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

HILLARYLAND AT WAR
(Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair)
“Bill Clinton was out of control … even the night she won in New Hampshire. Even Hillary couldn’t control him,” a Clinton fund-raiser tells me. “He began calling me directly,” says one of Hillary’s Big Five, “and you don’t talk back to the president of the United States.” Not only did Bill give “advice” directly to Penn, Wolfson, and Doyle, he wanted to set up his own shop in campaign headquarters, but the team persuaded him he was better used out on the stump. While Bill proved to be a magnet for rural voters, he turned off some super-delegates with his imperial assumptions. He didn’t make his first pitch to one Pennsylvania super-delegate, Jason Altmire, until the afternoon of the Ohio/Texas votes. He sounded giddy, recalls Congressman Altmire. “’We’re going to win Ohio for sure, and Texas looks good, and we’re coming to Pennsylvania,’ he said. ‘Keep your powder dry. Don’t endorse anybody—just wait it out.’” The flattered first-term congressman said he was concerned that Senator Clinton might not play well on the top of the ticket. “President Bush won my district twice … “ Clinton interrupted him. “How well did I do in your district?” “You won it twice.” “Well, there you go,” Clinton said, gloating. There was silence for a while, and Clinton assumed he had won his case. “With all due respect,” Altmire finally said, “you’re not on the ballot this year.”

HOW WILL THE NEXT PRES WORK WITH CONGRESS?
(John Bresnahan, Politico)
Clashes over executive power have been a staple of the past eight years. They won’t go away when the next president takes office. But the senator who succeeds Bush in the White House will have a difficult choice to make: to continue the Bush-Cheney effort to reverse the “erosion” of presidential power that began in the wake of Watergate or, instead, to seek a more cooperative working relationship with the legislative branch. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have pledged more “openness and transparency” if elected, but either candidate could see things differently once he’s ensconced at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And for McCain — who faces the prospect of an even larger Democratic majority on Capitol Hill — it might prove particularly difficult to cede some of the constitutional prerogatives claimed by Bush and Cheney over the past eight years. “If the president and the Congress are controlled by the same party, a lot of this stuff gets worked out behind the scenes,” one former Bush White House official, who did not want to be named, said, referring to the period from 2002 to 2006 when Republicans controlled both the Oval Office and Congress. “If we have a president and Congress from different parties, you can expect to see a lot of fireworks.”

OBAMA'S MONEY CLASS
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Political analysts now notice a gap between professionals and managers. Professionals, like lawyers and media types, tend to vote and give Democratic. Corporate managers tend to vote and give Republican. The former get their values from competitive universities and the media world; the latter get theirs from churches, management seminars and the country club. The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy?

THE SOUTH WILL FALL AGAIN
(Thomas Schaller, New York Times)
The interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South. Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the Republicans is not so simple.

OBAMA'S V.P. CONUNDRUM
(John Heilemann, New York)
It’s hard to think of anyone who would fit the change-AND-experience bill that Obama is trying to fill — except, that is, for a certain lady in a pantsuit. Hillary Clinton, of course, has plenty of baggage. And she is nobody’s idea of an outsider. But given her gender, it wouldn’t take much doing message-wise to frame her as an emblem of change. And even her critics acknowledge that her cajones are more than capacious enough to qualify her as commander-in-chief. (There is no Democrat more admired by the top military brass.) The smart set tells us that Clinton is ruled out by her husband; in particular, by his unwillingness to divulge certain details about his business dealings and to reveal the list of donors to his presidential library. And in general by the bitterness he apparently continues to nurse toward Obama (cf the remark of Clinton's reported over the weekend that Obama can "kiss my ass" in return for his support.) Yet if WJC were to stop behaving like a petulant adolescent and muster up a change of heart — an enormous "if," I'm well aware, but doesn't he owe HRC that much? — the case for Hillary would be nearly watertight. Unity. Brand equity. A fighter’s mettle. An ass-kicking ability as a debater. What more could you ask for in a veep? It’s a question that, I bet, will be plaguing Obama in the days and weeks to come.

MCCAIN HEADS TODAY FOR COLUMBIA, WHERE ADVISER HAS LONG HAD TIES
(Larry Rohter, New York Times)
Since 1998, the lobbying firm headed until recently by Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s closest confidants, has earned more than $1.8 million representing the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, the leading foreign producer of gas and oil in Colombia. The lobbying firm, BKSH & Associates, has also represented Colombian textile and apparel manufacturers and a former foreign minister and presidential candidate who is also a prominent businesswoman. According to official filings, Mr. Black, who resigned as chairman of BKSH in March, lobbied Congress, the State Department and the White House on Occidental’s behalf regarding “general energy issues” and “general trade issues” involving Colombia. His list of activities also included winning “foreign assistance for Colombia” and efforts to block an economic embargo against the country, which has a questionable human rights record.

MORE: John McCain's JFK Opportunity (William McGurn, Wall Street Journal)
One presidential candidate says our Latin American neighbors are "drifting away" because we do not support our democratic friends. That "our failure to help the people of Latin America to achieve their economic aspirations" is a moral and strategic tragedy. And that we need to confront those who are "exploiting domestic distress and unrest, encouraging growing dislike of the United States, working to impose Communist rule." No, the words are not John McCain's. They are John F. Kennedy's. But on the day that Sen. McCain leaves for a quick trip to Colombia and Mexico, they present him with an opportunity: The chance to remind American voters that his opponent has more in common with the party of Ted Kennedy than the party of John Kennedy.

WHAT PAWLENTY CAN'T DO FOR MCCAIN
(Steve Kornacki, New York Observer)
His two statewide victories in Minnesota have been paper-thin, and both times he’s finished with well under 50 percent of the vote. Minnesota was close in ’04, but polls now show Obama running away with the state. It’s doubtful that Pawlenty’s presence would deliver Minnesota or any other Rust Belt states. And his ability to handle himself in small, folksy settings may be real, but this is not how mass opinion is formed. If Pawlenty were tapped for McCain’s ticket, relatively few voters would ever meet him in person. Instead, they would meet him through television, and on television Pawlenty looks, sounds and acts like a generic, uninspiring and thoroughly forgettable politician.

OBAMA COURTING EVANGELICALS ONCE LOYAL TO BUSH
(John M. Broder, New York Times)
Mr. Obama and his advisers are seeking support not only among relatively moderate evangelicals like Mrs. Speakman, who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 but backed Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, in 2004 because of her opposition to the war. They are also trying to take advantage of signs that some conservative Christians are rethinking their politics, urged along by a new generation of leadership and intensified concern about issues including climate change, genocide, AIDS and poverty. Between now and November, the Obama forces are planning as many as 1,000 house parties and dozens of Christian rock concerts, gatherings of religious leaders, campus visits and telephone conference calls to bring together voters of all ages motivated by their faith to engage in politics. It is the most intensive effort yet by a Democratic candidate to reach out to self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians and to try to pry them away from their historical attachment to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech about faith in Zanesville, Ohio, in a battleground section of a battleground state, one where Mr. Bush relied heavily on evangelical voters to provide his narrow margin of victory in 2004.

RIVALS HIDE IMMIGRATION SIMILARITIES
(David Espo, Associated Press)
When it comes to immigration, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agree. It's just that they don't want to say so. Instead, the White House rivals accuse one another of flinching when it mattered most, during and after last year's Senate debate on a bill that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. McCain "was a champion of comprehensive reform, and I admired him for it," Obama said Saturday in an appearance before The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "But when he was running for his party's nomination, he walked away from that commitment and he's said he wouldn't even support his own legislation if it came up for a vote." McCain had spoken earlier in the day to the same group, and his campaign swiftly countered his rival's charge. "Obama put politics first and supported 'poison pill' efforts to kill the immigration reform compromise last year," it said in a written rebuttal. If the disagreement seems somewhat forced, the motives behind it are straight forward. The issue is important to Hispanics, who make up a large and growing minority of the electorate, and may hold the balance of power this fall in the potential battleground states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico as well as Florida.

MCCAIN'S ENERGY RECORD IS ON/OFF
(Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times)
McCain's record of tackling energy policy on Capitol Hill shows little of the clear direction he says would come from a McCain White House. Instead, the Arizona senator has swerved from one position to another over the years, taking often contradictory stances on the federal government's role in energy policy. At times he has backed measures to ease restrictions on oil drilling off the coast and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Other times he has voted to keep them. He has championed standards to require that automakers make vehicles more fuel-efficient, yet opposed standards to require that utilities use less fossil fuel by generating more power from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. McCain has rejected federal tax breaks for renewable energy producers, but backs billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry. He has criticized corn-based ethanol for doing "nothing to increase our energy independence." Yet while campaigning in 2006 in the Midwest corn belt, McCain called ethanol a "vital, vital alternative energy source." Senior McCain policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain's positions reflected a pragmatic approach to governing. "Sen. McCain is interested in getting results," he said. But many environmentalists see it as inconsistency. "There is a very sporadic pattern here," said Tim Greef, deputy legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters.

US CANDIDATES' HEALTH PLANS DIVERGE
(Nicholas Timmins, Financial Times) 
The US is unique in tying health insurance for working age adults to their jobs. In countries with social insurance systems such as France and Germany, employers make contributions to the insurance pool. But the cover is not linked to the workplace. This is the Gordian knot that John McCain’s plan aims to cut. In place of tax breaks for employers for providing cover, individuals and families would receive tax credits with which to buy their own insurance. By contrast, Barack Obama’s plan is closer to the approach Massachusetts has taken in its Commonwealth Health Plan. It stops short of that state’s requirement for individuals to buy cover or face a penalty. Instead it would require employers to offer cover or contribute towards a public plan. At national level there would be a plan that small businesses and individuals could join, and a national insurance exchange or “connector” for access to private plans that passed tests of quality and did not rate people by their health status. There are more elements to the US presidential candidates’ plans. But in essence, Mr Obama’s builds on the employer-based system while adding public options. Mr McCain’s overturns it.

A NEW CAMPAIGN CHARGE: YOU SUPPORTED CLINTON
(Raymond Hernandez, New York Times)
Brooklyn’s 10th Congressional District, home to more African-Americans than any other in New York, gave Senator Barack Obama his highest margin of victory in the state. But the district’s longtime congressman, Edolphus Towns, did not share his constituency’s preference for Mr. Obama. Now some of those voters are pushing to oust him... The tensions in the district echo those in a handful of races around the country as Democratic incumbents with large African-American constituencies try to soothe resentments and anger incited by their support for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Even after Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton embraced in Unity, N.H., on Friday and sought to put their divisions behind them, some strains are still evident closer to the ground.