelving when they discussed their brackets, you might consider playing politics to join in on the fun. The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies is hosting its third annual Tournament of the Presidents, where users debate and place March Madness-style votes on which former president the current candidates should look to as a guide—or, as they put it, “where commanders in chief go head to head.” Or, if a game just isn’t a game unless there’s money involved, then there’s always Intrade.

Either way, you don’t have to let the sports addicts have all the fun while you’re hard at work. Office distractions ought to be equal opportunity activities. Game on.

By Suzanne Smalley 

The news just keeps getting worse for Hillary Clinton. Even as her staff keeps working, peppering journalists with memos attacking the Obama campaign, the senator is hunkered down for a much deserved yet very out of character long Easter weekend break at her Chappaqua, NY manse. The respite comes as it becomes increasingly clear that much sought-after Michigan and Florida revotes are almost definitely not going to happen and as new troubles for the New York senator crop up on all fronts.

One big problem dropped on the campaign like an anvil this morning, as news broke that erstwhile presidential contender and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would announce his endorsement of Barack Obama today. Richardson is the country’s only Hispanic governor. Equally important, perhaps, is the fact that he served not once, but twice, in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, as Secretary of Energy and UN Ambassador. Aside from Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, and Al Gore, his endorsement is arguably the most sought after of all the Democratic powerbrokers. So we can all feel free to ignore Mark Penn’s understandably spirited but laughable assertion on a conference call with reporters today that both campaigns “have our endorsers” and Richardson’s defection to Obama is not “significant.”

Richardson is not the only problem the embattled Clinton campaign faces this Good Friday. Equally troubling are revelations from Clinton’s schedules as First Lady, which the Obama campaign say suggest Clinton is untrustworthy because they show she held five meetings about NAFTA in 1993, apparently in an effort to help get Congressional approval for one of her husband’s signature initiatives. While it is unclear what she said at the meetings, the schedules have been widely reported to document her role as a NAFTA booster. Hitting back yesterday, the Clinton campaign released a memo asserting that, “It is no secret that passing NAFTA was a priority of the Clinton Administration, but numerous contemporary accounts make clear that Hillary Clinton was personally opposed to NAFTA.” Today, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson went further, arguing on a conference call that “there’s been a lot of erroneous reporting on this” and saying Clinton was, in fact, “pushing back” on the legislation.  

Then there’s the possibly illegal peek by State Department employees at Obama’s passport file (Clinton’s also was reportedly improperly looked at last year, as was John McCain's). While there is no evidence that the Clinton camp had anything to do with the breach, potentially damaging innuendo is already surfacing. Meanwhile, a picture of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright visiting the White House and embracing Bill Clinton during his presidency was leaked to the media. Talk about the kitchen sink. Another month of this sort of vitriol and the Democratic Party will find itself hobbling into Denver.

Clinton’s advisers say they are committed to a peaceful resolution to the current chaos. “If every element has its role, the party will come together and certainly you can rest assured that the Clintons…will do everything in their power to bring the party together,” Penn told reporters today. But he quickly added: “This is a very, very close race….It’s not a race where you can get to a majority based on pledged delegates alone.” Penn also appeared to back away from previous campaign assertions that Clinton needs a popular vote win to claw back to the top and wrest the nomination from Obama, saying that many factors will come into play and the time for the conversation about what Clinton needs to do to make a legitimate claim will come after all the votes are counted. Perhaps the best bottom line summary of the call came from Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer, who suggested that long weekend in Chappaqua aside, there’s a lot of fight left in the Clinton camp. “We feel very confident that at the end of the day we are the most electable candidate,” Singer said, “because we believe that Senator Clinton will be the best president.”

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

BREAKING: BILL RICHARDSON ENDORSES OBAMA

MOTIVE SOUGHT FOR OBAMA PASSPORT BREACH
(Anne Gearan, Associated Press)
The State Department says it is trying to determine whether three contract workers had a political motive for looking at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file. Two of the employees were fired for the security breach and the third was disciplined but is still working, the department said Thursday night. It would not release the names of those who were fired and disciplined or the names of the two companies for which they worked. The department's inspector general is investigating. The disclosure of inappropriate passport inquiries recalled an incident in 1992, when a Republican political appointee at the State Department was demoted over a search of presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport records. At the time he was challenging President George H.W. Bush. The State Department's inspector general said the official had helped arrange the search in an attempt to find politically damaging information about Clinton, who had been rumored to have considered renouncing his citizenship to avoid the Vietnam War draft. 

CAN CLINTON WIN POPULAR VOTE, SUPERDELEGATES?
(Ben Smith, Politico)
The apparent collapse of planned new votes in Florida and Michigan could push victory on a key symbolic measure — the primary season popular vote — beyond Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s grasp... It’s impossible to project turnout in the 10 states and territories left to vote, but Clinton will have to close a deficit of more than 700,000 votes. That means, even with extremely high turnout estimates, she would have to win by huge, double-digit percentages in the states where she could have an edge — Pennsylvania and West Virginia — while holding Obama to tiny gains in states such as North Carolina and Oregon, where he is heavily favored.  Without those blowouts, many influential Democrats contend, she will find it hard to convince superdelegates of a legitimate victory. 

ANOTHER ANGRY BLACK PREACHER
(E.J. Dionne, Washington Post)
One black leader who was capable of getting very angry indeed is the one now being invoked against Wright. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. .... Wright was operating within a long tradition of African American outrage, which is one reason Obama could not walk away from his old pastor in the name of political survival... I loathe the anti-American things Wright said precisely because I believe that the genius of our country is its capacity for self-correction. Progressivism and, yes, hope itself depend on a belief that personal conversion and social change are possible, that flawed human beings are capable of transcending their pasts and their failings. Obama understands the anger of whites as well as the anger of blacks, but he's placed a bet on the other side of King's legacy that converted rage into the search for a beloved community. This does not prove that Obama deserves to be president. It does mean that he deserves to be judged on his own terms and not by the ravings of an angry preacher.

MORE: McCain Aide Circulates Obama/Wright Video, Is Suspended (Politico) 

SOUTHWEST PASSAGE
(Thomas Schaller, American Prospect)
McCain represents Arizona, the fastest-growing state in the nation's fastest-growing and increasingly pivotal electoral region, the Southwest. Couple his home region advantage with his prominent leadership role on the immigration issue and the man whom anti-amnesty conservatives openly deride as "Juan McCain" is, in theory at least, the Republicans' best chance to keep the Hispanic-heavy Southwest in the GOP's column this November. "It completely screws [the Democrats' Southwest ambitions] up," McCain adviser Charles Black recently told The Washington Post. "We nominated the one person who will not suffer that backlash." Can McCain thwart the Democrats from capturing the Southwest in 2008? Or will history remember him as the Republican who, home state aside, was responsible for finally letting the Southwest slip from red to blue?

CLINTON, OBAMA ARE WALL STREET DARLINGS
(Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times)
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who are running for president as economic populists, are benefiting handsomely from Wall Street donations, easily surpassing Republican John McCain in campaign contributions from the troubled financial services sector. It is part of a broader fundraising shift toward Democrats, compared to past campaigns when Republicans were the favorites of Wall Street. Some Democrats worry that the influx of money will make their candidates less willing to call for increased regulation of financial markets, which have been in turmoil after a wave of foreclosures on sub-prime mortgages... The candidates' receipts reflect a broader trend that demonstrates how money follows power in Washington. It suggests that the nation's money managers are betting heavily that either Clinton or Obama will capture the White House and that Democrats will retain control of Congress.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

By Richard Wolffe

The comparisons between Democratic candidates and John F. Kennedy are often overblown. But when Barack Obama rolled into Charleston, West Virginia, on Thursday, the locals were struck by at least one parallel.

On his first campaign swing to West Virginia, Obama delivered a hard-hitting speech detailing how the war in Iraq had cost in economic terms. ("For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students," he told supporters at the University of Charleston.)

In introducing Obama, Gov. Joe Manchin said, "The last time we had this type of excitement in the state of West Virginia, I was a young boy in 1960…John Kennedy was at that time coming through on the historic campaign that he ran. The rest is history. West Virginia has gone down in history for putting him over the top."

Obama's staffers did not miss the opportunity to play up the comparison, distributing copies a story from the Charleston Daily Mail from April 11, 1960, detailing Kennedy's visit. The crux of the story was about religion. Kennedy was campaigning as a Catholic candidate in a state that was 95 per cent Protestant--an issue that seemed to obsess political insiders then as much as Obama's race and his own African-American church today.

"The primary is expected to shed some light on a question that haunts many Democratic professionals," said the Charleston story from 1960, written by the Associated Press. "Would the election chances of Kennedy, if he were to become the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee in 32 years, be seriously hurt by his religion?"

 By David Noonan

I don't know exactly how or why it has suddenly become so popular, but can everyone please stop using any and all variations of the term "throw INSERT NAME HERE under the bus?" Yes, I'm talking to you Jonathan Alter. You, too, Maureen Dowd. I'm talking to all of you pundits and talking heads out there who have been tossing this weary figure of speech around lately as if it were a shiny new nickel. Barack Obama threw his grandmother under the bus this week during his speech on race. Roger Clemens threw his wife Debbie under the bus last month during his appearance before a congressional committee when he admitted she had used HGH. Also last month, MSNBC threw reporter David Shuster under the bus (according to Shuster, who used the dreaded phrase in an interview) after he said on air that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out." And I am going to throw myself under the bus if I hear or read the stupid cliche one more time. William Safire actually addressed this hoary mass transit metaphor in his New York Times Magazine column in November 2006. Do you realize how long ago that was? Hillary Clinton hadn't even announced she was running for president yet! (In the column, Safire quoted a slang expert who said the term had its roots in sports and cited a 1980 Washington Post article.) For God's sake, people, we have to put an end to this now, before the fall campaign begins. You are all highly paid professionals, with college degrees and everything. Can't you come up with something original? How about "threw her off the roof?" Or "threw him down a really steep flight of stairs?" Or "dragged him to the edge of a cliff, lifted him high over his head and hurled him screaming to a terrible death on the jagged rocks below?" Or how about "betrayed?" Yeah, that's got a nice ring to it.

• Related article: Who’s to Blame for ‘Under the Bus'? 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

CLINTON FACING NARROWER PATH TO THE NOMINATION
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers. She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states. She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June. And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses. For Mrs. Clinton, all this has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February. But that shot seems to have grown a little longer.

ALSO: The audience now is as much the Democratic superdelegates, who are especially attuned to politics and questions of electability in the fall, as it is rank-and-file voters. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they had spent recent days making the case to wavering superdelegates that Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Wright would doom their party in the general election. That argument could be Mrs. Clinton’s last hope for winning this contest.

IN HILLARY CLINTON'S DATEBOOK, A SHIFT
(Peter Baker and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post)
The release of 11,000 pages of Clinton's daily schedules as first lady yesterday opened a window into the shifting patterns of her eight years in the White House and provided fresh fodder for the debate over the scope of her experience. And yet they give little sense of her role in some of the most consequential moments of her husband's presidency, from the use of military force to the scandal that almost cost him his job.

MORE:
11,000 Long-Awaited Pages of Clinton's Schedules as First Lady Are Released (New York Times)
The documents offer no support for her assertions on the campaign trail that she helped negotiate the Irish peace accords or facilitated the flow of refugees in the Balkans, but neither do they disprove them. There is no evidence to back up her assertion that she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, the first legislation Mr. Clinton signed as president in February 1993.

An Uncluttered Calendar (Newsweek)
The documents include only Hillary Clinton's public schedules, not her private calendar. And even those appear to be heavily redacted to exclude almost anything that might be of interest to historians and the inevitable posse of "oppo" researchers.

CHOOSE, OR LOSE IN NOVEMBER
(Tenn. Gov. Philip Bredesen, New York Times)
It’s entirely possible that when primary season ends on June 3, we will still lack a clear nominee... In that situation, we would then face a long summer of brutal and unnecessary warfare. We would face a summer of growing polarization. And we would face a summer of lost opportunities — lost opportunities to heal the wounds of the primaries, to fill the party’s coffers, to offer unified Democratic ideas for America’s challenges. If we do nothing, we’ll of course still have a nominee by Labor Day. But if he or she is the nominee of a party that is emotionally exhausted and divided with only two months to go before Election Day, it could be a Pyrrhic victory. Here’s what our party should do: schedule a superdelegate primary. In early June, after the final primaries, the Democratic National Committee should call together our superdelegates in a public caucus.

SUPERDELEGATES WAIT AND SEE
(Jackie Calmes, Wall Street Journal)
Democrats expect Sen. Obama's progress to stall until some fence-sitters see how their constituents react to his attempts to soothe racial tension. In his speech, the senator condemned the minister's views without renouncing him, and, as someone who is biracial, sought to explain the resentments of blacks and whites to the other. Yet after a 15-month campaign that largely transcended race, some Democrats say Sen. Obama's association with the Chicago pastor potentially threatens his bid to be the first African-American president. Superdelegates are watching to see whether the senator's oratory will assuage white voters outraged at Internet videos showing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. suggesting that America be damned for its treatment of blacks. Separately, many worry that black voters will be outraged by a sense that Sen. Obama is being unfairly judged.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

 By Katie Paul

Opponents often dismiss Obama supporters as being as green as their candidate, silly young things whipped into a frenzy by the freshman senator’s rock concert rallies and soaring wordplay. Get them talking about real policy issues, it is said, and they fold, clueless. 

But then along came Derrick Ashong. Standing outside a Clinton-Obama debate in Los Angeles in early February, the 32-year-old Ashong provided the kind of free advertising every candidate dreams of. No stranger to public speaking, Ashong took on a cynical YouTube documentarian’s aggressive man-on-the-street interview and knocked it out of the park with (gasp!) informed, thoughtful, critically-minded responses. Now, bolstered by shout-outs from the Economist, The Atlantic, and, two days ago, a full-out article from the New York Times, the clip and Ashong’s follow-up video have together racked up well over a million views:



The broad appeal of wonkish discussions aside, I think it’s fair to say that Ashong’s rise to cyberfame has been so meteoric precisely because it was unexpected that anyone holding a “Change We Can Believe In” sign would be able to sustain a discussion about anything besides, well, change they believe in. All of which got me thinking: Is there any merit to the argument? Are any one candidate’s supporters more or less informed than another’s?

Maybe. Pollsters have long collected information about voters' education levels, but not their responses to “knowledge questions” about current events and policies as they did, for example, with this study about news consumers last year. Data exists to show that support for Hillary Clinton tends to be stronger among less-educated Democrats, while Barack Obama’s numbers trend in the opposite direction. Republicans tend on average to be slightly more knowledgeable than Democrats, but they pull support from voters in the mid-range of educational levels, while Democrats draw from both the most and least highly educated demographics. And as one analyst at Pew speculated, knowledge survey numbers are likely to be further complicated by Obama supporters’ “peculiar demographic profile,” since Obama tends to appeal to both the very young and the post-grad school crowd. Folks at the Annenberg Public Policy Center say they will likely come out with a study in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for updates.

By Suzanne Smalley 

In case the press corps didn't get the message yesterday when Hillary Clinton's campaign spokesman Phil Singer accused Barack Obama of being "an accessory to disenfranchising" Michigan voters, the Clinton campaign today held a last minute "Solutions for America" event at a local American Federation of State, County and Municipal employees chapter in downtown Detroit. Clinton made her case by trying to make a civil rights appeal: "It is the vote that has given voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. It is through that vote that women, African- Americans, Latinos and so many others have claimed their rights as full and equal citizens."

The Clinton team has also been bombarding reporters with Michigan-themed mail. The morning update sent out daily by campaign press staffers notes that Clinton planned the Detroit stop "because the voices of Michigan voters deserve to be heard." Minutes later, the campaign blasted out another memo, this one asserting that Obama's failure to back a revote in Michigan proves his candidacy is "just words." The reason? In an offhand comment to the press in early February Obama pledged to support a new vote. Who is it that said Clintons don't give up?

The Clinton campaign's nearly singular focus today on finagling a revote in Michigan comes on the heels of news that Florida's Democratic Party has decided not to pursue a new round of voting and as the lack of momentum behind pushing a revote through the Michigan state legislature becomes more apparent. The stakes are high for Clinton in Michigan--she'll need a resounding win there, a state with no shortage of blue collar towns where she should find ample support, if she's to make her case to superdelegates that her mathematical disadvantages in delegates and the popular vote can be ignored come nomination time. Meanwhile, the Detroit Free-Press reported today that the clock is ticking: If no bill providing for a revote is passed by Thursday, when the Michigan legislature begins a two-week recess, there won't be a new Michigan primary.

Clinton is ratcheting up pressure on Obama now for all these reasons and one more: Michigan legislative leaders, many of whom back Obama, said yesterday that any revote legislation will need Obama's support before they will consider it. That may explain the Clinton campaign's decision to dedicate a 3 p.m. conference call yesterday to the topic of Michigan and, to a lesser extent, Florida. Clinton's take-no-prisoners adviser Harold Ickes and spokesman Phil Singer led the call, all but calling Obama a wimp, undemocratic, and hypocritical for avoiding a Michigan revote. "I have information from people I've been talking to in Michigan that Obama people are going around saying, you know, 'We don't need a rerun,'" Ickes said. "Senator Obama's campaign does not want a primary. Initially they indicated they did want one in both states. Now, they've changed course."

While Clinton's handlers work themselves up with manufactured outrage over Michigan and Florida, the Obama campaign appears to be standing its ground. With a virtually insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, the Obama campaign has little to gain by holding do-over elections in large battleground states, and a lot to lose. On yesterday's call, Singer argued that by shutting out Michigan and Florida voters from the nomination process, the Democrats may be sending them into the arms of John McCain. "I've been around politics long enough to know that if you disenfranchise voters in two states that are vital to our prospects in November, we're gonna have a much harder time winning in those states than we otherwise would," he said. Singer raises a good point that the Democrats need to be worried about the impact on the general election. But it begs the question--if Clinton is so worried about the Democrats' prospects in November, is this fight over Michigan and Florida helping?

By Catharine Skipp and Arian Campo-Flores

After so much wrangling over what to do about the Democratic delegates from Florida and Michigan, things remain as inconclusive as ever. On Monday, the Florida Democratic party essentially threw its hands in the air and gave up on trying to arrange a do-over of the state’s primary. And yesterday, plans for a re-vote in Michigan suffered a potentially fatal setback. Where does that leave things? Negotiations are going on behind the scenes among the DNC, top advisers to the Obama and Clinton campaigns and the state parties, says a Democratic insider unaffiliated with either campaign. The hope is to find an agreement that is seen by the campaigns and their supporters as fair. Yet many fear that Democratic voters, who for a long while seemed happy with either candidate, are increasingly favoring one candidate to the exclusion of the other.

The Obama and Clinton campaigns continue to polarize by the day. On a Clinton campaign conference call Tuesday, deputy communications director Phil Singer argued that the Obama campaign’s refusal to promote re-vote plans in both states amounts to “a passive-aggressive effort on the part of the Obama campaign to disenfranchise the voters of Michigan and Florida.” Allan Katz, an Obama donor and a superdelegate from Florida, says, “Everyone is saying the DNC created this problem for us, but these are the rules we all voted for. … All the campaigns said they would stand by the rules, with no delegates seated in Florida and Michigan. Now, after the fact, some are saying they should count.”

Given that do-over contests appear to have been ruled out, the focus shifts to the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee and the credentialing committee. The rules committee, which voted to strip the Florida and Michigan delegates in the first place, doesn’t have a meeting scheduled to address the issue, according to the DNC. But the Florida Democratic party says it plans to appeal to that committee. Beyond July 1, any delegate-allocation issues would be taken up by the credentialing committee, which has plenty of flexibility to decide on a remedy, such as seating only half the delegates or splitting them 50-50 between the candidates.

All of this has prompted spasms of finger-pointing. "The situation we're in is unfortunate, but you have to remember that the Republicans moved the primary, not us," says Karen Thurman, Florida Democratic party chair. Yet the bill moving up the date was passed with overwhelming Democratic support. "I have no recollection of the state party throwing a fit about moving the primary to January 29th," says Frank Sanchez, a Tampa-based Obama supporter and adviser on Latin America. "So it rings a little hollow to say the Republicans did this. If we had said at the time, 'This is wrong, this is a mistake and we should not be doing this,' then we could say the DNC has no grounds to punish us." However, he adds, "the DNC went overboard in the punishment. It didn't fit the violation."

Many of the state's Democrats now wish the primary date had remained March 11, as originally scheduled. Had the contest been held on that date, “we would have had all the things we wanted to have without paying the price," says former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. "We would have had most of the candidates’ attention--there was only one other state primary that day--and at a dramatic and significant point in the process. It could have, under the right circumstances, been determinative in the same way Florida ended up being determinative in the Republican process: Giuliani got out, and Romney and the field cleared except for Mr. Huckabee. That might have happened if Florida had voted on the second Tuesday in March rather than the last Tuesday in January.” Unfortunately, it's all water under the bridge now.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

OBAMA STANDS HIS UNIQUE GROUND ON RACE
(Peter Wallsten and Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times)
From the earliest days of his career, Barack Obama has sought to assure black voters that a political leader of mixed race, coming from the outpost of Hawaii, could understand the resentments of an African American community shaped by slavery and segregation. On Tuesday, Obama tried to explain that anger to voters who have been repelled by racially incendiary comments from his longtime pastor. 

TACKLING A SENSITIVE TOPIC AT A SENSITIVE MOMENT, FOR DISPARATE AUDIENCES
(Alec MacGillis and Eli Saslow, Washington Post)
As skilled an orator as Obama is, he has faced few moments as fraught as yesterday's. The clips of his longtime spiritual mentor declaring "God damn America" for its mistreatment of blacks and saying that the country had provoked the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks threatened to undermine Obama's promise to bind up racial and political fissures. Obama needed to address several audiences with the speech: undecided white voters in Pennsylvania, whose Rust Belt cousins Obama struggled to win over in Ohio even before the Wright controversy; African Americans aggrieved by the opprobrium being heaped on Wright; and staunch supporters such as Farley who needed reassurance about their candidate.

OBAMA'S RACIAL PROBLEMS TRANSCEND WRIGHT
(John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, Politico)
It is true that Obama won a majority of white voters — a precedent-shattering achievement for a black presidential candidate — in an array of states like Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Virginia.  But many of his recent victories came when he got the better end of highly polarized voting patterns. He lost the white vote, sometimes by gaping margins in states like Alabama (whites went 72 percent for Clinton to Obama’s 25 percent), Maryland (52 percent to 42 percent) and Louisiana (58 percent to 30 percent). He compensated only with overwhelming support by black voters.  In Ohio, it was Clinton who benefited from the racial pattern in the voting. She took 64 percent of the white vote, according to exit polls. That was easily enough to offset his 87 percent of the black vote. Overall, she won the state by 8 percentage points.  This result could haunt Obama. The past two general elections were tipped by narrow GOP victories in Ohio and these rural whites are a prototypical swing bloc in elections stretching back decades.

GOP SEES REV. WRIGHT AS PATHWAY TO VICTORY
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama’s pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base. In fact, the video trove has convinced some that, after months of praying for Hillary Clinton and the automatic enmity which she arouses, that they may actually have easier prey. "For the first time, some Republicans are rethinking Hillary as their first choice," said Alex Castellanos, a veteran media consultant who recently worked for Mitt Romney's campaign. Even Obama's much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift. "It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission ... ," said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the ad in 2002 tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden.

TWO VIEWS FROM THE RIGHT:
A Speech That Fell Short (Michael Gerson, Washington Post)
Wright's Rantings Won't Sink Obama (Dick Morris)

CLINTON TRIES TO KEEP PLAN FOR TWO REVOTES ALIVE
(John M. Broder, New York Times)
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hopes of ending the primaries with game-changing victories from new contests in Florida and Michigan grew dim on Tuesday as Florida officially scuttled plans for a new vote and Michigan lawmakers appeared far from a deal. In a sign of how badly she thinks she needs the Michigan delegates to catch the Democratic front-runner, Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton made a last-minute schedule change and planned to fly to Detroit on Wednesday to plead with Michigan lawmakers to approve a new primary election in June to replace the January contest that awarded no delegates. 

RAISING MCCAIN
(Greg Veis, GQ)
It’s well- known that four years ago, when her father decided it’d be in his best interest to back George W. Bush’s reelection, [Meghan McCain] voted for John Kerry. “My dad actually outed me,” she says. “I’m an Independent. Socially liberal, economically conservative. I believe in a lot of Republican ideals, with the war being the number one thing I completely agree with my dad on.” Later on I hear from Meghan’s mother, Cindy McCain, who insists that the two simply “love the debate” and aren’t as far apart as they’ve often been portrayed. “They’re very similar,” Cindy says. “They’re both very intelligent and very direct in terms of—I mean this in a good way—their knowing what they want and knowing how to get there.” Meghan puts it more succinctly: “I’m almost incapable of bullshit. He’s the same way.” Indeed, John McCain is nobody’s idea of ideologically consistent, and it’s tempting to interpret his daughter’s progressive positions as evidence that life in the McCain household isn’t exactly a revival weekend at Bob Jones University. But Meghan sees her father’s politics as common sense.
 

Here's Jonathan Alter's take: 

This speech, which he wrote himself over the last couple of days, was not necessarily the obvious path when confronted by the campaign crisis involving the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons. To understand the quality of it, consider some of the Obama campaign's other options.

If he were approaching the controversy conventionally, Obama would have simply expanded on his March 14 cable interviews and denounced Wright's comments (e.g., "God damn America!") more loudly, then waited, as he said, for the issue to "fade into the woodwork." Given the dire economic news and whatever else might end up in the headlines, this approach would have likely worked just fine. Even if he threw Wright under the bus, black voters would still turn out for him. And enough white voters would have been placated to pull him through the next few weeks without collapsing. After all, the primary calendar continues to make Obama the heavy favorite for the nomination.

Or Obama could have dealt briefly with the Wright problem, then pivoted to his stump speech about the challenges facing the country. This would have satisfied the conventional preference of consultants for the candidate to "stay on message." Discussing, as he did, such things as what was good about Wright, bad about school busing and complicated about racial feelings did not serve that traditional political objective.

At a minimum, Obama might have made some obvious concessions to political realities (other than standing between American flags). Instead, he went so far as to depart from a recent tag line in his stump speech and refrained from saying "God bless you, and God bless America," which would have added a contrived close to an otherwise authentic speech. I don't believe Obama objects to the concept of God blessing America, only the clichéd nature of the sentiment. Over time he'll need to show other, less clichéd ways of showing his love of flag and country.

READ THE REST HERE. 

Richard Wolffe reports on Obama's "Race and Politics in America" speech from Philadelphia.  

It remains to be seen whether Obama's speech will quiet the cable news fixation with Wright—and whether addressing race in such a head-on fashion will pay dividends, in this closely fought contest, which has seen African-American voters flock overwhelmingly to his side. Will it win over the blue-collar white males who have been trending toward his opponent, or drive them away? But if it was a roll of the dice, Obama took the gamble with gusto—and deftly sought to repurpose the Wright controversy as an engine of the kind of change he has offered as the central thrust of his candidacy.

"We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the O.J. trial. Or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina. Or as fodder for the nightly news," he said. "We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that.

"But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

"That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.' This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn, that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy. Not this time."

Afterward Obama's aides applauded the speech as a way to take control of the narrative on race—and weave into it the story of his own life. "He has wanted to make this speech for a long time," says David Axelrod, Obama's senior strategist. "The question was when. He knew this was the right time. The firestorm about Wright and [former representative Geraldine] Ferraro meant that race was creeping up as a kind of dominant discussion." (Ferraro, a Clinton finance committee member, resigned her post after her own comments about Obama—suggesting he would not be enjoying such success as a candidate if he were white—caused a firestorm.)

Obama dictated a first draft to his young speechwriter Jon Favreau on Saturday, then reworked the speech until 3 a.m. Monday. He went at it anew on Tuesday, tweaking away until 2 a.m. Did Obama's political aides try to warn him off the idea? "It wasn't even a discussion," says Axelrod. "He was going to do it. I know this sounds perhaps corny, but he actually believes in the fairness and good sense of the American people, and the importance of this issue. His candidacy is predicated on the fact that we can talk to each other in an honest and forthright way on this and other issues."

READ THE REST HERE. 

One of John McCain’s biggest talking points is how he has more foreign-policy experience than any of the major presidential candidates in the field. “I’ve been involved in every major national security challenge for the last 20 years that has faced this country,” McCain told reporters in Arizona two weeks ago. “I look forward to having that debate as to who’s the most qualified in the event of a national crisis and the phone ringing at 3am in the White House.” Yet on Day Three of an overseas tour aimed in part at promoting those national security credentials, McCain proves he’s not infallible when it comes to telling the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia. According to the Washington Post, the Arizona senator, in a media availability with reporters in Jordan, repeatedly misidentified which Iraq extremist group is allegedly getting aid from Iran. The likely GOP nominee told reporters that he was concerned about Iranian operatives “taking Al Qaeda into Iran; training them and sending them back.” Asked to elaborate, McCain said, it’s “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” In fact, U.S. officials have said they believe Iran, a predominately Shiite country, is helping Shiite extremists in Iraq, not Al Qaeda, considered a Sunni militant group. It didn’t take long for McCain to correct his mistake. During the presser, the Post reports, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a McCain ally who is traveling this week with the senator, stepped forward to whisper something in McCain’s ear. Afterwards, the senator corrected himself. “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al Qaida,” he said. A little too late. McCain’s opponents, including the Democratic National Committee, have already been emailing the clip around along with the transcript of a radio interview last night when McCain made the same gaffe.

NBC's First Read asks, "What if Clinton or Obama had made this mistake?" Good question.

Update: McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers responds:
“In a press conference today, John McCain misspoke and immediately corrected himself by stating that Iran is in fact supporting radical Islamic extremists in Iraq, not Al Qaeda -- as the transcript shows. Democrats have launched political attacks today because they know the American people have deep concerns about their candidates’ judgment and readiness to lead as commander in chief.”

So much for making nice. CBN News’s David Brody blogs about a “whisper campaign” among “grassroots social conservatives” that John McCain will attempt to water down language in the Republican Party platform that calls for a Constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. Asked about it last week in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity McCain denied it. “I am committed to maintaining the unique status of marriage between man and woman,” McCain said. Yet that doesn’t seem to be enough for many members of his party, who for years have questioned McCain’s commitment to the issue. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee doesn’t support a Constitutional amendment, saying that he instead prefers to leave the issue up to the states. (Federalism, anyone?) Yet he ran into trouble during the primary with many social conservatives, who said they just didn’t buy his argument. And the endorsements he got from allies to the movement, including Sens. Sam Brownback and Tom Coburn, didn't seem help much either.

Will McCain get the benefit of the doubt since he’s now locked up the nomination? Doesn’t look like it. According to Brody, the Family Research Council issued a statement noting that McCain has merely “tepidly endorsed” the party platform when it comes to the “protection of life and the preservation of marriage.” McCain’s federalist position “leads one to believe that his endorsement is not definitive,” the group says. For McCain, it’s a tricky dance. The GOP nominee doesn’t want to alienate the faith vote, which has proven influential in recent elections. But he’s also got to be careful about keeping in touch with the moderate Republicans and independent voters considered to be his base. So far, the candidate hasn’t focused too much on social issues on the campaign trail, preferring instead to talk about Iraq and national security. Will that change?

A round-up of this mornings must-read stories.

RACE UPROAR OFFERS TEST FOR OBAMA
(John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, Politico)
He is now facing a full-blown and fast-moving political crisis in which his reputation as a leader with a singular ability to transcend racial divisions and unite Americans is in jeopardy. A convergence of factors — a media firestorm, a Democratic rival eager to exploit his stumbles and, most of all, a Republican opposition eager to rough up the man they expect to face in the general election — have raised the stakes to new heights for Obama with the speech he will deliver in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning. A successful address would go a long way toward answering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s complaint that Obama has never shown he can handle the rough-and-tumble nature of modern political combat. A failure could leave many of the white independent voters — a key group behind Obama’s swift rise in national politics — doubting whether he is really the bridge-builder and healer he has portrayed himself to be.

MORE: On Defensive, Obama Plans Talk on Race (New York Times)
He told several aides he was worried that if voters did not hear directly from him — in the setting of a major speech — doubts and questions about him might grow. Some associates advised him against giving the speech. “Race is now officially on the table. It’s not going away after this,” a senior aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalled one adviser saying.

EVEN MORE: On Wright, What Took Obama So Long? (Richard Cohen, Washington Post) 

THE OBAMA BARGAIN
(Shelby Steele, Wall Street Journal)
In the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin. But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings... Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable... What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background.

ANNIVERSARY HIGHLIGHTS IRAQ'S ROLE IN THE CAMPAIGN
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
The day left little doubt that the issue would be a major area of difference between the two parties this fall. Though they could have allowed the milestone to be overshadowed by the crisis on Wall Street, Senators John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama aggressively seized on Iraq. That they did so, in the face of risks for each of them in the handling of the issue, was evidence of the large role all sides believe the war will continue to play in months ahead, even as the weakening economy takes center stage. 

OBAMA WALKS ARROGANCE LINE
(Ron Fournier, Associated Press)
Obama may not be offensive or overbearing, but he can be a bit too cocky for his own good.... Privately, aides and associates of Obama tell stories about a boss who can be aloof and ungracious. He holds firmly to views and doesn't like to be challenged, traits that President Bush packaged and sold under the "resolute" brand in the 2004 election... Voters won't cut Obama as much slack on the humility test because he's sold himself as something different. While rejecting the "me"-centric status quo and promising a new era of post-partisan reform, Obama has said the movement he has created is not about him; it's about what Americans can do together if their faith in government is restored. The power of his message lies in its humility. As he told 7,000 supporters at a rally last month, "I am an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams." Nobody expects Obama to be perfect. But he better never forget that he isn't.

MCCAIN'S MIXED SIGNALS ON FOREIGN POLICY
(Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times)
McCain, an ex-Navy pilot and Vietnam POW who has built his campaign around his national security expertise, has advanced views on Iraq and Iran that are tough and assertive, and that seem to put him squarely in the neoconservative camp. Yet McCain has on many occasions resisted calls for use of U.S. troops. Even now, he adopts positions that are closer to those of traditional, pragmatic Republicans than the more hawkish neoconservatives. One sign of the internal contradictions in his views is growing friction between rival camps of McCain supporters -- between neoconservatives and those with more traditional views, widely called "realists." Both sides believe they have assurances from McCain that he would largely follow their path, and that like-minded allies would have key roles in the new administration. 

It’s no secret that John McCain and Dick Cheney aren’t the best of friends, but you’d hardly know it looking at their travel schedules. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee and the vice president both made surprise trips to Baghdad in the last 24 hours. Both visited with Gen. David Petraeus, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi and American officials there. On the ground, both men reiterated the same basic message: Five years later, the war was worth it. “It has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor,” Cheney told reporters in Baghdad. “The surge is working,” McCain told CNN. “We are succeeding.” The pair had nearly identical itineraries in Baghdad, and according to CNN, came within a few feet of each other, when both Cheney and McCain stopped by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace for meetings early this morning. Yet, during the hour they were both in the same building, they didn’t interact. Traveling separately--McCain on Senate fact-finding trip with Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, Cheney on a Middle East trip of his own--the vice president and the man who wants his boss’s job didn’t sit in on each other’s meetings, according to a McCain spokeswoman. They didn’t even say hello.

Why so chilly? For one, McCain hasn’t been shy about trashing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of Cheney’s closest friends and allies. Long before Rumsfeld resigned, McCain called him one of the worst defense secretaries in history. Last spring, he took it a step further, saying that President Bush had been “very badly served” by Rumsfeld and Cheney. “The president listened too much to the vice president,” McCain told the Politico. A few weeks later, Cheney struck back, telling ABC News that he “fundamentally disagrees” with McCain’s views on Rumsfeld, and oh btw, mentioned that McCain had apologized to him. “John said some nasty things about me the other day, and the next time he saw me, ran over to me and apologized,” Cheney said. Oh did he? Asked a few days later whether he had apologized to Cheney, McCain wouldn’t say, simply telling Newsweek, “I don’t discuss private conversations.” But, he quickly noted, “I stand by what I said about Rumsfeld.” It’s unclear how Cheney feels about McCain locking up the nomination. Unlike Bush, Cheney hasn’t come out and formally endorsed McCain. (Worth noting: Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a former State Department official, at first backed Fred Thompson in the primary and endorsed Mitt Romney when the former senator dropped out.) Of course, there’s still plenty of time to make nice. From Iraq, both McCain and Cheney will travel to Jerusalem, where they will meet with top Israeli leaders. Separately, of course.

Let’s face it: If there’s one good thing about the fight for the nomination dragging out on the Democratic side, it’s that we will still get to rock out to “You and I,” that cringe-inducing Celine Dion anthem that serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign theme song. Ok, we kid. But another few weeks (months?) of this fight between Clinton and Barack Obama must at least promise some totally cheesy celebrity moments on the trail. Case in point: the Clinton campaign announced this morning that Elton John--oops, we mean Sir Elton John--will headline a solo concert (his first in eight years!) in New York City next month at Radio City Music Hall to benefit Clinton’s campaign. The title is priceless--“Elton and Hillary: One Night Only”--but the tickets to the April 9th show are most certainly not. It’s $125 a pop for the cheap seats, $250 if you want to be close enough to maybe, possibly hear Clinton sing along with “Tiny Dancer.” (Or, perhaps more appropriately, “I’m Still Standing.”) “I'm not a politician but I believe in the work that Hillary Clinton does," John says in a press release issued by the Clinton campaign. "I'm excited to support Hillary by performing at what will be a truly memorable night." Ah, can’t you feel the love (tonight)?

Trinity United Church of Christ-Religion News Service

Tired of hearing (and reading) pundits rant about Barack Obama's controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.? I know I am. It's not that the story isn't important--it is. But one can only take so much pontificating. Luckily, my NEWSWEEK colleague Lisa Miller spent several weeks reporting on Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago before the Wright story broke wide. Actual facts, scenes and stories matter more, at this point, than what Bill O'Reilly and Maureen Dowd have to say--at least in my humble opinion. Take a look:

Always a volatile combination, race and politics is particularly vexing for Obama, who, with his message of unity, hopes to transcend it all. The Wright and Farrakhan controversies force voters to look at Obama through the lens of their racial or cultural identity, and in a tightly contested race, Obama can't afford to alienate anybody. The question for him now is whether his connection to Wright will hurt his ability to appeal to the best in people.

Wright declined to be interviewed, but on a recent Sunday morning between services, Moss spoke to NEWSWEEK. Trinity has been mischaracterized by the press, he says: the church is "very much in the traditional vein of the African-American church. Caring for seniors, loving our young people, and the focus on Christ and the cross is central to this church."

Trinity was founded in 1961, the first black church in the United Church of Christ. (UCC members are Congregationalists, mainline Protestants who trace their history to John Cotton and the Puritans of New England.) The earliest members of Trinity were "teachers, people with middle-class jobs, resistant to doing anything radical in terms of justice," says church historian Julia Speller, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a member of Trinity. But as the 1970s dawned, values within the church began to change. According to Speller's book "Walkin' the Talk," the congregation was beginning to believe that it couldn't continue to do Christ's work and not speak out against racism and injustice. What Wright gave the congregation, Speller says, was a "sense of beauty about who they were." In 1978, Wright broke ground on a new sanctuary big enough to hold 900 people. In 1994, he built the existing one, which seats 2,500.

As a leader, Wright defied convention at every turn. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year, he recalled a time during the 1970s when the UCC decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy. At its annual meeting, sensitive to the historic discomfort some blacks have with homosexuality, gay leaders reached out to black pastors. At that session, Wright heard the testimony of a gay Christian and, he said, he had a conversion experience on gay rights. He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.

Barack Obama walked into Trinity when he was 27. He was a secular person, raised by a mother who would now be called "spiritual, not religious." According to "The Audacity of Hope," he realized that his secular upbringing was hurting his work as a community organizer. It was keeping him at a distance from the religious people he was trying to help. In "Dreams From My Father," Obama describes the feeling he had when he heard Wright preach: "I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story."

In the African-American church tradition, pastors rely frequently on the stories of the Old Testament—stories of liberation and struggle—to reach their people. "The Audacity to Hope," the Wright sermon that so inspired Obama, is a discussion of the Biblical character Hannah, who, though she was barren, prayed for a child. Wright uses Hannah as a metaphor for the black people who pray for deliverance even though it seems unattainable.

Friends of the church like to speculate about what, exactly, drew Obama in. Hopkins thinks it's the erudition of the preachers. "Historically, African-American churches have had a strong anti-intellectual bent. There's a saying, 'Too much learning blocks the burning.' Trinity has the learning and the burning." But Melissa Harris-Lacewell thinks it's something else, a connection to the black experience that Obama lacked as a child. "I really see Trinity for Barack as being part of his continuing adult choice to be a black man," says Harris-Lacewell, who attended Trinity for a time and is now a professor at Princeton.

READ THE REST HERE.

After seeming to leave the door open to pursuing Obama's pledged delegates in a recent interview with NEWSWEEK--despite repeated denials from a spokesman--the Clinton campaign has now elaborated on the possibility to my colleague Michael Isikoff. Whether efforts will be passive--as in Iowa last week--or more overt, it appears inevitable that when push comes to shove in the run-up to the convention, pledged delegates won't be left to their own devices. Here's Isikoff's report:

Citing wiggle room in an obscure, 26-year-old Democratic Party rule, Hillary Clinton's campaign is leaving the door open to the idea of attempting to persuade Barack Obama's pledged delegates to switch their votes at the last minute and back the New York senator—despite fears among some party officials that it could throw this summer's Denver convention into chaos.

The question of whether pledged delegates must stick to the candidate they were elected to vote for has prompted party chatter for weeks. Clinton herself drew notice last week during a NEWSWEEK interview when she said her delegate numbers aren't "bleak at all," even though by most counts she trails Obama by more than 100. "Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to," she added. Although her campaign quickly denied it was waging any effort to "flip" Obama's pledged delegates, Clinton's remarks weren't academic. After the 1980 battle between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, her chief strategist Harold Ickes noted, the party changed a rule that required pledged delegates to stick with their candidates no matter what. The current rule, adopted in 1982, states that pledged delegates "shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." A "good conscience" reason for a delegate to switch, Ickes told NEWSWEEK, would be if one candidate—such as, say, Clinton—was deemed more "electable." If delegates believe she has a better chance in November than Obama, Ickes said, "you bet" that would be a reason to change their vote. (He added, however, that the campaign is "focused" on winning over uncommitted superdelegates "at this point.")

READ THE REST HERE.

Hi all,

For the past six months or so, I've crisscrossed the country, posting to Stumper three, four or five times a times a day. But with an unprecedented five weeks until the next primary in the midst of a titanic nomination fight that won't end anytime soon, I figured this would be my last chance to take a little vacation. For the rest of the week, then, I'll contribute the Filter each morning and the occasional item thereafter. I'll definitely pop back in if some big news breaks. But otherwise, I plan to calmly step away from my keyboard and seek treatment for my debilitating case of bloggeritis.

Stumper, however, will go on. The brilliant Holly Bailey--NEWSWEEK's White House correspondent and John McCain embed--will take the reins, overseeing an impressive roster of the magazine's best political reporters as they continue to do the good work of keeping you in the Election 2008 loop. You probably won't even want me to come back.

Happy trails,
Andrew
 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

FOR DEMOCRATS, INCREASED FEARS OF A LONG FIGHT
(Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
While many superdelegates said they intended to keep their options open as the race continued to play out over the next three months, the interviews suggested that the playing field was tilting slightly toward Mr. Obama in one potentially vital respect. Many of them said that in deciding whom to support, they would adopt what Mr. Obama’s campaign has advocated as the essential principle: reflecting the will of the voters... The interviews were conducted at a time of rising displays of animosity between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, with Mrs. Clinton repeatedly arguing that Mr. Obama did not have the foreign policy credentials to stand up to Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee. Several superdelegates said they were concerned that this could hurt the Democratic Party in the fall elections and put pressure on some of them to endorse one of the candidates to bring the contest to a quicker conclusion. 

THE DIVIDED DEMOCRATS
(Michael A. Cohen, Wall Street Journal)
If Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are still landing blows against each other come August, the Democrats will have squandered the opportunity to define their candidate while handing Mr. McCain a series of well-tested attack lines for the fall campaign. Moreover, Democrats will have wasted the enormous fundraising advantage they currently enjoy -- money better spent on campaign ads denting Mr. McCain's reformist, maverick image. In 1968, Democrats had the good fortune to run against Nixon, whom Democratic voters largely despised. This year, the party's nominee will have to square off against Mr. McCain, a man who is generally respected among Democrats. In short, Democrats are poised to give a GOP candidate, with largely unexplored liabilities on Iraq and the economy, a free ride. That's why it is imperative for Democrats to resolve this issue sooner rather than later.

OBAMA'S PASTOR: THE BACKSTORY
(Mike Allen, Politico)
Politicians know a troublesome story has “broken through” the Eastern media echo chamber when Jay Leno is laughing at them.  In the case of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., retiring pastor and outgoing spiritual adviser to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), it took less than 48 hours... Political reporters and editors were inundated with e-mails from red-state friends and relatives wanting to know why the brouhaha wasn’t getting more instant and constant coverage from every news outlet.  To reporters who had followed the campaign, it was an old, oft-written story. [But] it’s possible for regulars on the trail to be too familiar with the material. With the video widely available in the heat of the race, readers and viewers were thirsty for coverage.

WHITE MALE VOTE ESPECIALLY CRITICAL
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
In the fierce campaign between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, a battle dominated by questions of race and gender, white men have emerged as perhaps the single critical swing constituency. The competition for the support of white men, particularly those defined as working class, will shape the showdown between Clinton and Obama in Pennsylvania's Democratic presidential primary on April 22. Obama (Ill.) won majorities among those voters in what appeared to be breakthrough victories in Wisconsin and Virginia last month. But he badly lost working-class white men to Clinton (N.Y.) in Ohio and Texas two weeks ago, keeping the outcome of the Democratic race in doubt indefinitely. The results in Ohio in particular raised questions about whether Obama can attract support from this crucial demographic. They also brought to the forefront the question of whether racial prejudice would be a barrier to his candidacy in some of the major industrial battlegrounds in the general election if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

MCCAIN ARRIVES IN IRAQ, PLANS TO MEET MALIKI
(Joshua Partlow, Washington Post)
Sen. John McCain visited Iraq on Sunday as part of a congressional delegation on an international tour, a chance for the likely Republican presidential nominee to emphasize his support of the U.S. military effort in Iraq and his foreign policy experience. Unlike a previous trip to Iraq, in which he was criticized for his optimistic pronouncements about progress and security, McCain's visit on Sunday was largely out of the public view. U.S. Embassy and military officials stressed that the visit was not a campaign event. McCain apparently did not travel with reporters or make press statements. 

MANY VOTING FOR CLINTON TO BOOST GOP
(Scott Helman, Boston Globe)
About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.A sudden change of heart? Hardly. Since Senator John McCain effectively sewed up the GOP nomination last month, Republicans have begun participating in Democratic primaries specifically to vote for Clinton, a tactic that some voters and local Republican activists think will help their party in November... Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP... 
 

Jessica Ramirez files this report from the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania:

Hillary Clinton wasted no time in getting cozy with the people of Pennsylvania last week. She had lunch with her childhood friend, Charlotte Iori in Old Forge on Monday and chatted about the economy. In Harrisburg on Tuesday, she held 15-month old Charlie Verner-Waldner and later told a crowd of more than 2,000 about the importance of a good future for kids like him. By Friday night, when she hit Pittsburgh, New York's junior senator had perfected her Pennsylvania pitch, which focused on key issues like the economy, the Iraq war and, of course, her experience.

“I don’t want you voting on a leap of faith,” Clinton told one crowd. “I want you to look at the record, and I want you to look at the results, and then I want you to vote for the person you think can deliver.”

Her Pittsburgh stump marked the end of week one of a six-week marathon to woo voters and vie for the188 delegates up for grabs in the Keystone State’s April 22 primary. While a Pennsylvania victory may not effectively give the country a Democratic nominee it could be Barack Obama’s chance to seal his lead in a way that neither math nor momentum can question. For Hillary, it’s the difference between making the case that she’s still a viable candidate and a symbolic “end of the road” for her campaign.

“Pennsylvania’s such a microcosm of the United States,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a Clinton supporter, told Newsweek. “I think you will get a real feel for what the future will look like for the Democratic nominee coming out of [here.]”

According to a recent SurveyUSA poll of likely Pennsylvania voters, Clinton holds a 19-point lead over Obama, who’s coming off wins in Wyoming and Mississippi. She’s also garnered an important endorsement in Gov. Ed Rendell, who traveled with her all week. And her advantages don’t end there. The state has a significant older population, is predominantly white and heavily Catholic—all of which tend to trend her way. Then there’s the small fact that this is her home turf, sort of. Clinton’s father, Hugh Rodham, was born and buried in Scranton. As a child, Clinton often spent summers in the area and made sure every crowd she spoke to knew it.

Aware of her strengths, Clinton hung out near her old stomping grounds and had lunch at Pat Revello’s pizzeria in Old Forge early in the week. She said her hellos to the crowd of supporters outside before settling down. Inside, families huddled in booths with slices in one hand and cameras in the other. Revello, who cut his honeymoon short to accommodate the Clinton camp visit, said he was happy to do it because Clinton gets that their city is blue-collar ties and old fashion values. It’s a small town that, like many small towns across the country, has felt the backlash of a dwindling economy in a very personal way. “It’s such a big issue because it trickles down to the person who buys a slice of pizza from us,” Revello said. “I mean we’ve had to raise our prices because the oil and the flour—everything is so high. I like Obama, but we just need a shot in the arm and I think she can do it.”

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, an undecided super delegate, says he plans to pay close attention to the candidates as they tour his state, adding that he’d like to see the nomination wrapped up sooner than later for the sake of the party. “I think the goal here has to be a victory in November—a solid victory.” Still, in two recent polls with head-to-head matchups, McCain edges out Clinton and Obama. With one week down, that’s something to think about in the five weeks to go.

Pop quiz. Who said the following?

1. The United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
A: Sen. Barack Obama
B: Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., his pastor

2. "‘God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America."
A: Obama
B: Wright

3. "Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty."
A: Obama
B: Wright

4. "[America] started the AIDS virus."
A: Obama
B: Wright

5. "Hillary ain't never been called a n****r!"
A: Obama
B: Wright

Pencils down. In case you're wondering, the correct answers are B, B, B, B and B. I imagine that everyone scored pretty well--even those of you haven't switched on CNN, MSNBC or FOX News (which first broadcast the video above) in the past 48 hours to watch the talking heads pontificate endlessly about how Wright is hampering Obama's presidential hopes. Because even though Wright was, until his retirement last month, Obama's pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago; even though Obama has described Mr. Wright as his "sounding board"; even though Obama borrowed the title of his bestseller "The Audacity of Hope" from one of Wright's sermons; and even though Wright married Obama and wife and baptized his children, only an irrational person could possibly imagine Obama uttering, believing or condoning any of these inflammatory, often offensive, statements.

Which is why Wright poses a problem for Obama. Irrational people, of course, will simply allow Wright's remarks to confirm, by association, whatever biases they already held toward Obama--that he's a "foreigner," or an "anti-American," or an "angry black man." But rational people will react as well, wondering, I think, why the Illinois senator has spent nearly 20 years of his life choosing to attend a church where stuff like this--stuff that seems to contradict his core values of unity and healing, and that Obama himself has repeatedly rejected--was sometimes said. I don't put Wright's frequent remarks on institutional racism and black struggles into this category; while they might make some folks uncomfortable, they remain firmly within the black theological tradition. But the comments above (and any others like them)? Absolutely. "Like many people, I wouldn't sit through one of these sermons, let alone come back for more," writes the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, one of Obama's smartest and staunchest supporters. "It would be helpful, to say the very least, if Obama told us more candidly why he did and does."  

I'd prefer not to dwell on the irrational side of the equation; there's really no closing that can of worms once it's opened (and it was open long before Wright). But the rational question--why keep attending Trinity?--is an important one. In a statement published Friday afternoon on the Huffington Post, Obama writes, as expected, that he "strongly condemn[s]," "outright rejects," "categorically denounce[s]" and "vehemently disagree[s]" with Wright's "inflammatory and appalling" remarks, adding that "these particular statements by Rev. Wright are... contrary to my own life and beliefs." Which, of course, only makes Sullivan's question--which Obama calls "legitimate"--all the more relevant. He gives a two part answer. First, the senator says that "the statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation." There's no reason to doubt that this is true in a narrow sense, but still--it isn't particularly convincing. After nearly two decades, Obama was surely aware of Wright's more controversial tendencies. Thankfully, the second half of the senator's explanation--that Wright's remarks don't represent the real spirit of his church--is considerably more compelling:

[Wright] led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It's a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS. The sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

This, I think, gets at Obama's larger reason for sticking with Trinity. Raised by his secular white mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, a post-collegiate Obama arrived in Chicago desperate for a sense of community and eager to establish his identity, after years of self-doubt, as a black American. He found both in the church. Describing his first experience at Trinity in 1995's "Dreams from My Father", Obama writes that "at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories--of survival, and freedom, and hope--became our story, my story... Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black." It wasn't that he accepted everything Wright said, or everything the church stood for--much like most religious Americans. (Consider how Jerry Falwell's outrageous views, for example, have colored perceptions of evangelical Christians as a whole.)  In fact, Obama admitted from the start that "part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us." But to him the good far outweighed the bad.

I guess the voters now get to decide whether or not they agree.

UPDATE, 7:30 p.m.: The Obama campaign sends word that "Rev. Wright is no longer serving on the African American Religious Leadership Committee," severing his only formal tie to the campaign--a la Samantha Power and Geraldine Ferraro.

For John McCain, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, while Team Obama accuses "insidious[ly]" racist Clinton of spooky secrecy and Team Clinton says the too-green Obama "really can't win the general election," McCain gets to kick back, relax and release videos reminding voters that he was released from the Hanoi Hilton 35 years ago today after more than five years of torturous captivity:

Not only does the clip define McCain in the best possible terms--steely, selfless war hero--but it works to frame the general election as a debate over, as Jonathan Martin puts it, "Big Issues like service, sacrifice and character." That's exactly where McCain wants to be. Not Democrat versus Republican. Not his domestic agenda versus, say, Obama's. Just "hero" versus, well, "not hero." With a "different kind of Republican" tour set to start in purple states next month, expect Team McCain to keep hammering on biography and character--especially while the Democrats keep hammering on each other.

The downside? Last week, McCain was a significant or dominant factor in only 28 percent of news stories about the election, according to the Pew Research Center. Obama and Clinton? 58 and 60 percent, respectively. It's difficult to define your candidate or frame the debate when no one's paying attention. But that's what happens when the press doesn't have bloody fisticuffs to feed on.

Maybe having Mike Huckabee as a "sparring partner" wasn't such a bad idea after all...

UPDATE, 5:37 p.m.: My colleague Michael Hirsh writes about the same subject in his latest column. Great minds:

Winning elections is about setting the agenda and, while creating a positive image of oneself, negatively defining one's opponent in the minds of the voters. This is happening for McCain—having Obama defined as unready and Hillary as lacking in integrity—without his having to lift a finger. If the current campaign keeps up—and there's every sign it will—it's likely that by summer irrepressible doubts about both Dems will have been lodged in the minds of the electorate.

That's no small thing. Especially in this age of terror and economic uncertainty, voters don't want doubts. They will want to pull the lever for the most trustworthy candidate. And who's making himself seem trustworthy? Why, John McCain, of course. Next week he's off to Europe and the Mideast to confer with "leaders I have strong relationships with," as he put it to reporters the other day.

Be sure to read the rest. 

Like any Iowan worth his salt, Lance Jenkins is used to tuning out campaign robocalls. But when the 28-year old Web designer got a buzz from the Clinton camp last week, his ears perked up.  "I listened to more of it than I normally would," he says. "I thought it was odd that I was receiving a political solicitation this long after the caucuses."

Remember Iowa? It's been more than two months and nearly four dozen primaries and caucuses since the Hawkeye State kicked off the 2008 election season back on Jan. 3, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama haven't quite moved on. On Saturday, the 13,485 precinct-level delegates who committed to the candidates on caucus night will travel to county conventions, where they will select delegates to the district and state conventions scheduled for April and June. (These delegates will then go on to appoint Iowa's 45 national delegates.) None of Iowa's delegates--precinct, district or state--are bound to their candidates; a Clintonite can flip to Obama and an Obamaniac can flip to Clinton. Needless to say, that hasn't mattered much in recent elections, when the Democratic nominee was decided by Super Tuesday. But now it does. So instead of ignoring the latter stages of Iowa's convoluted nominating process like their predecessors, both the Obama and Clinton camps have hired staff to whip up turnout.

Which is where Jenkins--a county delegate himself--comes in. As recent reports have shown, both campaigns are actively pursuing the 30 percent of county delegates pledged to John Edwards; his estimated 14 statewide delegates--now free-agents--would be a major boon. "Absolutely they're fair game," says Karen Hicks, a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. "We are reaching out to a lot of them, trying to persuade them to join our team." But Jenkins says that the Clintonites are going a step further--and cites himself as evidence. According to Jenkins, the robocall he received from the Clinton campaign was a solicitation. "It said something like, 'As the county convention nears, we ask that you consider Hillary,'" he recalls. "It rattled off a bunch of Clinton's talking points, like experience, substance, ready on day one, etc." The only problem? Jenkins is committed to Obama--meaning that, in Jenkins words, "Clinton is actively pursuing pledged delegates."

Is this true? And does it matter? On Tuesday, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer confirmed that the campaign is calling county delegates, but disputed Jenkins' accusation. "The point of the call is to identify our delegates," he told me. "The Iowa Democratic Party sends us a list of all the delegates, but it doesn't specify who they're pledged to. Which ones are for Obama? Which ones are for Edwards? We're calling to find out." I reminded Singer that Jenkins had received an automated message, not an inquiry asking whom he supports; Singer repeated that the calls were meant to identify Clintonites, not flip Obama people. When I asked for a script, Singer said he would get back to me. He hasn't. What's more, Iowa Democratic Party political director Norm Sterzenbach contradicts Singer's claim, saying that "80 percent" of the county delegates are, in fact, linked to their chosen candidates on the lists sent to the campaigns--Lance Jenkins among them. "There's quite a bit of activity out there," says Sterzenbach. "It's a very unique year."

Now, a pro-Hillary robocall isn't exactly a dirty trick, and pursuing county delegates is perfectly legit. (If that is, in fact, what the Clinton camp is doing; I'll let you know when I hear back from Singer.) But it does raise questions about where the race is headed. A Feb. 19 report on Politico.com cited "high-ranking Clinton official" confirming that the "campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination," and Clinton herself seemed to second the emotion in an recent interview with NEWSWEEK. "There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and super-delegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose," she said. "Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process." For his part, Singer has said, "we have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama." At the time, he was answering a question about national delegates, not county delegates, so there's no contradiction here. But going forward, it'll be interesting to watch whether what happens in Iowa stays in Iowa--or not.

UPDATE, 7:12 p.m.: Here's a more detailed description of the call from another Obama delegate:

"This is the Hillary Clinton campaign. We are calling you because you are a delegate or an alternate to the county convention." (Some 30-45 seconds of talking points). "If you are supporting Hillary Clinton at the county convention, press 1." I listened to the last question and did not press 1. The same question was repeated two more times. At no time was there an option to press for any other candidate.

According to someone who would know, the Clinton campaign had concerns about the accuracy of the delegates that were identified, so they robocalled all the listed delegates to ensure that everyone knew about the convention. 

That explanation is totally reasonable, especially in light of the "press 1" option. But from the description of the call--especially the 30-45 seconds of talking points, which have nothing to do with ID'ing supporters--it seems like the whole thing could work another way, too. Keep track of how many delegates you have and, by getting your message out, maybe pick up a few. If this is "delegate poaching"--which, I remind you, is totally legit--it's the mildest, most passive form imaginable. Stay tuned to see if these "identification with benefits" robocalls reappear in the run-up to the convention.

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

MAVERICK WANTS TO PAINT BLUE STATES RED
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Conversations with McCain backers and other Republican operatives, most of whom insisted on anonymity, reflect a party intent on altering the red state/blue state paradigm... Though still very early in the planning stages, McCain aides have begun eyeing between 20 and 25 states that could be competitive, a list that includes some places that are anything but rock-ribbed conservative. Next month, they’ll make this case symbolically by sending the candidate on a different-kind-of-Republican tour into places where party members typically don’t tread.  By virtue of his maverick brand, nontraditional stances on key issues and his Western roots, McCain may be able to compete in states that were far out of reach for Bush and that have otherwise been trending away from Republicans. This potential, say McCain strategists and other Republicans, could amount to the GOP’s ace in the hole in an otherwise dismal political climate.

RACE TANGLED IN THE RACE
(Kevin Merida, Washington Post)
The debate about racial preference vs. equal opportunity has coursed through society for decades, and not smoothly. We've argued passionately about who gets admitted to college and why, who gets a job promotion and why, which company gets awarded a contract and why. But affirmative action in pursuit of the presidency? Now, that's a new one.

DEM FIGHT CONFLICTS SOME WOMEN, BLACKS
(Kathy Kiely, USA Today)
For months, Democratic party leaders have argued the nomination fight is good for the party, drawing voters to the polls in record-breaking numbers. Now, some express misgivings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that "some of the exchange is not at the highest level" and expressed a hope that it "will return to that level." In an interview with The Washington Post website this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer expressed concern about the impact of a prolonged fight between Obama and Clinton, each trying to make history as the first African-American or first female president. "When they attack one another, it's not just an attack on the other candidate," Hoyer said. "It is taken, I think, by women and by African-Americans in a more personal sense."

CLINTON'S ROLE IN HEALTH PLAN DISPUTED
(Susan Milligan, Boston Globe)
In campaign speeches, Clinton describes the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, as an initiative "I helped to start." Addressing Iowa voters in November, Clinton said, "in 1997, I joined forces with members of Congress and we passed the State Children's Health Insurance Program." Clinton regularly cites the number of children in each state who are covered by the program, and mothers of sick children have appeared at Clinton campaign rallies to thank her. But the Clinton White House, while supportive of the idea of expanding children's health, fought the first SCHIP effort, spearheaded by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, because of fears that it would derail a bigger budget bill. And several current and former lawmakers and staff said Hillary Clinton had no role in helping to write the congressional legislation, which grew out of a similar program approved in Massachusetts in 1996.

DON'T DISCOUNT A CLINTON TICKET'S STRENGTH IN OHIO
(John Fortier, Politico)
Many Ohio Democrats are wondering whether Clinton might be more electable than Obama. Clinton dominated rural and blue-collar districts such as Ohio’s 6th in the March 4 primary. And lunch pail and breadbasket voters are key swing voters, concentrated in the competitive battleground states. The 6th Congressional District gave Clinton, who won 70 percent of the vote, her widest margin of victory of any district in Ohio. The district starts in Northeast Ohio, on the Pennsylvania border in Mahoning County, just south of Youngstown. It continues along the borders of West Virginia and, ultimately, Kentucky, following the banks of the Ohio River. It is about 50 percent rural and 31 percent blue collar, according to The Almanac of American Politics. Clinton won every county easily. Only in Athens County, home of Ohio University, did she fail to break 60 percent. The rural and blue-collar voters of Ohio are likely to be more important swing voters than those Obama courts.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

Other than that whole "not blogging on weekends" thing, the best part of the six-week lull before the next presidential primary is that the candidates will actually have some time to serve their home-state constituents--also known as, um, "doing their jobs."

Today, for example, none of the remaining candidates--Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain--is stumping in Pennsylvania or fundraising in Manhattan. Instead, they've all decided to visit a curious, off-the-beaten-path hamlet known as Washington, D.C. to vote on the 2009 budget resolution. Fancy that.

Not that the good people of Arizona, Illinois and New York are, you know, the real reason our three White House hopefuls have returned to the swamp. That would be--you guessed it--presidential politics. The key item on the agenda is a measure designed to ban congressional earmarks for one full year. (UPDATE, March 14: And if anyone was confused about their idiosyncratic motives, a quick glance at last night's roll call would clear things up--a 71-29 vote against the amendment, with only three Democrats joining Clinton and Obama to vote "yea.")

The legislation is McCain's baby. Proud recipient of the top Senate score from the earmark watchdogs at Citizens Against Government Waste, he's long railed against "wasteful pork-barrel spending" and pledged to "veto every single pork-barrel bill Congress sends me" if elected president. So the opportunity to co-sponsor the proposed ban was too good to pass up. Not only does McCain burnish his anti-pork cred, but he can also loudly contrast himself with Clinton and Obama, neither of whom have opposed earmarks as strongly in the past. "I call on my Democratic colleagues... [to] make this a bipartisan effort to return the budget to a focus on genuine national priorities," he said last week. "And, in the spirit of openness and transparency in government, I call on them to fully disclose all of their earmark requests while serving in the U.S. Senate." Translation: meet me in November.

Unwilling to cede any general-election ground, both Clinton and Obama have since declared that they support McCain's amendment--unlike, say, senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is reportedly not running for president. McCain quickly put out a statement "praising" them for their  “new-found enthusiasm” on earmarks. But the shift is a little less jarring for Obama than Clinton. In the Senate, Obama worked closely with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to draft and pass the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which increases transparency by "by creating a user-friendly website to search all government contracts, grants, earmarks and loans." And he sponsored a bill (the Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act) that required "all earmarks... to be disclosed 72 hours before they could be considered by the full Senate." That said, Obama is playing politics, too. After long refusing to release his 2005 and 2006 earmark requests--few politician want their records scoured for ties to donors and political allies--the senator suddenly let them fly today. The reason: to challenge Clinton's transparency. (Team Obama has been pressuring Clinton to release her tax returns and White House papers, too.) When asked "why now?" by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama thought it was appropriate to release them." Two hours later, though, communications director Robert Gibbs told reporters that, "if Senator Clinton will not agree to join Senator Obama in releasing her earmark requests, voters should ask why she doesn't believe they have the right to know how she wants to spend their tax dollars." No doubt that Obama did the right thing. But in this case, appropriate = politically expedient.

Where does Clinton stand? Somewhere else, I suppose. For one thing, she's a far more enthusiastic--and effective--earmarker than Obama. Last year, her $342 million tab for New York was the 10th highest in the Senate, according to the budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense; Obama snagged $98 million. Spokesman Philippe Reines says Clinton is "proud of the investments in New York she has secured," but believes the one-year ban "will allow a hard look at how more sunlight and transparency can be brought to this process." The only problem? That year apparently starts later rather than sooner. At press time, Team Clinton has yet to release any of her earmark requests, deferring press inquiries to her less-than-responsive Senate office.

With McCain and Obama waiting, that's just bad politics.

UPDATE, March 14: And then there's the downside. From the Washington Times:

Mr. Obama and Sens. John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton jetted back to Washington yesterday to vote during the annual budget free-for-all that compresses votes on a host of contentious issues into a single day. That meant taking positions on border security, energy independence, President Bush's tax cuts and Democrats' spending plans, each of which might come back to haunt the three major-party candidates still vying for the chief executive's slot, and could be used in this year's Senate elections as well.

No wonder they're more interested in extracurricular activities.

OBAMA: Forget those false (and politically malicious) "Obama is a Muslim" rumors. Now the Illinois senator's unusual name has been linked to another "exotic" entity: the small town of Obama, Japan, known the world over for its delightful "lacquered chopsticks."

No word yet on whether the connection has destroyed Obama's chances with the crucial "bigoted South Pacific combat veterans" demographic. Then again, something tells us they were going to vote for John McCain anyway.

CLINTON: Back in February, Stumper mercilessly mocked the creator of "Hillary4U&Me," a painful, over-choreographed pro-Clinton "music video." "The song itself... sounds sort of like a commercial jingle for a used futon store circa 1979," we wrote. "Only less catchy." Which is why we sharpened our knives when "Hillary in the House" appeared in our browser's window:

Sadly, the video, which was made by Texas volunteers, does not aspire to the same level of Three's Company-era professional polish as "Hillary4U&Me"--and so, despite ourselves, we find it kind of adorable. The awkwardly improvised lyrics, the sporadic clapping, the fist-pumping dance moves--it's clear that while its predecessor wasa humiliatingly misguided waste of too many people's time and energy, "Hillary in the House" is a spontaneous expression of childlike enthusiasm.

Cherish it while you can. These people are going to be suicidal zombies by the time the Democratic party finally picks a nominee, like, five months from now.

Sifting through the Mississippi exit polling data on Tuesday, I stumbled upon a pair of baffling stats: not only did 12 percent of Democratic primary voters describe themselves as Republicans, but a stunning 75 percent of these crossovers chose Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. The numbers were shocking because of how sharply they broke with established trends. Throughout January and February, Obama routinely routed his rival among Repubs, restricting her to an average take of 31 percent. Even in the demographically similar Alabama, which voted on Super Tuesday, Republicans accounted for a measly five percent of the electorate--and only 52 percent voted for Clinton.

As it was sort of hard to imagine there were that many Mississippi Republicans suddenly crushing on Clinton, I wondered if a) animosity toward Obama accounted for the surge in the New York senator's crossover support, or b) Rush Limbaugh's request that Republicans back Clinton in order to prolong the race (and perhaps eventually propel the more polarizing figure to the nomination) was actually working.

It looks like we have a (tentative) answer. Over at National Journal, the ever-brilliant Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com has gotten his hands on some delectable raw exit poll data that suggests a desire to stop Obama--not boost Clinton, a la Limbaugh--was the major factor motivating Clinton's crossover voters. Sorry, liberal blogosphere: the Limbaugh effect looks like a myth.***

The numbers are pretty clear. Of the 147 Clinton Republicans surveyed by pollsters, very few seemed to actually, you know, like Clinton or consider her an inspiring or honest leader (especially compared to John McCain): 85 percent rated McCain favorably, and 58 percent had a "strongly" favorable opinion of him; 41 percent said they would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the Democratic nominee; 56 percent said Clinton has not "offered clear and detailed plans to solve the country's problems"; 62 percent said Clinton does not inspire them "about the future of the country"; and 72 percent said Clinton is not "honest and trustworthy." That said, analyzing Clinton's numbers in isolation shows only that these Republicans aren't likely to support her in the general election; it's impossible to say why they chose to support her in Mississippi.

One glance at her opponent's stats, however, and the answer is immediately apparent: they really, really don't like Obama. Here's the damage: 91 percent said Clinton is more qualified to be commander in chief, while only 3 percent said Obama is more qualified; 94 percent said Obama does not inspire them "about the future of the country"; 89 percent would be dissatisfied if Obama were the Democratic nominee"; 86 percent said Obama is not "honest and trustworthy"; 86 percent said Obama has not "offered clear and detailed plans to solve the country's problems"; and 82 percent said Clinton should not pick Obama to be her running mate if she is the nominee. For comparison's sake, consider the latest Newsweek poll: 41 percent of Republicans had a favorable opinion of Obama. That should give you a sense of how anti-Obama Clinton's Mississippi Republicans actually were. Nationwide, most Republicans like Obama more than Clinton (in the same poll, she earned an unfavorable score of 73 percent). But the few driven to vote in Mississippi's primary were hard-core Obama haters. 

The larger question, of course, is why these angry activists object to Obama. No exit poll can answer that. It may be that they consider him a more dangerous general election opponent, as some Dems have surmised; after all, a full 89 percent say they oppose his nomination, versus 41 percent for Clinton. Or it may be that there are still some racists in the Deep South.** Until we install brain-scanners in our ballot boxes, we'll probably never know.

** This was meant to be sarcastic. I'm well aware that there are racists everywhere--not just Mississippi.

*** UPDATE, 4:30 p.m.: The Limbaugh effect line was a little hasty. What I tried--and failed--to get at above is the fact that if these Republicans were motivated primarily by Limbaugh, you'd expect them to dislike Clinton more than Obama. After all, Limbaugh's whole shtik is "let's keep this race going as long as possible to bloody the eventual nominee--and, if we're lucky, it'll be Hillary, who will inspire tons of animosity and excitement in the Republican base." The whole idea presupposes that Republicans hate Clinton and don't really mind Obama; that's why she'd be easier to "cream," in Limbaugh's words. National polls (see Newsweek's above) support this view.

But the results in Mississippi show just the opposite. The Republicans who voted for Clinton don't object to her nearly as strongly as they object to Obama. To me, that implies that they cast their votes viscerally, not tactically--i.e., to register their opposition to Obama himself. Whether that's racism or not, I don't know. But I'd expect Dittoheads to display more Hillary hatred than Obama hatred; otherwise, Limbaugh's whole reason for wanting to face Clinton in the general election falls apart.

Whatever the cause of the crossover, though, many of the commenters are correct to note that the effect is the same. Here's reader David Carlisle with a smart take:

Whether or not it was Limbaugh's influence that caused it, the Republican voters were not voting for Clinton because they like her, they were voting for Clinton because they dislike Obama, see him as the presumptive nominee, and want to weaken him against McCain by prolonging his fight for the nomination. Or, alternatively, they do want to see Clinton nominated, because they think she won't fare as well in the general election. Either way, the polls make it pretty clear that a Republican vote for Hillary isn't a vote for Hillary, it's a vote for McCain and/or against Obama. Which is exactly what Rush wants. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who voted Hillary in the primary but would not vote for her in the general over McCain is following the Rush Plan (whether they heard it from him directly or not).

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

MCCAIN TO MEDIA: LET'S STAY TOGETHER
(Mike Madden, Salon)
The "Straight Talk Express" that McCain rode through New Hampshire and Massachusetts Wednesday was a swankier version than the one he had two months ago, with red velvet couches and slabs of marble holding lights to the walls. Eight reporters, plus Joe Lieberman, squeezed into the back lounge with McCain for an 80-minute trip from Portsmouth, N.H., to Boston, while his press secretary sat in the hallway... The tone was conversational, and it felt less adversarial than on other campaigns where candidates don't spend as much time with reporters. (Like Obama, for instance, who walked away from a tense press conference last week, growling, "I just answered, like, eight questions.") ... McCain clearly likes having the press around, more than most politicians do. Never mind that he jokingly calls reporters "Trotskyites" and "jerks." When an aide pulled him away from the conversation to make a phone call, he groaned... There is no question that McCain starts the general election out on much friendlier terms with the press than either Democrat, despite conservative protests of a liberal media bias. And there's no question that it helps him. When he ran against George W. Bush eight years ago, McCain joked that the national media was his base. ... This time around, facing a Democratic nominee who will almost certainly have more money and more enthusiastic supporters than he does, McCain may need that base even more.

THE DREAM TICKET WON'T HAPPEN
(David Broder, Washington Post)
Judging from what I was told in a canvass of both the Clinton and Obama camps, there is good reason to believe this pairing will never occur. Even if the long campaign does not leave bruised personal feelings, practical considerations for both candidates argue strongly against such a deal. For Clinton, partnering with Obama, with him on top of the ticket, would either leave her part of a defeated pair in a party that is not generous with second chances or, if they won, probably lock her out of a presidential race until 2016, when she would be 68 -- almost John McCain's age now. Knowledgeable Democrats see at least two more-attractive options for her. One is to return to the Senate, where she is popular, well-established and potentially in line to be majority leader, a position with real power. The other is to go back to New York, where Eliot Spitzer's resignation from the governorship on Wednesday leaves a potential opening for a new candidate in 2010. As for Obama, many of the same arguments apply -- with even greater force. He is less enamored of the Senate than is Clinton, but it could provide a comfortable resting place, for four or eight years. Or he could go back to Illinois and run for governor in 2010, when incumbent Democrat Rod Blagojevich would face a third term.

OBAMA WINS TEXAS
(John Dickerson, Slate)
Clinton won the state's popular vote and the primary, but that doesn't matter, because after a majority of the caucus votes were counted—the second step in Texas' two-stage process—it looks as if Obama won the delegates. Declaring Obama the winner makes sense. In this primary season, we've got to stick fast to the rules. As both the Obama and Clinton campaigns spin themselves into the topsoil, that's all we have to keep us from madness. Except that Obama supporters have been making a case that doesn't stick to the rules in arguing how Democrats should pick the party's nominee...Fair or not, if Clinton wins by superdelegates, that win would be perfectly legal. The Democratic Party, in all its wisdom, designed the system to allow for this possibility. It may subvert the popular will, but the rules are the rules. In claiming victory in Texas, Obama is making this very same case, because the Texas delegate win happened through a subversion of the popular will.

RACIAL ISSUE BUBBLES UP AGAIN FOR DEMOCRATS
(Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
After the Democratic primary in South Carolina turned racially divisive in January, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama essentially declared a truce and put a stop to fighting between their camps. But this week, race has once again begun casting a pall over the battle between the two... From virtually the start of the contest between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama in January 2007, they have sought to move beyond race and sex, acknowledging that their possible nominations would be historic, yet saying they were running on their qualifications. At the same time, each has used the issue against the other.

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day.

Talk about good timing. A week ago, Cornell law student Gregory S. Parks emailed me a law review article that he had just coauthored with university professor Jeffrey Rachlinski. The subject? "Unconscious race and gender bias in the 2008 election." In addition to their legal studies, both Parks and Rachlinski (whose academic efforts have focused on the influence of human psychology on decision-making by courts, administrative agencies and regulated communities) boast Ph.Ds in psychology. On Monday, I decided to call them up for a chat. The next day, of course, race and gender consumed the national conversation (yet again) when Clinton supporter and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro told a California newspaper that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Revisiting my conversation with Parks and Rachlinski this morning, I realized that many of the questions we covered--who's battling the more difficult biases? is the 'victim pose' politically helpful? what should we expect in the general election?--are precisely the questions that everyone is asking in the wake of the Ferraro flap. Thus, I defer to the experts:

How about Obama?
R: Obama has a tougher job. The biases against African Americans are just a raw animus in a lot of ways. What you see in the studies is that people associate black with negative imagery, just wholesale, without regard to specific content. Blacks are bad, whites are good. You see it over and over in the unconscious bias literature. So what does he have to fight? He has to fight against being black in a way. He has to have people look at him and associate him with the positive imagery that Americans tend to associate with whites. It's not surprising, then, that his campaign is about very amorphous goals like hope and aspiration. That's the message that can work, because he can't embrace black issues without activating unconscious biases in white voters. That's very difficult to begin with.

AFTER THE JUMP: THE 'VICTIM POSE'

PHILADELPHIA, Penn.—Hillary Clinton has an eye for detail. Hundreds of homemade signs hovered above the heads of the 4,000 raucous supporters packed into McGonigle basketball arena last night at Temple University here in North Philadelphia. There was "YES WE WILL," Clinton's recent revision of the famous Obama catchphrase "YES WE CAN." There was the Spanish rendition of her rival's slogan, too: "Si, se puede." (The "Yes, We Will" pledge does not apply to translation, apparently.)  And, last but not least, there was "From Pennsylvania to Pennsylvania Avenue," a fitting assessment of a state that "should," in the words of the senator, "make all the difference in deciding the next president of the United States." But Clinton didn't mention any of them in her brief, fevered stump speech. Instead, she singled out another, more conveniently worded placard.

"I saw a sign up there: 'Help Wanted. Experience Required, Day One,'" Clinton said near the start of her remarks. "And I think that says it all. I want you to think about this campaign as a loooong job interview. Because each of us is going to come and talk about what we've done and what we want to do, and you have to decide: who would you hire for the toughest job in the world?"

Something tells me she would've made the point without the poster. As the opening gun sounded yesterday on the uninterrupted six-week Pennsylvania marathon, Clinton's strategy was clear: appeal to the state's whiter, older, more blue-collar and more conservative Democratic electorate by reminding them, both explicitly and implicitly, that she--unlike, presumably, her opponent and his "boutique, latte-sipping" supporters--is "one of them." She didn't swipe at Obama, as she did earlier in Harrisburg; I suspect she'll save the direct attacks for smaller media markets. But the contrast was still obvious. You've had to pay your dues, Clinton seemed to tell the crowd at Temple. Why shouldn't the President?

In the quest to portray herself as the Keystone State's more comfortable choice, Clinton has several weapons at her disposal--and she deployed all of them last night. First, and perhaps most beneficial: her biography. Though she grew up in Chicago and lived her adult life in Arkansas and Washington, the former First Lady opened the evening's festivities by boasting of her roots in Scranton. "My father was born there, my grandfather came there when he was a three-year old," she said. "He went to work in the lace mills when he was 11 years old. Worked until he retired when he was 65." Lest the audience assume her Pennsylvania connection was merely ancestral, Clinton went on to describe summers and Christmases spent on nearby Lake Winola, in "the little cottage my grandfather built himself." (Take that, latte-sippers.) In fact, according to Clinton, the Rodhams behaved much like presidential candidates themselves, "travel[ing] across Pennsylvania" and "taking every detour you can imagine." (No word on whether little Hillary held any rallies.) "We came to Philadelphia all the time," she said. "So I feel a sense of connection whenever I'm here." Like any competent politician, Clinton has "felt a sense of connection" to other states as well--she went to college in Massachusetts, attended law school in Connecticut, worked on the McGovern campaign in Texas and in Iowa... um, well, Iowa was Midwestern, like Illinois. And there's no guarantee that the "granddaughter of a millworker" will meet with more success than John Edwards, who may have mentioned that he was son of a millworker once or twice. But at the very least, Obama can't brag about idling on the banks of Lake Winola--or watching his brother play football under Joe Paterno at Penn State, as Clinton did last night--so it's a definite advantage, however slight.

Also helping to cast Clinton in a familiar, favorable light: the 1990s. After Philadelphia former mayor (and current Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell heaped praise on the Clinton Administration for policies that he said helped the city--including federal empowerment zones, housing-authority assistance, poverty programs and extra police--Clinton eagerly picked up the theme. "When people say, 'We don't want to go back to 1990s,' I think to myself, which part don't they like?" she said. "The peace? Or the prosperity?" The reporters in the press file rolled their eyes--they'd heard it all before. But Philadelphians, of course, haven't--and after years of watching murder rates skyrocket under a corrupt mayor, it's probably smart politics to promise them a return to security and competence.

Clinton's underlying argument, of course, is that, with her, voters know exactly what they are getting--unlike the "riskier" Obama. Which accounts for last night's heavy--some might say leaden--focus on "specifics."  "I'd like to tell you what I would do if you gave me your vote and your confidence," she said, launching into a half-hour of gas prices ($100 a barrel), student loan rates (up to 29 percent), tax-credit pledges and health-care remedies. While Obama's speeches build to stirring (if airy) perorations, Clinton chose to cap hers with a clunky laundry list of promises."Who would you hire to bring our sons and daughters home and take care of our veterans and give them the health care and service and the compensation and respect they deserve! " she shouted, adding so many clauses to each sentence that the crowd was uncertain when to cheer. "Who would you hire to stand up against the home foreclosure crisis, put a moratorium on foreclosures and freeze interest rates for five years so people can stay in their homes! Who would you hire to go to bat for organized labor, to stand up for your right to organize and bargain collectively and have a chance to give more people a good middle-class lifestyle with a rising income! Who would you hire to get rid of No Child Left Behind and make college affordable and provide pre-kindergarten for our kids!" 

Not exactly Cicero there, senator. But in their stubborn refusal to inspire, Clinton's final lines last night perfectly captured the character of her candidacy going forward. Obama can keep his uplift, she seems to say. I'm betting that Pennsylvanians are in the market for something nittier, grittier and more "down-to-earth."

After all, she is, like, one of them.

On Monday, I wrote that if Obama doesn't want the media to accept Clinton's claim that Keystone State is the be-all, end-all contest--and interpret a loss there (on what is Clinton-friendly terrain, after all) as a confirmation of his "weakness" in big general-election states--he needs to offer up a compelling counternarrative. (I'm winning the delegate race no matter what happens is far too static.) With that in mind, I suggested that the campaign 1) lower expectations by continuing to hammer on Clinton's huge demographic advantages in Pennsylvania, but 2) acknowledge that, with nothing else to do between now and then, the press is going to obsess over such a delegate-rich contest, no matter what you say, so 3) frame its Keystone State stumping and spending as an effort not to win but to cut into Clinton's demographics WHILE ALSO 4) challenging Clinton to do the same thing in North Carolina, which votes two weeks later on May 6. Surprisingly, they haven't taken my advice. But this morning campaign manager David Plouffe released a memo gesturing in that general direction. Here's the meat, straight from the horse's mouth (apologies for the unappetizing mixed metaphor):

Now that Mississippi is behind us, we move on to the next ten contests. The Clinton Campaign would like to focus your attention only on Pennsylvania – a state in which they have already declared that they are “unbeatable.” But Pennsylvania is only one of 10 remaining contests, each important in terms of allocating delegates and ultimately deciding who are nominee will be. Senator Obama campaigned in Pennsylvania yesterday and will do so again later this week, but he will also campaign aggressively in the other upcoming states – he will travel to other upcoming states in the very near future.

As I've said before, the six-week lull between now and April 22 will be as much a battle over media expectations as actual votes, so expect this sort of talk to continue as the Obama campaign struggles to deemphasize Pennsylvania and curb the press's lust for "drama." On a conference call with reporters just now, in fact, Plouffe further lowered the bar, calling Clinton "the prohibitive favorite" and saying "they should win by a healthy margin there given where they’re starting from." It's only a matter of time, I think, before they start name dropping North Carolina...

UPDATE: And there it is. Via TPM Election Central:

The Obama camp is seizing on a comment made by Clinton adviser Harold Ickes to today's New York Times to broaden its case that Obama's far more electable in a general than Hillary is. Ickes, speaking of states Obama won or is likely to win, said: "Most of those states haven’t voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don’t see that changing. They’re great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November. He’s winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election." On a conference call with reporters just now, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe used the Ickes quote to beat the electability drum, arguing that Camp Hillary's concession of this general election turf is a sign of her weakness against McCain. "Amazingly, they said that the Democratic nominee could not carry the Carolinas," Plouffe said. "We think that speaks to their weakness in the general election. We think we can win the state of North Carolina. Clinton has already waved the white flag [there]. North Carolina will be a central battleground if Obama is our nominee." 

FULL MEMO AFTER THE JUMP... 

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

OBAMA'S DELTA WIN
(Richard Wolffe, Newsweek)
Buoyed by an overwhelming edge among African-American voters, Barack Obama cruised to victory over Hillary Clintonin the Mississippi primary, posting a 54-44 percent margin and teeing up a crucial showdown in Pennsylvania, the next major contest in the quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama, seeking to become America's first African-American president, has enjoyed strong support from black voters throughout the nominating process. But here in the Delta Tuesday night, the racial divide was especially stark. According to exit polls, Obama outpolled Clinton among black voters 91-9. White voters preferred Clinton by a slightly narrower 72-21 percent margin. If the outcome and the racial math was predictable, Mississippians did provide a few modest surprises at the ballot box.

RACIAL TENSIONS ROIL DEM RACE
(Ben Smith and David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
The Clinton and Obama campaigns are once again locked in tense fight over race, as both sides refuse to budge on the question of what constitutes an offensive comment, and what counts as a sincere apology. The argument over race and grievance could carry short term benefits for Hillary Clinton, and could boost her support among white voters in Pennsylvania who may be turned off by a more intense focus on Obama's race. Barack Obama's promise has been in part based on his dexterity in moving past the old-fashioned political battlegrounds - including the politics of race - where he's found himself battling Clinton in recent days. But a Clinton supporter's charge that Obama has received preferential treatment because he's black also carries serious dangers for her, as senior members of Congress and other superdelegates begin to signal discomfort with the Clinton campaign's increasingly sharp attacks. Notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she thought Clinton's attacks on Obama had put a joint ticket out of the question.

DEMOCRATS IN A FIGHT TO DEFINE WINNER
(Patrick Healy, New York Times)
With the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination likely to go on for weeks or months, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are battling to define what it means to be winning — and, in some instances, they are overstating their own advantage and understating the gains of the other... The Clinton campaign’s argument that Mrs. Clinton has been winning in Electoral College battlegrounds falls short somewhat because of Mr. Obama’s victory in a bellwether state, Missouri, and his success in states that Democratic officials believe they may have a chance to carry this fall. These include Virginia and Colorado, which have been increasingly electing Democrats to statewide offices, as well as traditional swing states like Iowa... As another counterargument, Mr. Obama has been toting up his victories to suggest a striking range of popularity in states that usually fall outside the Democratic electoral map. Yet though these states have helped give him a lead in pledged delegates, it appears far from likely that he would be able to carry some of them in a general election.

MCCAIN'S ROLE IN PLANE PACT HIGHLIGHTS TIES TO LOBBYISTS
(Michael D. Shear and Matthew Most, Washington Post)
To show that he's a crusader against wasteful spending and congressional corruption, Sen. John McCain repeatedly brags about his leading role in stopping a scandal-plagued air tanker contract between the Air Force and Boeing in 2004. Four years later, a $35 billion contract has been awarded to Europe's Airbus consortium to build the latest generation of tanker planes. The decision has sparked anger from Boeing's congressional supporters and critics of outsourcing. It has also focused attention on McCain's reliance on lobbyists in his campaign for president because his finance chairman and several other top advisers lobbied for Airbus last year when it was in fierce competition with Boeing for the Air Force contract. 

MUTUAL CONTEMPT
(Michael Crowley, The New Republic)
It's little wonder that Obama and McCain would be casting each other as fakers. At the core of each man's political identity is the image of a reformer determined to take on and reshape the corrupt culture of Washington, D.C. To Obama, McCain is a fixture of that system, one whose reform talk belies his debts to the GOP establishment and its lobbyist machine. McCain, meanwhile, sees Obama as an upstart self-promoter whose talk about reform isn't matched by a record of hard work to achieve it. "In a weird sort of way, they're fighting over a change-and-reform mantle from two ends of the same argument," says Dan Schnur, a former senior aide to McCain. And that was never more obvious than in a 2006 clash between the men, well before Obama was even a candidate. That episode revealed the importance of reform to both men, but also the pitfalls they're finding as they walk the high ground.

DEMOCRATS IN FLORIDA ARE NEAR PLAN FOR NEW VOTE
(Abby Goodnough, New York Times)
Democratic Party officials here are close to completing a draft plan for a new mail-in primary that would take place by early June, a proposal that seeks to give Florida delegates a role in the party’s presidential contest, several people involved in the discussions said Tuesday. A spokesman for Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat who has been pushing for a mail-in contest, said Mr. Nelson expected the Florida Democratic Party to finalize details of the complex plan as soon as Wednesday. The state party would most likely submit the proposal to Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, by week’s end.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP... 

Extra, extra, read all about it.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Obama has defeated Clinton 61-37 in today's Mississippi primary--slightly exceeding our 20-point "MVP," or margin-of-victory prediction. (Like the acronym? I just made it up. Ah, the pleasures of blogging.) The spread should net him 20 delegates to Clinton's 13, for an overall gain of seven. Which, as we noted earlier, will completely erase the New York senator's March 4 advances. Congrats!

Not many surprises in the exit polls either. As expected, Obama garnered overwhelming support from the Magnolia State's black electorate, while Clinton won a solid, though less sweeping, white majority. Such polarization is not the norm nationwide; Obama has already captured lily-white states like Iowa, Wisconsin and Wyoming, and typically polls within five to 20 points of Clinton among whites (even winning the category in diverse Virginia). But it has been consistent across the Deep South. Mirroring Alabama, Mississippi saw a nine-to-one pro-Obama split among African-American voters and a three-to-one pro-Clinton split among whites.  That said, I tend to agree with Ben Smith of the Politico about the larger significance of such stats. "If there's one part of the country where you'd actually expect a black candidate to have trouble with white voters, it is the Deep South," he writes. "So I'm not sure there's really all that much to read into this one." Amen.

Earlier I questioned Obama's claim that blacks could flip Mississippi for him in the general. I remain skeptical. While more African-Americans showed up at the polls this year than in 2004, it's impossible to determine how many were spurred by excitement for Obama and how many were simply eager to vote in Mississippi's first relevant primary in ages. Either way, white turnout was up as well, meaning that the rolls swelled from about 60,000 voters four years ago to about 400,000 today--and blacks ended up seeing their share of the electorate drop from 56 to 50 percent overall. That trend isn't transferable to the general election. But it's still doubtful that Obama could carry the state in November.

The most interesting--and perhaps distressing--finding relates to the Republican crossover vote. In state after state, Obama has crushed Clinton two- or three-to-one among GOPers willing to participate in a Democratic primary or caucus. Not so in Mississippi. There, a stunning 75 percent of Republicans voted for Clinton; they were her single strongest group. Meanwhile, the GOP more than doubled its share of the 2004 electorate, skyrocketing from five to 12 percent. For comparison, Republicans accounted for five percent of the Super Tuesday turnout in Alabama--where only 52 percent of them voted for Clinton. Could white racial animosity toward Obama account for the surge in the New York senator's crossover support? Or is Rush Limbaugh's request that Republicans back Clinton actually working? Either way, it's sort of hard to imagine there are that many Mississippi Republicans who have suddenly fallen for Hillary. But maybe I'm just being cynical.

Guess what? Everyone loses.  

At March 7, 7:52 a.m., the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif. printed an interview with former Democratic vice presidential candidate and current Clinton finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro in which the pioneering politician said something about Clinton's main rival, Barack Obama, that was both baffling and offensive. "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."  As if running as a black man named Barack Hussein Obama was, like, easy.

More than four days later, at 5:03 this afternoon, Obama spokesman Bill Burton emailed reporters a statement slamming Clinton for "refus[ing] to denounce or reject Ms. Ferraro" and demanding that her campaign remove Ferraro from its finance committee. "She has once again proven that her campaign gets to live by its own rules and its own double standard, and will only decry offensive comments when it’s politically advantageous to Senator Clinton," he wrote. "Her refusal to take responsibility for her own supporter’s remarks is exactly the kind of tactic that feeds the American people’s cynicism about politics today."

In between, the two campaigns engaged in the kind of crossfire that's becoming all too common as the Democratic campaign enters a likely five-month slog to the Denver convention in late August. With passion on either sides hardening into something more like animosity, both camps tried to play the incident (and their rival's reaction) for political gain, battling over what constitutes an offensive comment and what counts as a sincere apology. Both ended up looking like hypocrites.

Hillary first. Asked last night for a reaction to Ferraro's comments, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said, "We disagree with her." So far, so good--no sane person, let alone political operative, could possibly agree. But Wolfson's "disagreement" wasn't enough for Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice. Appearing this morning on CNN, she demanded that Clinton herself "repudiate" Ferraro's remarks. "I think if Sen. Clinton is serious about putting an end to statements that have racial implications," said Rice, "then she ought to repudiate this comment." Considering Clinton's recent history, she had a point. When Louis Farrakhan declared his support for Obama last month, Clinton famously insisted that he "reject and denounce" the Nation of Islam leader (and occasional anti-Semite); Obama obliged. And when foreign policy adviser Samantha Power called Clinton a "monster," Clintonites prodded Obama to "ask [her] not to be part of his campaign," calling it "a test of character." The result? Power quickly resigned. Unfortunately, Clinton has refused to either reject, denounce or remove Ferraro, reiterating instead that she "does not agree." "You know it’s regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides say things that veer off into the personal," was all she would say this afternoon in Harrisburg. "We ought to keep this focused on the issues." Right. Because Farrakhan and Power were "issues."

Unfortunately, Team Obama hasn't quite remained above the fray. Calling for Clinton to repudiate Ferraro was only fair. But on a conference call this afternoon, top Obama strategist David Axelrod went a few steps further. Linking Ferraro's remarks to earlier "race-based" gaffes--including Billy Shaheen's speculation about whether Obama dealt drugs, Robert Johnson's claim that the senator spent his youth "doing something in the neighborhood" and Clinton's "own inexplicable unwillingness" to flatly deny that Obama is a Muslim in a "60 Minutes" interview--Axelrod said that "all this is part of an insidious pattern that needs to be addressed" and asked "whether she's trying to send a signal to her supporters that anything goes." Putting aside the question of whether or not such a pattern exists--and it very well may--Axelrod's assertion is clearly at odds with a statement that his boss made only six weeks ago, when aides floated similar suspicions in the rancorous run-up to the South Carolina primary. (In a four-page campaign memo, they even cited many of the same incidents.) Asked at the time by Tim Russert whether he "regret[ted] pushing this story," Obama said yes--and insisted that he wouldn't tolerate such speculation in the future. "Well, not only in hindsight, but going forward," he said. "Our supporters, our staff get overzealous. They start saying things that I would not say. And it is my responsibility to make sure that we’re setting a clear tone in our campaign, and I take that responsibility very seriously." The only problem? While he has rightfully called Ferraro's comments "divisive" (and even suggested that she should be fired), Obama hasn't said a word about Axelrod's "insidious pattern" insinuation. According to the senator himself, it wasn't acceptable then--so it shouldn't be acceptable now. End of story.

Both campaigns, of course, have already highlighted these hypocrisies. But whatever moral outrage they affect, in the end it's all about--what else?--political calculation. As the Politico's Ben Smith has noted, Obama's campaign thinks it has something to gain from accusing Clinton of crossing racial lines; Clinton's thinks it has something to gain from accusing Obama of playing the race card. The sad part is that the day started out on a substantive note, with Team Obama questioning Clinton's foreign-policy cred and the Clinton camp delivering a serious, factual rebuttal. International experience is a crucial question, and voters deserve to hear the candidates debate. But once race and gender enter the equation, the cable channels swarm, the pundits sharpen their knives--and the campaigns play along.

Only five months to go.

UPDATE, 10:00 p.m.: Ferraro has called back the Daily Breeze to reaffirm her comments suggesting that Sen. Obama is 'lucky' to be black:

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. ... Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?" 

How about "not good."

The outcome in today's Magnolia State primary is unlikely to surprise anyone. Unless the laws of politics--and mathematics--suddenly collapse in on themselves, Barack Obama should defeat Hillary Clinton by relatively wide margin. Five polls taken over the last week show Obama leading Clinton by an average of 18 points; on March 6 an InsiderAdvantage survey posted a smaller spread of plus six for Obama--spurring stories like this--but by March 9 the public opinion firm had him up by nearly 20. The major reason for Obama's lead: a Democratic electorate that's 56 percent African-American. When blacks, who typically vote for Obama four- or five-to-one, make up a majority of voters, as they did in Georgia (51 percent), Alabama (51 percent) and South Carolina (55 percent) it's very, very hard for anyone else to win--let alone come close. 

That said, if you can tear yourself away from the coverage of Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal, Mississippi is still worth watching. Three thing to track:

1) The Delegate Count: As we've repeated ad nauseam, Obama's case for the nomination at this point is all about math: I am winning by 100-plus delegates, he says. No matter what happens in the upcoming contests, I will still be ahead in the delegate count by the end of regulation. If things go as planned today, his campaign could emerge with a new arithmetical talking point. On March 4, Hillary Clinton won the primaries in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, giving her a ton of narrative momentum--"Comeback Kid," anyone?--but only a tiny net gain in delegates. Ohio awarded her nine more delegates than Obama, but his victories in Vermont and the Texas caucuses canceled out her primary wins in Rhode Island and the Lone State State. With two delegates from Saturday's Wyoming win, that means Obama has a chance to completely erase Clinton's March 4 advances today. According to Slate's Delegate Calculator, a 20-point win net him the seven delegates needed to do the trick--which is exactly what the polls are predicting. So keep an eye on that margin. Of course, a nifty mathematical "triumph" won't trump Clinton's comeback storyline, or shift the spotlight off of Pennsylvania. But it's definitely the factoid that Team Obama is hoping to feed the talking heads tonight.

2) The Black Vote: Back in August, Obama told the AP that he's the "only candidate who, having won the nomination, can actually redraw the political map." The reason? Black voters. "I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum," he said. "So we're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ." The state at the heart of Obama's prediction was Mississippi. At the time, Obama said that "if we just got African-Americans in Mississippi to vote their percentage of the population, Mississippi is suddenly a Democratic state"; in November he told the Washington Post that he "think[s] [he] can put Mississippi in play." Today will be the first test of Obama's clairvoyant "30 percent" claim--and he's not likely to pass.  African-Americans made up 56 percent of Magnolia State's Democratic primary electorate, meaning that a 30 percent increase would boost black turnout to a preposterous 73 or 74 percent. As leading scholar of black politics David Bositis told me in November, "no state and no voting group has a turnout of 74 percent." *** Rather than mess up the math myself, I'll quote Philip Klinker of PolySigh:

In 2004, blacks made up 34 percent of Mississippi's electorate and gave 90 percent of their votes to John Kerry. Conversely, whites made up 66 percent of the electorate and gave 85 percent of their votes to George W. Bush. Based on that breakdown of votes, blacks would have to make up 47 percent of the electorate in order for the Democratic candidate to win the state. In 2004, there were 1,152,365 votes cast in Mississippi in the presidential election, 66 percent or approximately 760,561 by whites. Assuming that the white vote remains the same, there would have to be approximately 675,000 black voters in order for them to make up 47 percent of the electorate. According to the Census, there were only 698,000 voting age blacks in Mississippi in 2004. Even accounting for changes in population over the last four years, a Democratic win in Mississippi this November would require a black turnout of nearly 100 percent. 

So don't hold your breath. That said, Obama has been increasing black turnout across the deep South; in the Palmetto State primary, for example, it was up about 17 percent over 2004. And the Obama camp would argue, I'm sure, that the dynamics in a primary are totally different than the dynamics in a general election. With that in mind, I'll be keeping an eye--if a wary one--on black turnout.

3) The Republican/Independent/White Vote: There's another reason to doubt that Obama could put Mississippi,