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

POLL FINDS VOTERS SPLIT ON CANDIDATES IRAQ-PULLOUT POSITIONS
(Jonathan Weisman and Jon Coen, Washington Post)
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the country split down the middle between those backing Sen. Barack Obama's 16-month timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and those agreeing with Sen. John McCain's position that events, not timetables, should dictate when forces come home. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will deliver what his campaign is billing as a "major address" on Iraq today in Washington, part of an effort to convince voters that he could serve effectively as commander in chief. The public is also evenly divided on that question, with 48 percent saying he would be an effective leader of the military and 48 percent saying he would not. On Iraq policy in general, Americans continue to side with Obama and McCain, his Republican rival, in roughly equal numbers, with 47 percent of those polled saying they trust McCain more to handle the war, and 45 percent having more faith in Obama. The poll results suggest that months of Democratic attacks on McCain's Iraq position have not dented voters' basic trust in his ability to lead the country's armed forces: Seventy-two percent said McCain would make a good commander in chief.

PLANNING TO IGNORE THE FACTS
(Rich Lowry, New York Post)
It’s gotten harder as the success of the surge has become undeniable, but — despite some wobbles — Obama is sticking to his plan for a 16-month timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He musters dishonesty, evasion and straw-grasping to try to create a patina of respectability around a scandalously unserious position. Obama spokesmen now say everyone knew that President Bush’s troop surge would create more security. This is blatantly false. Obama said in early 2007 that nothing in the surge plan would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence,” and the new strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” He referred to the surge derisively as “baby-sit(ting) a civil war.” Now that the civil war has all but ended, he wants to claim retroactive clairvoyance. In a New York Times op-ed laying out his position, Obama credits the heroism of our troops and new tactics with bringing down the violence. Our troops have always been heroic; what made the difference was the surge strategy that Obama lacked the military judgment — or political courage — to support.

OBAMA ON IRAQ
(Joe Klein, Time)
Barack Obama lays out a strong and plausible case for his position on withdrawal from Iraq in the New York Times today--with one exception. He's still clinging to his 16 month timetable for getting the troops home. That's probably too quick, but I understand why he's sticking with it: because he doesn't want the Republicans to call him a flip-flopper and also, I'd guess, because he figures that being overly optimistic about the withdrawal timetable isn't going to hurt him with the electorate. The reality here is that the troops are likely to come home with all deliberate speed, but that the exact timetable will depend on the sort of boring how-do-we-move-that-truck, and what's-the-rotation-schedule logistics that exist well beyond the realm of actual strategic policy. People in the military familiar with the process tell me that we should be down to about 30,000 troops in four years. But these are details of implementation. The real importance of Obama's op-ed is his insistence that we need to leave--that we can't have the 100-year bases that John McCain has proposed--and that we need to refocus our attention on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that's where the real foreign policy debate should be, not the silly diversion over whether Obama is "changing" his position.

HILL DEMOCRATS MIFFED AT OBAMA
(John Bresnahan, Politico)
After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November. “They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on everything,” groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. “They are kind of insufferable at this point.” ... Obama has sometimes appeared in members’ districts with no advance notice to lawmakers, resulting in lost opportunities for those Democrats to score points by appearing alongside their party’s presumptive presidential nominee. The Obama campaign has not, until very recently, coordinated a daily message with congressional Democrats, leaving Democratic members in the lurch when they’re asked to comment on the constant back and forth between Obama and John McCain... Some Democratic leadership staffers complain that, having defeated the vaunted Clinton political machine in the primaries, the Obama campaign now feels a “sense of entitlement” that leads to “arrogance.” One Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, compared the Obama campaign unfavorably to President Bush’s administration. “At least Bush waited until he was in the White House before they started ignoring everybody,” the aide said.

CONTRA EXPECTATIONS
(Eli Lake, New Republic)
Of course, the Obama counterterrorism policy is still a work in progress. As his recent zigzags illustrate, he still hasn't figured out his stance on some of the larger questions. But, in discussing his plans for Iraq, he has made one key admission: He will listen carefully to the advice of his generals. You can easily see how this will play out. Obama will enter office with a set of somewhat inchoate instincts about American power and the importance of outsourcing force. These instincts will mesh with the evolving thinking of his top commanders, who have also begun to realize the limitations of an overstretched army and the value of counter-insurgency. And that brings us back to the situation room on Obama's first day. If he and Petraeus can overcome whatever awkwardness lingers, they will discover a mind meld and an emerging doctrine-- a doctrine that looks a lot more like Ronald Reagan than Jimmy Carter.

MCCAIN'S IMMIGRATION TWO-STEP
(W. James Antle III, American Spectator)
The Arizona senator's conservative critics don't trust him to secure the borders. And a surprisingly heated La Raza question-and-answer session revealed that McCain wasn't given lasting credit for his amnesty advocacy. One questioner challenged him to commit to a single immigration bill as Obama had in his speech to the group. "It is my top priority today and it will be my top priority tomorrow," McCain vowed.  Some people in the La Raza audience seemed to reject the idea that there should be any immigration enforcement at all. "When your forefathers came, there was no illegal-legal. Everyone was welcome at Ellis Island," one man insisted to McCain. The candidate shot back, "The United States has to have secure borders sir, and that's necessary, even if you disagree." Why is there such controversy surrounding McCain's position, given that he has compiled an immigration voting record as consistent as Tom Tancredo's but in the opposite direction? Because McCain has had trouble staying on message since embracing enforcement-first during the primaries, using different rhetoric for different audiences.

IN VIRGINIA, A THAWING MAP
(E.J. Dionne, Washington Post)
If the 2008 election is destined to break up a frozen electoral map, Virginia is one of the most likely venues for the great political thaw. The state has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 44 years, yet the trends are decidedly in the party's favor. Demographic change, often a driver of realignment, is occurring at a furious clip. The Old Dominion is now the New Dominion, particularly in the suburban and exurban counties north of the Rappahannock River. Barack Obama could not have carried Virginia as it once was. But he is running even with John McCain in a paradoxical state that was home to the Confederacy's capital but also gave the nation its first elected African-American governor in 1989, Doug Wilder... [Of the state's three possible VPs,] only Kaine has stayed in the running...  [His] political approach is remarkably similar to Obama's. Kaine is broadly progressive in his views. But like Obama, whom he supported in the primaries, Kaine has been a vocal critic of partisanship. Indeed, Virginia Democrats have been gaining ground since 2001 partly by casting theirs as the party of nonpartisanship and Republicans as the ideologues... Elleithee sees the path for Obama in Virginia as similar to Kaine's: Win just enough in the state's rural areas and overwhelm McCain in the Washington suburbs and among African-Americans, notably in Hampton Roads. Yet Elleithee also says McCain makes the state "very challenging" for the Democrats, particularly because his war-hero status appeals to its large population of active and retired military voters.