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

CLINTON MEETS WITH OBAMA, AND THE REST IS SECRET
(Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
For 17 months, they tracked one another’s movements like prey. But Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton came together here Thursday evening to pull off a secret rendezvous. They ditched their traveling entourages, eluded camera crews across town and startled many of their own advisers as they held their first private meeting since becoming archrivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was a political scavenger hunt like this capital had seldom seen before — at least in the current frenzied climate — where the two rivals huddled at an undisclosed location. Only hours earlier, she sought to cool speculation that she was clamoring to be his running mate, but suddenly the city’s media was awash in rumor as word spread of their meeting... Finally... a joint statement was issued by representatives of the two senators, but sent out by Mr. Obama’s staff. Those words, perhaps, were the first cooperative undertaking since the presidential race began six seasons ago. “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama met tonight and had a productive discussion about the important work that needs to be done to succeed in November,” the statement said.

NEW QUESTION: WHAT DOES HILLARY CLINTON WANT NOW?
(Stephen Braun and Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times)
By this week, as her campaign lurched to an awkward close, Clinton had embraced a strikingly different role: a defiant insurgent, a spokeswoman for working-class voters who she said "felt invisible," an all-too-human candidate who defined the historic moment's central question as: "What does Hillary Clinton want?" Now, after her own friends stepped in to nudge her to cede the spotlight to Obama, Clinton must change roles again, from tenacious underdog to presumably gracious loser. That transition could start Saturday, as Clinton holds a Washington event to thank her supporters and rally them around Obama. Then she must begin the sober task of charting a post-campaign career. Her next chapter could include a role as Obama's running mate, although on Friday she downplayed efforts to put her on the ticket, saying the choice was Obama's alone. More likely, it will mean a return to the Senate, even more prominent than she was before, to work on healthcare and other issues she has long championed. And she may well begin preparing for another run for president -- in 2012 if Obama loses this fall, in 2016 if he wins.

ADVISER SAYS MCCAIN BACKS BUSH WIRETAPS
(Charlie Savage, New York Times)
A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team... Although a spokesman for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, denied that the senator’s views on surveillance and executive power had shifted, legal specialists said the letter contrasted with statements Mr. McCain previously made about the limits of presidential power. In an interview about his views on the limits of executive power with The Boston Globe six months ago, Mr. McCain strongly suggested that if he became the next commander in chief, he would consider himself obligated to obey a statute restricting what he did in national security matters.

MCCAIN SETS SIGHTS ON DEMOCRATS WHO VOTED FOR CLINTON
(Michael D. Shear and Jon Cohen, Washington Post)
Republican Sen. John McCain envisions a November victory built in part around attracting a large number of the millions of voters who turned away from Sen. Barack Obama's promise of change during the historic Democratic primary campaign. Buoyed by polls showing a quarter or more of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters planning to back McCain, his advisers have already started wooing the white working-class voters and women who made up the bedrock of her coalition. They plan to echo and expand the former first lady's critiques of Obama: that he is out of touch with Middle America and too unseasoned to be president... Nonetheless, to succeed, McCain will have to upend firm partisan voting patterns that have held for the past four presidential elections.  In those contests, only about 1 in 10 Democrats cast a ballot for the GOP candidate, according to network exit polls. In the 2006 midterm election, 93 percent of Democrats voted Democratic in their House districts. That party loyalty -- matched by Republicans' fidelity to their party's candidates -- came despite voters' occasional protestations that a nomination defeat would send them scampering.

THE DEMOCRATIC GAMBLE
(Ronald Brownstein, National Journal)
It’s difficult to overstate Barack Obama’s achievement in wresting the Democratic presidential nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton—or the magnitude of the gamble he represents for his party... An insurgent campaign inherently upsets existing arrangements and assumptions. It trades the comfort of the familiar for the exhilaration and unpredictability of the new. Obama’s campaign is no exception. He offers Democrats new electoral opportunities with the enormous passion and activism he inspires. But his hold on some voting blocs and states that the party traditionally targets looks shakier than Clinton’s might have been. Obama almost certainly presents Democrats with a better chance to redraw the electoral map and expand their coalition if all goes well. But, in a year so tilted toward Democrats, Clinton might have represented a safer bet to accumulate the bare minimum of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Compared with Clinton, “Obama has a much bigger upside,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future. “And a much bigger risk.”

I'M NOT TOTALLY SURE WE CAN
(Kurt Anderson, New York)
The problem for Obama is that three of the biggest northern states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan—sometimes swing southern these days. It’s practically impossible to see how he becomes president without winning two of them. All three, not to put too fine a point on it, contain blocs that bear a certain psychographic kinship with Civil War Southerners—that is, insular white traditionalists who are suspicious of the African-Americans in their midst and resent the ascendant economic and cultural power of self-righteous urban elites. Thus the Clintons’ argument that an Obama candidacy could founder in these key states happens, alas, to be true. He is apparently strongest in Pennsylvania, between 2 and 9 percent ahead of McCain. In Ohio, the latest poll has Obama well ahead, but in the five previous surveys, going back to early April, he was behind. In the Michigan polls from May, he’s trailing McCain... So if he wins two of the three big northern swing states but loses the whole Deep South, then he has to prevail in Colorado (where he’s ahead), or take Nevada and New Mexico (where the polls have him seesawing with McCain), or get lucky and win Virginia. The paths to victory are there, and Obamaniacal turnout among blacks and the young may push him over. But by historical standards, it really would have been easier to piece together a winning electoral map with Hillary Clinton as the nominee. Politically, nominating Obama (as Bill Clinton said) is something of a roll of the dice.

OBAMA REACHING OUT TO THE WHITE WORKING CLASS
(Kathy Kiely, USA Today)
As he begins the general election contest for the White House, Democrat Barack Obama is targeting the voters he had the hardest time winning in the primaries: those who are white and working class. The Illinois senator told USA TODAY Thursday that his appearance here in a small town on the Virginia-Tennessee border represented the first stop in a 2½-week tour about economic issues. The trip will also take him to several states won by his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, during the Democratic primaries, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Obama laid out his campaign plans during an interview in the library of Bristol's Virginia High School. "What we're going to do over the next 2½ weeks is focus on the economy, which is what is pressing on the American people so severely," Obama said.

RACE ISSUE LOOMS IN ELECTION, WITH SHARP DIVIDE IN SOME STATES
(Jonathan Kaufman, Wall Street Journal)
Some argue that Barack Obama's background will hurt him among a sliver of voters, perhaps 10% or more, who say they take race into account. Others argue it may well be a benefit, boosting turnout and even insulating him from some criticism. Sen. Obama has demonstrated his ability to draw support among whites. There was his surprise victory in the predominantly white Iowa caucuses; his string of victories in primaries and caucuses after Super Tuesday, many in largely white states; and the sight of 75,000 people, nearly all of them white, listening to him speak in Oregon. But in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, there was a sharp racial divide in voting, with blacks supporting Sen. Obama and whites favoring Hillary Clinton by big percentages. In those states, as many as 20% of voters said race played a role in their decisions. An April Wall Street Journal poll found that 13% of white voters nationally said race was an important factor or among the most important factors in their votes, and they overwhelmingly favored Sen. Clinton.

CLINTON'S EXIT: WHEN PUSH CAME TO SHOVE
(Amie Parnes, Avi Zenilman and Ben Smith, Politico)
By the time the polls closed on Tuesday night and Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, it was clear to many of them that Clinton had to drop out. After months of campaigning with her head down, the shift in pace and direction was going to be abrupt, no matter how long she took to gather her bearings.  "She wanted a day or two to talk to her supporters," said a source close to the Clinton campaign. "That was very important to her, especially because she's been in a bubble."  Yet she didn’t have that luxury, not after Tuesday’s speech, not after failing to even acknowledge that Obama had reached the delegate threshold necessary to claim the Democratic nomination. While her Senate colleagues were willing to wait a few more days until her formal exit, members of the House were intent on accelerating the end of her campaign. She huddled at her Arlington headquarters Wednesday with top advisors, discussing her diminished options and leaving supporters free to mount a campaign on her behalf for the vice presidential nod. Even close supporters were unsure what she was waiting for, beyond a chance to clear her head, and all assumed she would be leaving the race within days. But Clinton seemed to think she could postpone the inevitable, and had her aides convene a pair of conference calls with Senate and House supporters. Her message, a prominent supporter said, was to be: “Please wait.” 

FOR OBAMA, A TICKET TEST
(George Will, Washington Post)
Obama's choice of a running mate will be the first important decision he makes with the whole country watching, so it will be a momentous act of self-definition. If he chooses her, it will be an act of self-diminishment, especially now that some of her acolytes are aggressively suggesting that some unwritten rule of American politics stipulates that anyone who finishes a strong second in the nomination contest is entitled to second place on the ticket. Behind the idea that Obama should run in harness with Clinton is this wobbly theory: Because the Republican Party is in such bad odor, if you unify the Democratic Party, that will suffice to win the election, and she is a necessary and sufficient catalyst of unity. But she is neither. She would be a potent unifier of John McCain's party, thereby setting the stage for exactly what the nation does not need, another angry campaign of mere mobilization rather than persuasion. Surely she, the most polarizing Democrat, is not the only Democrat who can help Obama appeal to the voters who rejected him in Kentucky and West Virginia. And as his running mate, she would nullify his narrative. The candidate embracing the "future" should not glue himself to Washington circa 1993.