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

OBAMA PUSHES EFFORT TO CLAIM VICTORY TONIGHT
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
Senator Barack Obama’s campaign began a concerted effort on Monday to rally undecided superdelegates around him so he can claim the Democratic presidential nomination after the primaries end on Tuesday night. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton invited fund-raisers and other supporters to an election-night rally in New York City where, aides said, she was prepared to deliver what they described as a farewell speech that summed up the case for her candidacy. They said Mrs. Clinton was not likely to withdraw from the race on Tuesday night, probably waiting until later in the week, once Mr. Obama’s victory appeared clear. Sensing an opportunity to shut down the nominating contest, Obama campaign advisers said that they were orchestrating an endorsement of Mr. Obama by at least eight Senate and House members who had pledged to remain uncommitted until the primaries ended, and that the endorsements would come the moment the South Dakota polls closed on Tuesday night... Mrs. Clinton has no public traveling schedule through the weekend, other than to Washington, reflecting what is, for all practical purposes, a campaign in suspension. Her associates said that no one in her campaign saw any way she could win the nomination, and that the only question now was when Mr. Obama could claim victory... The most likely situation, some of Mrs. Clinton’s aides said, was that she would suspend her campaign later in the week and would probably — though not definitely — endorse Mr. Obama.

MORE: Obama is Poised to Clinch Victory (Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post)
As Clinton made a final push for votes across South Dakota, her advisers said her options ranged from dropping out Tuesday night and endorsing Obama to making a final effort to convince uncommitted superdelegates that she would be a stronger rival to McCain. Another, according to senior Clinton advisers, is what they dubbed the "middle option," for Clinton to suspend her campaign, acknowledging that Obama has crossed the delegate threshold but keeping her options open until the convention in late August. Advisers said she is looking at historical precedent while weighing her recent victories, including her landslide win in Puerto Rico, in trying to sort out what to do. Clinton has been angered by recent calls for her to quit, her advisers said, and the "soft landing" of suspending her campaign would allow her to move ahead on her own terms.

ON LAST DAY... SUPERDELEGATES REPORTEDLY LINING UP
(John McCormick and Mike Dorning, Chicago Tribune)
A Democratic source said that at least five to 10 House members would endorse Obama on Tuesday morning, at least 10 senators would endorse him by the end of the day and an additional 10 superdelegates also would endorse him during the day. That would almost certainly assure enough delegates by the end of the day to reach the 2,118 needed to clinch the nomination ... Obama was about 40 delegates away from the nomination on Monday. Among the House members expected to endorse Obama are Reps. James Clyburn and John Spratt, two prominent South Carolina lawmakers who could make it easier for others to follow.

MORE: Some Superdelegates May Defer Decision (June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal)
Dozens of superdelegates may throw their support behind Barack Obama after polls close in Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday, possibly settling the nomination within days. But other superdelegates may see no advantage in taking sides just yet, and some even say they may arrive at the August convention uncommitted. That is unlikely to alter the outcome of the Democrats' presidential nomination race, but it shows that at least some superdelegates -- despite continuing pressure from the campaigns -- aren't eager to resolve the nomination when the voters themselves remain closely split.

OBAMA BEGINS DELICATE TASK OF WOOING CLINTON SUPPORTERS
(Monica Langley, Wall Street Journal)
With the bitter, hard-fought primary season ending Tuesday, a behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding. Amid growing speculation that Sen. Clinton may pull out as soon as Tuesday night, top Obama strategists and supporters are wooing several of Sen. Clinton's key big-money donors, political operatives and policy advisers... Among the moves so far: Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a senior adviser to Sen. Obama, has talked to Clinton supporter Leon Panetta, the former congressman and President Clinton's chief of staff, about endorsing Sen. Obama once the final primary contests conclude. Obama chief strategist David Axelrod recently chatted with ex-Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, whom the Obama camp will want to bring in for help with women and Hispanics. A top money man for Sen. Obama, hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, is keeping a dialogue open with two of Sen. Clinton's finance chairs, Hassan Nemazee and Maureen White, one of Sen. Clinton's top fund-raisers, in hopes of moving their fund-raising prowess to his candidate soon. The contacts aren't part of a concerted effort by the Obama campaign, but the result of numerous informal conversations among people who have known each other for years, including some who have worked together on past campaigns.

OBAMA'S ADVERSITY CREATES OPPORTUNITY
(Michael A. Cohen, Politico)
After months of bruising political battles, the matchup for the November election is now almost set. It’s clear that one of the two presumptive nominees has been badly hurt by his party’s nominating fight. Barack Obama? No. John McCain. Certainly, Obama has faced the tougher primary battle. But in adversity has come opportunity. The presumptive Democratic nominee has been able to confront difficult questions about his candidacy that would normally arise during the general election. And he was able to test out an affirmative message of change with independent voters in nearly every state of the country. McCain, on the other hand, won the GOP nomination by defeating a lightweight group of opponents best described as “none of the above.” He was never forced to define his candidacy or make amends with the party’s conservative base. Instead, he relied on the votes of moderate Republicans and independents as Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney split the conservative wing of the party. In the states where McCain largely clinched the GOP nomination — New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida — he won, respectively, a mere 37 percent, 33 percent and 36 percent of the vote. In all, as of May 8, McCain had garnered less than 45 percent of the total GOP vote. 

CALLING DR. DOOM
(David Brooks, New York Times)
The Obama people are too convinced that they can define McCain as Bush III. The case is just factually inaccurate. McCain will be able to pull out dozens of instances, from torture to global warming to spending, in which he broke with his party, as Rush Limbaugh will tell you. The Republican camp, meanwhile, is possessed of the belief that Obama is a charming lightweight. Republican senators have contempt for Obama’s post-partisan image, arguing that he and his staff refused to even participate in backroom bipartisan discussion groups. But Obama is far from a lightweight, as Republicans will learn if he agrees to do joint town meetings with McCain. McCain’s jabs that Obama is naïve will backfire. In this climate, a candidate can’t define the other guy, only himself. When McCain attacks Obama for being naïve, all voters see is McCain being sour and negative.

MORE: Obama, Awaiting a New Title, Carefully Hones Partisan Image (Michael Powell, New York Times)
Mr. Obama sets up his political jabs with a to-be-sure-my-opponent-is-not-a-knave disclaimer. He reminds his audiences that Mr. McCain, of Arizona, is a war hero, and he honors his service. (That Mr. Obama’s tone sometimes suggests that Mr. McCain, 71, might have been a Civil War veteran is surely coincidental.) When a question is raised about Mr. McCain’s recent, incorrect assertion that the number of American troops in Iraq is at “pre-surge levels,” Mr. Obama waves his hand magnanimously. Everyone, he tells listeners, makes a slip of the tongue. At this point Mr. Obama slips the rhetorical shiv into his rival. “The problem is that John McCain can’t admit he made a slip, and we’ve seen this movie before,” Mr. Obama told an audience in Great Falls, Mont. “Just like George Bush, John McCain refuses to admit a mistake.”

THE ILLUSIONIST
(Jonathan Chait, New Republic)
If you accuse John McCain of agreeing with George W. Bush on economics, he'll come back at you with the one big issue where he and Bush disagree: spending. McCain may (now) approve of the Bush tax cuts, but he lacerates the president for his spendthrift ways. This, McCain says, is a "fundamental" difference between him and Bush. But you know who else disagrees with George W. Bush on spending? George W. Bush. The president has been lamenting excessive spending for years now. Bush's line is the same as McCain's: The tax cuts are swell, but "[t]hat's just one part of the equation. We've got to cut out wasteful spending." Actually, McCain is following the pattern of not just Bush but every Republican president since Ronald Reagan. Phase One is to enact tax cuts and promise that they'll cause revenues to rise, or will cause revenues to fall (leading to spending cuts), or somehow both at once, so, either way, there's no possibility that it will lead to deficits. Phase Two is deficits. Phase Three is to blame the deficits on big-spending congressional fat cats and to issue increasingly strident threats to cut expenditures, without going so far as to identify actual programs to cut.

CAN NEW VOTERS DELIVER NOVEMBER VICTORY FOR OBAMA?
(Peter Brown, Wall Street Journal)
He is betting the White House on the same Democratic demographic strategy that has given us a variety of Republican presidents over the past generations... Have the electorate and the times changed sufficiently that the once-losing Democratic strategy will succeed in a year when the playing field so favors Sen. Obama? To be sure, Sen. Obama’s ability to bring new voters to the polls in the primaries was greater than his Democratic predecessors. But his weakness among white-working class voters is probably as great, or greater, than any of the losing Democrats of the past 40 years.  Conventional wisdom - and common sense - says that because Sen. Obama brought out an estimated 3.5 million new voters in the primaries, he will be able to inspire record turnout levels that will carry him to victory in the fall. Yet, the historical record says it just ain’t so. Political scientists Leonard Williams at Manchester College in Indiana and Neil Wollman at Bentley College in Massachusetts studied almost 300-plus state presidential primaries between 1972 and 2004. “No matter which party had the edge in nomination contest turnout, there is no resultant advantage in the general election for that party,” said Mr. Williams. In fact, twice as many times, the party with the higher turnout in a state primary lost that state in November than won it. In roughly two-thirds of the states, Democrats had the higher turnout, but only carried those states about 40% of the time.

AS HIS WIFE'S CAMPAIGN WINDS DOWN, BILL CLINTON REMAINS WOUND UP
(Michal Luo, New York Times)
Former President Bill Clinton took the microphone here on Monday and began with a lament that it might be his last day as a campaigner. If so, he went out venting the kind of anger that has punctuated his efforts to put his wife in the White House. He jumped energetically around South Dakota to what were likely to be the final small dots on the Clinton campaign’s 2008 electoral map — a campaign that at times seemed to be about Bill Clinton and the baggage he had brought to the race as much as it was about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her efforts to leave all that behind. After a weekend in which his aides sought to discredit an article in Vanity Fair that, relying primarily on anonymous sources, raised questions about his judgment, the company he keeps and whether he was spending time with other women, Mr. Clinton unleashed a tirade against the article’s author, Todd S. Purdum, a former reporter for The New York Times... According to the Huffington Post Web site, Mr. Clinton, as he worked the rope line at an event here, called Mr. Purdum “sleazy,” “slimy” and “dishonest.” 

WHITE WOMEN TAKE THE GLOVES OFF
(Froma Harrop, Providence Journal)
What's dangerous for the Democratic Party is that, for many women, the eye of the storm has moved beyond Hillary or anything she does at this point. The offense has turned personal. They are now in their own orbit, having abandoned popular Democratic Websites that reveled in crude anti-Hillary outpourings -- and established new ones on which they trade stories of the Obama people's nastiness. But worse than the online malice has been the affronts to their faces... The women are angry at the ludicrous charges of racism leveled against Clinton by the Obama camp -- amplified in the supposedly respectable media -- and projected onto themselves. Jean B. Grillo, an "over 50" writer in lower Manhattan, was pretty straightforward: "I am so tired as a white, ultra-liberal, McGovern-voting, civil-rights marching, anti-war fighting highly educated professional woman who totally supports Hillary Clinton to be attacked and vilified as racist and or dumb." Shauna Morris, a 44-year-old lawyer from Largo, Fla., told me, "I am upper-middle class, and I still can't stand him -- and it has nothing to do with race, believe me." The women talk of being taken for granted by a party leadership that never spoke out on some of the outrageous Hillary bashing -- and despite the close race, joined the early rush to crown Obama.

MAKE NO MISTAKE--GAFFES HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR GENERATIONS
(Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe)
The parade of candidates' mistakes has been fast and furious throughout this campaign season, creating the impression that our future leaders are the most gaffe-prone in history. In fact, campaigns have been seizing on opponents' misstatements for generations. What's different this time is speed - and the ever-intensifying vigilance of the gaffe police. The rise of blogs and 24-hour cable networks means that any gaffe, however small, can rise to prominence within hours, and the mainstream media can't resist the temptation to jump in. And with the help of ubiquitous cameras and well-honed opposition-research machines, political parties have become more adept at compiling, packaging, and promoting their rivals' missteps. The Republican National Committee has staffers watching every Democratic media appearance - sometimes via Internet live stream - and disseminating mistakes, via press release, with lightning speed.