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

CANDIDATES CLASH ON TERRORISM
(Ann E. Kornblut and Karen De Young, Washington Post)
The campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama on Tuesday engaged in a heated exchange over the rights of terrorism suspects, with each side accusing the other of embracing a policy that would put the country at risk of more attacks in the future. In a Tuesday morning conference call with reporters, McCain advisers criticized Obama as "naive" and "delusional" in his approach to the handling of terrorism suspects after he expressed support for last week's Supreme Court decision granting detainees the right to seek habeas corpus hearings. Obama fired back, saying the Republicans who had led failed efforts to capture Osama bin Laden lacked the standing to criticize him on the issue. The exchange marked the general election's first real engagement over the campaign against terrorism and demonstrated that both sides are confident that they have a winning message on the issue.

THREE QUESTIONS FOR MCCAIN
(David Leonhardt, New York Times)
A week before Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary... [McCain] said he would abolish the dreaded alternative minimum tax. He said he would also allow companies to write off spending on new equipment more quickly than they now could, effectively reducing their taxes. Most ambitiously, he vowed to set up a simpler income tax system, one that anyone could voluntarily use instead of the current tangle. In the months since then, Mr. McCain has repeated these vows. Fast forward to last week, when a Washington research group called the Tax Policy Center set out to estimate the budgetary effects of Mr. McCain’s and Mr. Obama’s plans, after having talked with the campaigns about the details. Almost immediately, the center’s report became the yardstick that journalists and bloggers used. To anyone who has been following the campaign closely, however, there were some strange things in the report’s summary. The alternative minimum tax? Mr. McCain apparently no longer wants to abolish it. The write-off for corporate equipment? It exists for a few years, but then it disappears. The simple new tax system? Gone... So far, Mr. McCain is having it both ways. On the campaign trail, he has sounded like a bold tax cutter. To budget wonks, though, his campaign has gingerly inched away from those plans, saying details will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the most-cited analysis of his proposed budget doesn’t square with what he is saying on the stump.

STRAIGHTENING OUT MCCAIN'S STRAIGHT TALK
(John Dickerson, Slate)
Tuesday brought more frustration for Team McCain. A carefully planned two-week rollout of the candidate's energy plan was in danger before he'd given the kickoff speech. The message was supposed to be that McCain was offering a multifaceted plan to wean the U.S. off foreign oil. Among his proposals was an unartful call to end the federal ban on offshore drilling—a reversal of his position in 2000. But instead of talking about biofuels and hydroelectric cars, the campaign found itself fighting charges of flip-flopping opportunism. The wobbly start of the GOP candidate's push on energy raised the possibility that the whole thing might topple—just like his previous efforts to get voters to compare him and Barack Obama side-by-side.

MORE: McCain Risks 'Flip-Flop' Jibes by Voters (Edward Luce and Andrew Ward, Financial Times)
Nobody is yet calling John McCain a “flip-flopper”. But the Republican nominee’s increasingly finely balanced efforts to shore up his support among the shrinking Republican base while reaching out to independents is starting to fire up the critics. 

MCCAIN PLAYS WITH FIRE ON OFFSHORE DRILLING
(Charles Mahtesian and David Mark, Politico)
By calling for an end to the federal ban on offshore oil drilling, John McCain is placing a risky bet. He is wagering that skyrocketing gas prices have finally reached a tipping point, a threshold moment that has led voters to rethink their strong and long-held opinions against coastal oil exploration. The stakes couldn’t be higher: If he is wrong, McCain will have seriously damaged his chances in two key states with thousands of miles of coastline — California and Florida — and where opposition to offshore oil drilling has been unwavering. And he will have undermined some of his closest political allies in those states and others, including potential fall battlegrounds such as Virginia and North Carolina.

AFTER ATTACKS, MICHELLE OBAMA LOOKS FOR NEW INTRODUCTION
(Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor, New York Times)
Now her husband’s presidential campaign is giving her image a subtle makeover, with a new speech in the works to emphasize her humble roots and a tough new chief of staff. On Wednesday, Mrs. Obama will do a guest turn on “The View,” the daytime talk show on ABC, with an eye toward softening her reputation. Her problems seemed hard to imagine last fall and winter. Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, appeared so at ease with the tactile business of campaigning and drew praise for humanizing, often with humor, a husband who could seem elusive. Then came some rhetorical stumbles. In Madison, Wis., in February, she told voters that hope was sweeping America, adding, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Cable news programs replayed those 15 words in an endless loop of outrage. Barack Obama often blurs identity lines; much of his candidacy has seemed almost post-racial. Mrs. Obama’s identity is less mutable. She is a descendant of slaves and a product of Chicago’s historically black South Side. She burns hot where he banks cool, and that too can make her an inviting proxy for attack.

HIL AND OBAMA, TOGETHER AGAIN
(Michael Saul, New York Daily News)
Hillary Clinton will join Barack Obama for a joint appearance in Washington next week to persuade her donors to begin giving to the Democrats' nominee, the Daily News has learned. It's the first known plan to bring together the victor and vanquished from the Democrat primary race and put their pledges of unity for the fall campaign into action. Jonathan Mantz, Clinton's national finance director, sent top Clinton fundraisers an e-mail today inviting them to the event on June 26. "As we move forward, we invite you to join us for a National Finance Committee meeting with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Thursday, June 26th in Washington, D.C., to discuss how we can work together to support Barack Obama and the Democratic Party," Mantz wrote.

DON'T EXPECT GORE ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
Despite Al Gore’s choreographed endorsement of Barack Obama Monday, top Democratic strategists don’t expect the 2000 Democratic nominee will risk his environmental agenda by campaigning vigorously in this year’s presidential race. They note that the new Gore—Nobel laureate, documentarian, globetrotting advocate for environmental issues—has in recent years shied away from more partisan domestic debates. “[Gore] is not wholly going to abandon his profile as a Democrat but he also has his advocacy and citizen-of-the-world stature to take into account,” said a Gore confidant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He’s trying to weigh all of these things because he understands the importance of the White House in solving some of these climate crisis issues and there is a difference between the candidates on that issue.” Those closest to the former vice president also suggest that he may have exhausted his interest in campaign politics, which would explain his change in direction from the 2004 general election, when he made several fiery speeches lambasting the Bush administration.

SUBURBAN WOMEN SEEN AS KEY BLOC FOR OBAMA AND MCCAIN
(Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune)
While party leaders watch anxiously to see if those voters are too disenchanted to support their nominee, polls suggest that Obama is beginning to pick up many of the women who once formed a critical part of the Clinton army. One recent poll shows former Clinton voters choosing Obama over Republican John McCain at a rate of 3-1. McCain is launching an aggressive foray into traditional Democratic territory, attempting to lure disaffected women voters with laudatory words for Clinton and with reminders of his past departures from conservative orthodoxy on everything from campaign finance reform to the right of Democrats to block President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. In the months to come, the two camps will wage their fight in key territories in battleground states like Pennsylvania. This enclave west of Philadelphia—home to educated, professional women of all political stripes — is the sort that will help decide the election. Recent polling suggests that women favor Obama over McCain, but also that the Republican holds a slight edge with white suburban women, a crucial target group in the campaign. 

CLINTON TAKES MONTH OFF
(J. Taylor Rushing, The Hill)
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is taking a month off from Congress to recuperate after her marathon run for the presidency. She is not expected to return to the Senate until July 7 or July 8 after the Independence Day recess, according to two Democratic sources.Clinton’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate are taking a sympathetic attitude toward her extended absence, which comes after a grueling 18-month formal bid for the White House and, according to some calculations, a decade or more of planning and positioning since the days when her husband was president. “People understand this is a transition for her,” Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said. It is a transition from the possibility of the most powerful job in the world to the reality of a junior senatorship among 99 others in a chamber dominated by overweening egos that have already indicated they will make no special provision for her to ascend quickly to a leadership role.