May 2008 Archives

Based on the Obama campaign's projection of 38 pledged delegates from Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota, Barack now needs just 27 more superdelegates to secure the nomination on Tuesday night.

And as this report from ABC News suggests, the campaign has no doubt that those superdelegates will come on board:

The Obama campaign is not worried about the tempest that erupted at a Washington, D.C., hotel on Saturday when top Clinton adviser Harold Ickes threatened to take the fight over Michigan's delegates all the way to the convention.

"He said 'reserve the right,' not that he was going to do it," said Obama adviser Anita Dunn. "They have to get through the next three days. I've been there before."

...Asked if Obama would wait to get a concession call from Clinton before claiming the nomination, Dunn said the onus was on Clinton now that the Democratic Party has firmed up the number of delegates needed to claim the party's nod.

"He's not going to wait by the phone like a high-school girl waiting for a date," said Dunn. "That's not Barack Obama."

"After Tuesday," Dunn added, referring to the final contests of South Dakota and Montana, Clinton "can decide how united she wants this party to be."

It all begins in St. Paul at the Xcel Energy Center, site of the 2008 Republican National Convention. We're moving on to the next round.

Update: You might get a kick out of this interactive seat chart which gives you views from inside the center.

I just updated this chart with the latest -- Clinton does have a resilient base, but Barack's growth has been steady, even as Clinton supposedly has hit her stride.

It's a reminder that her recent success is more of a function of when states chose to have their primaries than it is of any underlying trend. Indeed, if the nominating calendar had been flipped and the states that voted in March, April, and May had gone in January, I'd bet that Barack would not have done as well as he did.

If you think about what Barack Obama has pulled off this year, it's actually like defeating sitting or former vice president of your own party for the nomination -- and I can't remember the last time that happened.

Think about it: in 2000, Gore won the nomination; in 1988, Bush won; in 1984, Mondale won; in 1976, Ford won (though he was president at the time); in 1968, Nixon and Humphrey won; in 1960, Nixon won.

Pretty impressive.

He also affirms his support for the RBC's decisions today.

Meet Harriet Christian (via Jane Hamsher). She seems really interested in a unity ticket...between Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Outside the RBC she raised quite a ruckus, finishing off her rant with this gem: "I've got news for all of you -- McCain will be the next president of the United States."

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I smell Roger Stone.

I have trouble seeing how either of these women could possibly be real Democrats. Maybe they are. But it if they really thinks that Hillary Clinton is the victim of sexism and a paternalistic society, it's truly pathetic for her to run for comfort into the welcoming embrace of a seventy-plus year-old white man.

Seriously, I smell Roger Stone. Am I too much of a cynic?

So one of the obvious question is: where did the 69-59 split come from? And when Harold Ickes yowls about 4 hijacked delegates, what is he talking about?

The short answer is that Ickes is full of it. Obama's name was not on the ballot and nobody outside of Clinton's world think the election in January was serious. As debrazza notes in the comments:

"uncommitted" was not "uncommitted" because the Mich. Dem. Party itself was telling people to vote "uncommitted" to express their preference for Obama, Edwards and Richardson...[and] the Clinton position was that the all the votes should could and all of the voter preferences were valid, except for the 30,000 write in ballots who expressed a preference for Obama (or at least everyone believes they did).

Today's decision by the RBC is the first time that the DNC has accepted a Michigan delegate selection plan. There never was any other plan, so no delegates could have been hijacked.

The 69-59 itself was a compromise between a proposal by the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign. Essentially, the RBC split the difference between each campaign's proposal, giving Clinton a slight advantage.

A longer explanation follows.

Florida passes unanimously, Michigan passes 19-8. It passed with the support of several Clinton endorsers, including former DNC Chair Don Fowler.

To recap: Florida is seated based on the "straw poll" primary from January with delegates at half-strength. Michigan is seated 69-59, also with delegates at half-strength.

We are now done. Clinton can of course fight the decision in front of the credentials committee, as indicated by Harold Ickes, but I can't imagine that she will; 5 of her supporters at the RBC jumped ship on Michigan, which gives you a sense of how much support she would lose if she tries to fight it. She would also have to defend a primary in which Obama was not on the ballot and write-in ballots were ignored. That's a very difficult position to defend, and I don't think she'll do it.

Chuck Todd's quick math is that Obama is now 65 delegates away. Less the 43 Todd predicts for the next three primaries, Barack would need just 22 delegates to hit the magic number. If he gets those before Tuesday, Montana will put him over the top. I'd bet heavily in favor of him getting all the superdelegates he needs to seal the deal on Tuesday evening.

:: ::

Update - Chuck Todd: "Yes it's true that Harold Ickes can threaten this stuff about the credentials, but Don Fowler really did signal today by being for the Michigan compromise that, 'Guys, it's over.'" (h/t: georgia10)

While the Florida solution was unanimous, Harold Ickes leveled a blistering attack on the RBC. The issue: he is outraged that the RBC did not abide by the Michigan primary. Fine -- if Clinton wants to double down on something, let her double down on defending an election in which her main opponent was not on the ballot and in which 30,000 write-in ballots, most of which had his name on them, are discarded.

Florida is settled -- a closed issue.

Monroe Anderson says that Barack Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ today in the wake of the Father Pfleger controversy. Both Lynn Sweet and Ben Smith have picked up Anderson's story. Ben says the campaign has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Update: Both CNN and NBC's Andrea Mitchell are making the same report.

Update 2: Ben Smith and Mike Allen confirm the story.

Chris Matthews finally convinced me to mute the box. He said something along the lines of: "Fairly or not, early in the process, after he won 10 or 11 straight contests, Barack Obama was deemed the front-runner."

1. Early on? Um...after that streak, 70% of the delegates to the DNC had been selected. He didn't become the dominant, widely accepted front-runner until well more than half the people had voted.
2. I seem to recall that Hillary Clinton was considered "inevitable" not just by the press, but by her own campaign. In fact, she entered January with a lead of about 100 superdelegates on Obama.

Chuck Todd on the other hand is a good reason to unmute the box. He's now saying Michigan is closing in on the 69-59 approach advocated by Sen. Levin, and that the Obama will get the two add-on superdelegates. The delegation would be seated at half-strength.

Update: Chuck says that once the deal is done, Obama will need just another 15 or 20 superdelegates after the voting is done on Tuesday -- assuming that he doesn't get another endorsement between now and then. Remember, both Russert and Ambinder reported that he has three dozen supers in the bank, so assuming that Chuck Todd's source is correct, Barack will have enough delegates to secure the nomination Tuesday night in Minneapolis.

If this were a Coen brothers film, that's what this'd be called. It seems as if the RBC is determined to come to a resolution, which is a good thing and would clear the path for a final resolution of the nomination battle next week. According to Chuck Todd, they will not be adopting Harold Ickes' "fair reflection" standard, which should make it even harder for Clinton to advance her bogus popular vote argument.

Joe Sudbay captured some video of Lanny Davis heckling the Florida Democrats during their press availability at outside the RBC meeting earlier today. Pretty funny. HuffPo and Jake Tapper have more. (And Jane Hamsher captured some video of Joe, heckling nobody.)

Howard Wolfson just effectively declared victory on Florida even though it doesn't appear that the Florida delegation will be seated at full strength.

What he focused on was that the vote in Florida was the basis for vote allocation. This seems to confirm what the Ickes-Levin exchange suggested: the Clinton camp's main goal in Michigan is getting the Clinton votes counted for her and the uncommitted votes counted as uncommitted (and not for Obama), allowing them to make their (false) popular vote argument.

It's sort of weird, because the popular vote argument is so flawed that I don't understand why they think it matters whether the votes are used to allocate delegates.

Update: Chuck Todd says that Clinton doesn't want Michigan to be resolved today, for it to be punted to the credentials committee, but he says she doesn't have the votes for this on the RBC. If the RBC did make this punt it would be a disaster.

Update 2: I should have made it clear that Clinton declaring FL as a victory is a very good thing for Obama. Resolution is good. It means that Michigan is the only open area.

So far today, I think think the Rules and Bylaws Committee comes down to this exchange.

ICKES: Fair reflection of uncommitted status stands in the same shoes and is given the same protections and the same rights as a named presidential candidate ... to take those delegates and convert them to Obama...does enormous violence ... Delegates that are put into those [uncommitted] slots are fair game for any candidate who wants to go to persuade them to join his or her ship.

LEVIN: You're calling for a fair reflection of a flawed primary. And what we're trying to do is keep a party together so we can win a critical state in November. You've got two candidates still standing, one of whom was on the ballot, and one of whom wasn't. ... You can't say that a ballot where you have got one candidate named and the other candidate not on the ballot should be reflected.

Here's where I think we're at: Clinton supporters are saying that no effort should be spared to count people who supported Clinton, but no effort should be made to count people in Michigan who supported Barack Obama or John Edwards.

By making this flawed argument, the Clinton operation has given up any claim it may have had to the moral higher ground.

10:14AM: Carl Levin's basic message: Don't stomp on Michigan. It's a fulsome defense of his state, and it's a reminder that each of our states has a unique nominating process. (DHinMI has more on Michigan at Daily Kos.)

10:17AM: Remember, the reason why there is no such thing as the national popular vote is that each state has its own process for selecting delegates. Trying to establish a national popular vote is the equivalent of adding together stats from the L.A. Lakers (basketball) and L.A. Angels (baseball) and comparing them with stats from the St. Louis Rams (football) and St. Louis Cardinals (baseball) to determine which city has a better sports town.

10:28AM: I'm going to post any further updates to this post in the comments -- feel free to join in!

Wexler just made an important point about Florida and the general election: John McCain supports the privatization of Social Security, and he's said so publicly, and in this campaign. Now, George Bush also supported privatization but he wasn't stupid enough to state it publicly before the election. In fact, when a New York Times Magazine report indicated that Bush supported privatization in the closing days before the 2004 election, Bush denied it vociferously. Of course, one of the first things that he did upon taking office was...attempting to privatize Social Security. That effort was beaten back -- and I can think of no state where supporting privatization would be more toxic than Florida.

Mark Brewer, the Michigan Party chair, just said that there were 30,000 write-in votes in Michigan -- something I hadn't known. Write-in votes aren't counted under Michigan law unless a candidate specifically asks for them to be counted, so we don't know who those votes were for, but it's hard to imagine that nearly all weren't for Obama and Edwards.

Meanwhile, Clinton supporter Elaine Kamarck just said: "I have no doubt that most of the uncommitted vote was for Obama, and that most of those delegates would be for Obama." She went on to argue that uncommitted voters in Michigan should be treated as uncommitted.

The understudy takes the president to the airport after a $3 million fundraiser in Phoenix last Tuesday. McCain did everything he could to avoid having his picture taken with the leader of his party, but for about 27 seconds there was nothing he could do but smile and say "cheese." Even FOX News couldn't spin it:

It was the first time McCain and Bush have been seen publicly together since the presumptive GOP nominee visited the White House on March 5, but if you turned away you might have missed it as the two were on the tarmac together for only 26 seconds and within camera shot for a total of 47 seconds.

Kind of like getting busted on a walk of shame.

Also notice that when McCain and his wife returned to their vehicle, he made her walk around to the far side. I could care less, but imagine the field day the McCain and Clinton campaigns would have had if Barack Obama were ever so unchivalrous to his wife.

Yikes:

TOKYO - A homeless woman who sneaked into a man's house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.

For all of Bill and Hillary Clinton's bellyaching about the Democratic Party's nomination process, and all their whining about how the rules have screwed them over...without the rule that created superdelegates, where would they be?

Tonight, both NBC and ABC had segments spotlighting Father Pfleger's sermon. The thing that really struck me was how different the two reports were. ABC's made the case that Pfleger's sermon could make it impossible for the Democratic Party to unite, costing Obama the election this fall. In contrast, NBC's report was not nearly so hyperbolic, and offered far more balance. In particular, NBC mentioned that Geraldine Ferraro had written similarly divisive words for today's edition of the Boston Globe, while ABC didn't (a particularly dishonest judgment call, further confirming my view that when it comes to the general, ABC is solidly pro-McCain). Here's a key excerpt from Ferraro's op-ed:

Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

I think both the views of both Pfleger and Ferraro were divisive, but it is important to note that while Ferraro intended her remarks for a national audience, Pfleger's remarks were delivered to parishioners.

Meghan McCain

...at least she does according to the absurd standards of Pam Geller and Michelle Malkin. The issue: she's been caught wearing a scarf like the "controversial keffiyeh"  worn by Rachel Ray in that Dunkin' Donuts ad. Malkin offers the following wisdom:

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Spain’s Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, and Hollywood darlings Colin Farrell, Sienna Miller, and Kirsten Dunst, and rapper Kanye West have all been photographed in endless variations on the distinctive hate couture. So has Meghan McCain, daughter of the GOP presidential candidate, who really ought to know better given that her dad positions himself as the candidate best equipped to “confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”

Michelle Malkin hates America and everything that it stands for. Or something like that.

Chris Cilizza was just on MSNBC a few minutes ago and made the case that it would be a bit of a disaster for the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton's supporters felt in any way that she had been pushed out of the campaign before she was ready to leave.

C'mon. That is such a patronizing attitude to take towards Clinton supporters. I know they will be disappointed when Obama finally hits the magic number, but the overwhelming majority of them will be able to handle it.

They're not delicate flowers that need to handled with extreme caution. I'm not saying we should taunt them, but blowing smoke up their ass isn't really showing them respect either. When the campaign is over, it's over, and there's no reason not to say it.

Ben Smith says that it will be in St. Paul, Minnesota -- in the Xcel Energy Center, the same facility that will house the GOP convention in September:

Tuesday is the night of the final Democratic primaries, and the choice of venue is a mischievous, aggressive way for Obama to unofficially kick off the general election campaign against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). The location gives huge meaning to the moment, with Obama likely to frame a tough case against his new opponent in the very hall where McCain will accept his party’s nomination.

Update: The Obama campaign has now confirmed the event, which will be free. Admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis. "The event is free and open to the public.  Tickets are NOT required, but an RSVP is strongly encouraged.  Members of the public are invited to RSVP at www.barackobama.com. ***For security reasons, do not bring bags.  Please limit personal items.  No signs or banners permitted.*** Further details to be announced as they become available. Doors Open: 7:00 PM Public Entrance: Gates 1 and 3"

John Bush McCain, May 29: "We have drawn down to pre-surge levels." (Uh, no. That claim is totally false.)

John Bush McCain, May 30: "The rest of them will be home the end of July. That's just fact, those are the facts as I stated them." (No sir, that's not what you said, and YouTube is gonna' prove it.)

So not only does John McCain have no idea how many troops are in Iraq, he's got no idea what he said...just yesterday. What a strange man.

Update: Tonight in Great Falls, MT, Barack hammered McCain on the troop level gaffe:

John Bush McCain is doubling down on his false claim that troop levels "have drawn down to pre-surge levels" and it's not going well.

He started out the day earning 2 Pinocchios from the WaPo fact checker. After his campaign's silly complaint that reporters were "trying to nitpick the tense of the verb", he has now earned 3 Pinocchios. Do we hear 4?

Wow, here's a spectacularly amusing response to John McCain's gaffe about troop levels in Iraq (he said yesterday that they had been "drawn down to pre-surge levels" when in fact no such thing thing has ocurred). Ben Smith captures the massive hilarity:

McCain campaign: Don't nitpick his verb tenses

On a McCain campaign conference call,  Senator Jon Kyl did not concede that McCain had made an error in saying "We have drawn down to pre-surge levels," instead accusing the Obama campaign and reporters of "trying to nitpick the tense of the verb about the surge troops being home."

..."To get into a debate about a verb tense rather than the real fundamental national security issues at stake is really a distraction," [McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann] said.

This verb tense thing is a novel excuse, with potentially wide future use on both sides. Hillary, for instance, could have been referring to the risk of future sniper fire. Obama, perhaps, meant that the U.S. will, at some future date, add seven states.

John McCain: an angry, stupid old man who hates America and the English language?

I am pleasantly surprised that John McCain's most recent gaffe -- claiming that troops in Iraq are at pre-surge levels when in fact they are not -- is starting to get some attention from the MSM. Here's an item from a WaPo blog:

Sen. John McCain has attacked Sen. Barack Obama for not traveling to Iraq to see the "facts on the ground." But a recent statement by McCain about troop levels has his opponents raising questions about his own knowledge.

In comments to reporters on Thursday, McCain asserted that "I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it's long and it's hard and it's tough and there will be setbacks."

In fact, as the Obama campaign was quick to point out, the troop level in Iraq is at about 155,000 right now, well above the 130,000 that would mark a return to pre-surge levels.

The McCain campaign's response is, typically, to lash out in anger:

Clearly John Kerry and Barack Obama have very little understanding of troop levels, but considering Barack Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in 873 days and has never had a one on one meeting with General Petraeus, it isn’t a surprise to anyone that he demonstrates weak leadership. What informed people understand, John McCain included, is that American troops are not even close to Surge levels. Three of the five Army ‘Surge’ brigades have been withdrawn and additional Marines that were initially deployed for the ‘Surge’ have come home as well – the remaining two brigades will be home in July. Talk about a political stunt, it’s sending out campaign surrogates to parse words about a topic Barack Obama has no experience with, and has shown zero interest in learning about.

As Ben Smith notes, the McCain campaign's response fails too address McCain's false claim; instead, they just lash out and attack anything with a (D) next to its name.

McCain says he knows so much about Iraq, but he keeps on getting everything wrong about it -- and his ignorance is hurting America. At some point we gotta start wondering: does John McCain hate America as much as George Bush and Dick Cheney?

The campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have outlasted the now former relationship between Sarah Larson and George Clooney. Awww.

(By the way, this is a scheduled post -- I'm probably asleep right now. Feel free to use it as an open thread, or just stare at George or Sarah or both. I know...it's kind of hard not to.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on KGO radio yesterday:

There's not going to be a fight at the convention...we are all going to urge our folks to next week make a decision very quickly. Simple math indicates that next Tuesday...Obama will probably have the necessary number.

Another Reid quote:

I don't lament this campaign taking as long as it has, but it's time it ended. ...By this time next week, it will all be over give or take a day.

The L.A. Times reports that Reid and Pelosi are working together to end the campaign next week.

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Rodham Clinton is coming under growing pressure from Democratic Party leaders and elected officials to quit the race, while some of her own supporters seem reluctant to rally behind her strategy for salvaging her presidential ambitions.

Intervening in the primary fight, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are sending public and private messages to superdelegates urging them to make a choice once primary voting ends Tuesday.

..."We're going to urge folks to make a decision quickly -- next week," Reid said in an interview with a radio program in his state of Nevada. "We agree there won't be a fight at the convention."

Pelosi and Reid have made it clear this thing will come to a close next week, and there's no one better positioned to get the undeclared superdelegates off their butts than those two. Assuming they pull it off, the race will have moved that much closer to finality regardless of what Clinton does.

Here's the background: Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest from Chicago who has known Barack Obama for years, gave a guest sermon at Trinity this past weekend. In his sermon, he mocked Hillary's tears in New Hampshire and suggested she was crying merely because she had felt she was entitled to the the nomination based on her relationship with Bill and the fact that she was white.

In some ways it was reminiscent of Geraldine Ferraro's attack on Obama as a sexist, except Ferraro was once a part of the Clinton campaign, and she went on national television. Pfleger made his remarks from the pulpit of a church in Chicago. Here's a video of Pfleger and Ferraro side-by-side, if you're interested in making the comparison.

Anyway, Barack Obama gets out ahead of the story and flatly condemns Pfleger's remarks:

I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the Clinton campaign was unhappy with Barack's condemnation. Here's Howard Wolfson's response:

We are disappointed that Senator Obama didn't specifically reject Father's Pflegler's despicable comments about Senator Clinton, and assume he will do so.

Huh? Does Howard live on the same planet as you and me? "Divisive" and "backward-loooking" aren't good enough? Expression deep disappointment isn't good enough? What do they want him to do? Curse up a storm? For crying out loud!

Someone over in Camp Clinton needs to chill out. Seriously -- take a deep breath.

Affairs, evictions, even cocktail waitresses: Nevada governor Jim Gibbons' divorce scandal has it all. Yesterday, his wife accused him of an affair. Last month, he tried to evict her from the governor's mansion. And now he's losing support from his own party, which, thankfully, is the GOP.

The Las Vegas Gleaner is on top of it all, in typically hilarious fashion.

Here's some video to give you a flavor of the local coverage:

Isn't it a bit ironic that Bill Clinton is going on and on about the the popular vote when he's the first president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to have been re-elected without achieving a popular vote majority in either of his elections?

In 1992, he won 43.01% of the vote. In 1996, he won 49.23%.

In 1912, Wilson won 41.84% of the vote. In 1916, he won 49.24%.

Data from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

Update on 5/30 at 11:45PM: The point of this post is not to dispute the legitimacy of Bill Clinton's election -- he was the popular vote leader both times.

Moreover, even though a majority of voters chose someone other than Bill Clinton, in both of his elections, they were also both 100% legitimate. Why? Because he followed the rules that everybody had agreed to ahead of time and won large electoral college majorities.

Similarly, Barack Obama has followed all the rules -- he's not the one trying to change the rules in the middle of the game. The Clintons are the ones trying to change the rules, not just on Michigan and Florida, but also on how the Democratic Party judges the winner of the primaries and caucuses.

Their popular vote argument has jingoistic appeal, but it quickly falls apart once you think about it. Under Democratic Party rules, each state has a unique method of electing its pledged delegates; you can't simply add up the results of each contest and say the resulting number is a true reflection of the popular will. It's actually worse than meaningless, because when you do add them together, what you end up with is a situation where 27 states end up getting their power significantly diluted. For more on that, see this post.

There's certainly some jingoistic appeal to Hillary Clinton's "count every vote" refrain, but the truth is that what she is proposing is a massive power grab, and as in every massive power grab, there are winners and losers.

In this case, it turns out that the losers would be 27 states representing two-fifths of the U.S. population.

Under Clinton's proposal, they would go from having a proportional voice in the nomination process to having a dramatically minimized one, from having 41% of the votes to select the nominee down to having just 24%.

These are state that even Mark Penn would admit matter, among them New York, Washington, Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan.

The flip side is that 22 states would have their power boosted dramatically. And the partisan makeup of these states is surprising: 10 of them actually voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Here's some more examples of how Clinton's "popular vote" argument screws Michigan:

• 12 states that have a smaller population than Michigan nonetheless cast more votes
• In these states, on average the population was 6.6 million and the number of votes cast was 1 million.
• Michigan's population is 10 million and just under 600,000 people voted.
• Therefore, on a per capita basis, the 12 states states with smaller populations but more voters would have 2.6 times the impact of Michigan if Clinton's popular vote argument were adopted, violating the Federalist principles upon which our system of government is based.

What Clinton is proposing is essentially the same as eliminating congressional districts and the senate with a system of proportional representation. Perhaps there's some merit to the idea, but I think everybody would agree that it would be unfair to have national elections for the Senate while different states have different rules for voting. (For example, Oregon, with vote by mail, would have disproportionate influence.)

The point is that while Clinton's "popular vote" war cry has some jingoistic resonance, upon closer examination, it falls apart under its own weight, independent of who it would help or hurt.

Again, the key principle here is that under our nomination system, each state -- within certain guidelines -- is free to choose its own system for electing pledged delegates. It's absurd to add together the "votes" from each of these systems, because in each state, a vote means something different.

And when you do go down that path, you end up with bizarre results, such as this one: under Clinton's standards, on a per capita basis, Wisconsin would have 3.4 times as much clout as Michigan. Surely any standard that would yield a result like that is deeply flawed -- and should not be adopted the Democratic Party.

I figure this deserves a post of its own given the concern I had about Carville's interview on GMA yesterday. From Greg Sargent at TPM:

In a quick phone interview with me just now, prominent Hillary supporter James Carville diverged from the Hillary campaign message on several key "electability" questions, saying that he thinks Obama "will" win the general election. ...Carville's repeated suggestions that Obama "will" beat McCain contrast with the core Hillary message -- repeated frequently by Hillary advisers -- that Obama merely "can" win a general election, while Hillary "will" win it. Carville's comments also suggest that with the fall contest looming, it's becoming tougher for prominent Hillary backers to sustain any argument that doesn't show full confidence in Obama's chances against McCain.

This interview is a good sign -- whatever you think of Carville's support for Clinton (I think it is out of loyalty), he's one of the most effective political communicators in the Democratic Party.

So Hillary Clinton's argument to superdelegates is that if you add up every contest, she's received (or will receive) more votes than Barack Obama. (Her claim is only true when you count certain votes and not others.)

She also says that if we don't count every vote cast in Michigan, we'll certainly lose the state in November.

But here's the problem:

• Michigan has cast 1.6% of all votes in the 2008 Democratic primaries (as defined by The Green Papers)
• If it were seated at full strength, Michigan would have 3.6% of all pledged delegates
• If it were seated at half strength (most likely), Michigan would have 1.9% of all pledged delegates

In other words, as long Michigan ends up being seated at half-strength or better, it will have more influence under a pledged delegate standard than under a popular vote standard.

So no matter how you count the votes, Michigan is better off under a pledged delegate standard than a popular vote standard.

Luckily for the Democratic Party, we use pledged delegates to make sure that every state has a fair shot at being heard, so Hillary Clinton's risky gambit to diminish Michigan's influence on the nomination process (sic) will fail, sparing us the inevitable electoral repercussions in November.

(Although all the numbers in this post are accurate, if you detected a bit of snark in my tone -- well, your snark detector is working just fine.)

Update: Here's some more ways the popular vote argument screws Michigan.

Vets for Freedom is a swiftboat-style group attacking Barack Obama, and the McCain campaign is using the exact same attack. Last week, HuffPo broke the news about the close ties between the two organizations. Now the question is: have they  coordinated their messages? If so, they are breaking the law.

Watch this video comparing a Vets for Freedom ad with the attack lines used by John McCain and his co-chairman Lindsey Graham who until yesterday was on the swiftboating group's board of advisors. It seems obvious there was message coordination, especially given the tight links between the two groups.

Already, the McCain campaign has been forced to ask Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, both McCain campaign co-chairmen, to take leaves of absence from the group. However, two members of McCain's campaign team still maintain roles with the organization.

Now will the mainstream media cover this potential scandal of illegal campaign activity?

I keep on getting e-mails from Clinton supporters, frequently with the subject line something like this:

Check it out, 'bama whore, check it out

The e-mails go on to talk about how since March 1 Clinton has done better than Obama. Well, yes, this is true. But it's not like he won West Virginia in February, and now the state has turned on him. It's just the nature of the primary calendar. If you look at the bigger picture, which is really only measurable by public opinion polls, Obama has gained ground over Clinton every month this year.

One other point -- I'm sure some Clinton folks will bellyache, saying things would have been different if West Virginia had come in January instead of May. Well, first: it didn't. Second: John Edwards probably would have won West Virginia. After all, he got 7% of the vote there in May -- and he'd dropped out of the campaign nearly four months earlier.

With Lieberman and Graham at his side, McCain called the swiftboating group a "wonderful organization" just last month

NYT:

Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, prominent surrogates for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, stepped down Wednesday from their positions with an independent group that released a pair of Internet advertisements attacking Senator Barack Obama on Iraq.

Mr. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, were both on the policy advisory board to the organization, Vets for Freedom, which on Wednesday released its second Web advertisement in less than a week attacking Mr. Obama.

The senators’ positions with the group, which describes itself as a grass-roots advocacy organization pushing for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to place them in contravention of new conflict-of-interest rules released by Mr. McCain’s campaign that specifically prohibit anyone “with a McCain campaign title or position” from participating in a “527 or other independent entity that makes public communications that support or oppose any presidential candidate.”

After inquiries from reporters, the senators released a joint letter to Vets for Freedom on Wednesday saying they had requested a leave from their positions to come into compliance with the new policy.

McCain announced his conflict of interest policy on May 15, and since that point, everyone who has been in violation of it has been asked to leave the campaign -- until now. Now, apparently, all you have to do is announce publicly that you've taken a leave of absence from the position creating the conflict. What a joke of a policy.

The real question though isn't whether or not the McCain campaign was in conflict with his own policy: it is whether his campaign violated the law by coordinating message strategy with Vets for Freedom.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel looks back at the Clinton campaign, concluding:

We have big issues and big differences to thrash out in this election. On June 4, I hope Hillary Clinton exits this historic race, gracefully, with dignity. That exit should win her the respect due her from all those in the Democratic party, whether they are Hillary or Barack supporters. It is an exit that is in the interest of the party and the nation. And she must know that how she exits will define the winner in November 2008.

It is time to for this election to turn to the defining issues.

As Vanden Heuvel shows, at almost every point in this campaign, Hillary Clinton has missed an opportunity to do the right thing. That's what got Hillary to where she's at now. And that's why it's hard to believe that she'll start on June 4.

All the current numbers are based on figures from DemConWatch. But don't blame them if I've screwed anything up. (Leave that to me!)

Excluding MI/FL:

• Today, Barack has 1,980 delegates, 45.5 short of the 2,025.5 he'll need
• By Tuesday, he will have picked up another 40 or delegates from the elections (perhaps more, probably not less).
• Assuming the forty superdelegates that Russert and Ambinder (who said 36) exist, than Barack should end Tuesday or begin Wednesday with 2060 or so -- well beyond the magic number that everybody agreed to at the start of the campaign.

Including MI/FL at full strength (this will not ever happen, but being able to say he's got enough delegates that he'd win IF they were seated at full strength will be an important talking point):

• Today, Barack has 2,081 delegates (including 22 of the uncomitted Michigan delegates), putting him 129 short of the 2,210 he'd need.
• Projecting 40 for Tuesday and assuming the 40 "banked" delegates exist, Barack will have 2,161 delegates, leaving him 49 short.
• There would be 18 Edwards delegates and 33 uncommitted Michigan delegates. Assuming that he can get most of these delegates on board, he'd only need a handful of undeclared supers to come on board to hit 2,210.  With a lot of luck, he might even be able to say that he's got the 2,210 number locked down by Tuesday or Wednesday; it should certainly by possible very shortly after Tuesday.

The value of getting to that 2,210 number is that Clinton has no comeback; I don't like playing the game by her rules, but if someone proposes a game you know you can't lose, it's not the worst thing in the world to take them up on it.

ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports: Sen. Barack Obama has high hopes for the results of the last primary contests on Tuesday: He believes that will likely mark the start of the general election.

Asked aboard his plane returning to Chicago from Colorado if the general election will begin after Tuesday’s voting in South Dakota and Montana, Obama answered in one word: "Yes."

Obama said he believes at that point he will be the nominee. But with three primary contests left -- Puerto Rico on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday -- Obama is still couching his prognosis ever so slightly.

"You know, it’s technically not over until we have the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination," Obama said of the 2026 delegates needed. "Once we have that number, we will focus on the general election."

One thing to note is that 2,026 number looks like one that ABC inserted. Whatever happens this weekend, it seems extremely unlikely that 2,026 will be the number. That's why he's been stockpiling superdelegates -- so that whatever the number is, he'll be able to meet it on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning at the latest.

Second, I think it's clear the Clinton campaign is going to push back against the Obama campaign hard, and they will focus on their opinion of the so-called popular vote. The Obama campaign is going to need be ready to push back against the Clinton popular vote nonsense even harder. I keep on saying this, but the key reason why the popular vote isn't meaningful is simply that every state has a different mechanism for selecting delegates. You can't just total up all these different contests with different rules and call it democratic.

Third, no matter what the RBC decides, and no matter where Obama is on Tuesday night with total delegates, he needs to get to 2,210 as quickly as possible. Having 2,210 delegates will allow him to say that no matter what happens with FL/MI, he's got the nomination wrapped up; that at this point, it's an RBC thing, and it won't effect the nomination, and for Clinton to continue beating the Florida and Michigan drum divisive and nothing more.

Here's James Carville, from a little-noticed interview this morning on ABC's Good Morning America:

I would say it would probably be decided by the convention. It was a very big setback, I thought, when Senator Obama had his campaign try to hype this idiotic story out of South Dakota [Clinton's RFK comments]. I thought that set things back.

...I'm saying this. On this date [June 3], I don't know if it's going to happen. There's a chance she's going to be the winner in the popular vote. Already, we're seeing emerging a pattern in the polls that she is the stronger, and looks like by more than a little bit, general election candidate

Well, no one said it would be easy.

Update 1: Looking at the transcript again, I realize Carville's language is ambiguous. I read it to mean that the convention would decide the nominee, as in "the bottle of wine was opened BY the waiter." But it is possible that he means it would be settled "by the time the convention rolls around." I'm going to err on the side of caution and change my title from "Clinton taking it to convention" to "Clinton taking it past June 3."

Update 2: Assuming Carville meant "by the time of the convention" as opposed to "by the convention itself," what kind of timeframe might we be looking at? Well, if she is negotiating for something, then it would be resolved as soon as that negotiation is resolved. (Of course, if the negotiation isn't resolved, then things would drag on.) If her main goal is appealing whatever decision the RBC makes on Saturday, than the earliest conceivable timeframe in which she would give up is when the credentials committee meets. I've read that the credentials committee meets in July, but I don't know if that is a hard and fast date -- perhaps they could meet earlier.

Update 3: Nancy Pelosi is stepping up to the plate to put the kibosh on Carville's nonsense. Hurray for the Speaker! This is key -- Pelosi can't force Clinton to quit, but she can quickly rally enough delegates to make it clear that there is no hope for Clinton winning the nomination under any scenario; once that happens, if Clinton stays in, she'll just be doing it to divide the party, and people will start jumping from her campaign in droves.

Yesterday, The Daily Show was at its finest, so damn accurate that it almost wasn't even funny. I've posted the two clips below the fold (Comedy Central embeds slow down the home page).

To give you a flavor, here's how Jon Stewart frames it:

"The Clintons, simple people, who want but one thing: to leave peacefully in a country that they themselves run."

The second clip is particularly amazing -- it shows everything that was wrong about the RFK comment, even though the MSM is afraid to discuss it now that the Clinton camp has blamed Obama.

Interesting result from the latest SurveyUSA VP pairings poll, this one in Michigan: an Obama-Edwards pairing would provide a small boost to Obama while an Obama-Clinton pairing would a small negative. Without VPs, Obama loses to McCain by 4; against a McCain-Romney ticket, Obama-Edwards loses by 3 and Obama-Clinton loses by 5.

This might not be enough to prove that Edwards would give a bigger boost to Obama than Clinton, but it should help knock back the idea that Obama needs Clinton in any way.

The difference seems to mostly be gender-related. While the Obama-Clinton ticket does 2 points better than the Obama-Edwards ticket among women, it does 7 points worse among men.

Another advantage Edwards would provide over Clinton is his spouse: I think Elizabeth Edwards would be a tremendous asset, whereas Bill would be more...complicated.

SUSA also tested tickets with Richardson, Clark, Sebelius, Rendell, Kaine, Biden, and Webb. All lost to McCain-Romney by between 14 and 19 points. The big difference of course is that John Edwards is better known than any of the other people. It may be an unfair advantage, and it might be a surmountable one, but it is real -- Edwards, who is already pretty well-defined, could hit the ground running. Most of the other candidates would need to be introduced to the public, a process that can take several weeks.

The two names I'd like to know more about on that list are Sebelius and Kaine, mostly because I keep on hearing such good things about them, particularly Sebelius. The other candidates on that list, for various reasons, don't excite me.

A little over a year ago, Scott McClellan was a guest on Real Time and sat through one of Bill Maher's best "New Rules" segments ever -- the one one elitism.

About 1:15 into the Clip, Maher calls Bush "President Shit-for-Brains." I remember thinking McClellan was a good sport about Maher's line -- he laughed good naturedly -- but now I'm thinking he actually agreed with Maher.

On another note, Keith Olbermann raised a good question -- now that McClellan has raised these allegations, will Colin Powell step forward?

And finally, on the same topic but somewhat tangential: I know there is a wide range of opinion on the political consequences of impeachment, and whether or not they should be taken in to account. One important thing to remember is that it's really impossible to predict the political consequences of impeachment without knowing what the evidence for impeachment was.

For sake of argument, if the evidence for impeachment were a report by Henry Waxman -- well, that's probably going to lead to a politically disastrous impeachment trial. On the other hand, if both McClellan and Powell step forward with evidence that Bush lied about WMD -- not hearsay, but actual documents -- then wouldn't the country demand impeachment?

Andrew Sullivan highlights some of the key passages relating to the Iraq War from Scott McClellans' new book. McClellan's basic points:

1. He says Bush's real motivation for the war in Iraq was the desire to transform the Middle East -- not to protect America from Iraqi WMD
2. He claims Bush was guilty of "intentionally ignoring" data that did not support the case for WMD
3. He concludes: "President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."

Sullivan notes an important implication:

If this is true, if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam's WMDs, he should be impeached.

I agree with Sullivan, though I think if any of the three points are true, Bush should be impeached. Practically, however, the "deliberate deception" standard is the probably the only one that could muster the political support an impeachment proceeding would require.

McClellan's claims certainly demand further investigation by Congress, a point made today by Robert Wexler. I know that impeachment would be political tricky, but if that investigation results in hard, irrefutable evidence that Bush intentionally deceived the country into war, we have an obligation to impeach him, no matter political consequences.

From the third paragraph of Hillary Clinton's memo to superdelegates (emphasis added):

"Indeed, since March 1st, she has won over a half million more votes than Senator Obama (difference: + 517,748)."

The problem? The Clinton memo overstates the gap by 36,761 votes -- 8% more than the actual difference.

Now this might not seem like the biggest deal in the world, but consider that 36,761 is bigger than the final margin in 21 different contests (including 17 states). More importantly, it calls into question all the other "key metrics" Clinton cites in her memo.

Hillary Clinton, last night: “Who is the stronger candidate against John McCain? We have not gone through this exciting, unprecedented, historic election, only to lose."

Hillary Clinton, last month saying that Obama can win (turn the volume down a bit if you're at work!):

Sorry about that...but you've been yes-rolled. :)

A certain presidential candidate is making some rather extravagant claims about leading in every single poll taken here on planet earth, so let's just look at the numbers.

This chart shows, by month, the average net margin of victory or defeat for Obama and Clinton versus McCain. It relies on every single poll aggregated by pollster.com except for those polls in which only one candidate appeared. In other words, this is a true apples-to-apples test.

As you can see, even though Hillary Clinton has made significant strides relative to Obama, he still outperforms her on average. Sure, you can cherry pick whatever results Karl Rove may want by taking a selective look at state-by-state polling, but there's no ambiguity: Hillary Clinton does not do any better than Barack Obama versus John McCain.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons for the tightening is that since March, the GOP attack machine has focused almost exclusively on Barack Obama. Simultaneously, he's faced withering attacks from Hillary Clinton and had to deal with two Jeremiah Wright flareups, not to mention ABC's assault on his patriotism. And yet he's still more than held his own.

From the concluding paragraph of Hillary Clinton's memo to super delegates:

The race will be decided by automatic delegates, with no candidate getting the majority of total delegates needed.

So after all her talk about the importance of the letting every state vote and respecting the will of the people...Hillary Clinton settled on her final answer: screw the democratic process, it doesn't matter.

Ah, won't it be fun when this stuff is over?

Every state has a different way of electing delegates. Some use open primaries, some closed, some semi-open, and some semi-closed. The ones that are closed or semi-closed have different registration deadlines. Some states have caucuses. Some of the state that have caucuses record votes. Some don't. Some states have huge numbers of registered Democrats who probably won't vote Democratic in the fall. And in some states, there's even a primary and a caucus hybrid.

The point is that under the Democratic system, for better or for worse, you simply can't add up all the various contests and end up with a meaningful number. If all the states used the same mechanism, the results would mean something. But that's not our current system, for better or for worse.

Maybe someone from DCW can help me figure out how Mark Halperin makes this a net gain of 2 for Clinton (you can see a screen capture here):

Tuesday’s Super Battle
Net gain: Obama 0, Clinton 2*
CLINTON GETS: Virgin Islands DNC super Kevin Rodriquez, who switches back to Clinton after previously moving to Obama. Read release.
OBAMA GETS: Wyoming party vice chair Nancy Drummond. Read release.
*Rodriquez’s switch takes one away from Obama, gives Clinton back an additional super. Permalink

So...Obama -1 (Rodriguez), Clinton +1 (Rodriguez), Obama +1 (Drummond). Obama nets 0, Clinton 1.

I would say it was just a typo, but the fact that Halperin used an asterisk to explain his math tells me he actually put some thought into this one. And that's...scary. I guess now we know why some folks in the media still think the popular vote is a meaningful metric.

(Halperin also didn't mention that Obama picked up Ben Pangelinan of Guam, so on the day, each candidate actually netted 1 superdelegate.)

Tim Russert, May 27, 2008 on NBC Nightly News:

The Obama campaign will claim a mathematical lock on the nomination one week from tonight [after South Dakota and Montana], Wednesday morning at the latest...and then Hillary Clinton will have to, I believe, acknowledge that reality and make some very difficult decisions for her campaign. 

Russert's report puts an exclamation point on Ambinder's post from earlier this morning that Obama had three dozen superdelegates sitting in the wings, ready to put Obama over the top depending on what the Rules and Bylaws Committee decides on Saturday. If you're interested in a detailed overview on why what the RBC decides won't make a difference in the nomination battle, read Al Giordano's post on the subject last week.

I hope when Michelle is running for president, Barack remembers this video clip.

Update: On Sunday, David Axelrod said: “By any calculation, we’re within striking distance of getting the absolute number that we need and I’m confident — I’m confident that we will [right after South Dakota and Montana].”

I have a feeling I'm a little late to the party on this one, but just in case I'm not, here's Marc Ambinder (via Avi Zenilman):

The Obama campaign has, for the first time, really, begun to bank delegates. Sources close to the campaign estimate that as many as three dozen Democratic superdelegates have privately pledged to announce their support for Obama on June 4 or 5. The campaign is determined that Obama not end the first week in June without securing the support of delegates numbering 2026 -- or 2210, as the case may be.

Emphasis added.

On Countdown, Keith Olbermann is reporting that Phil Gramm -- John McCain's campaign general co-chair and economic policy guru -- was a lobbyist for UBS and lobbied Congress on the mortage crisis at the same time that he helped McCain develop his housing policy.

Bill Clinton, on Sunday: "I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running. ... I can't believe it. It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out."

:: ::

Without editorial comment, here's a list of quotes and statements about the 1992 Democratic nomination battle from March and April of that year. (Links after the jump.)

"Things I see happening in the Brown campaign lead me to believe something destructive is happening. I'd say it's time for Democrats to link arms, dig in our heels, set our sights and work together to put Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992."
-- Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (NYT, 3/27/92)

"In an interview, Ronald H. Brown, the party chairman, said he wanted to maintain his neutrality but was compelled to speak out against what he described as the former California Governor's 'scorched-earth policy' of verbal assault on Mr. Clinton's record and character. "
-- NYT, 3/27/92

"It's mathematically impossible for Brown to get the nomination."
-- Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos on Clinton's last foe (NYT, 4/8/92)

"In the future, people will look back upon this week and this campaign as a turning point, not for Bill Clinton,  but for the Democratic Party and for America."
-- Bill Clinton, after winning New York's primary (NYT, 4/8/92)

"People are starting to rally around the flag."
-- Dee Dee Myers, Clinton Press Sec'y (NYT, 4/10/92)

"It's time to close ranks. We cannot wait until July when we already know who has earned the right to be our nominee and who will be our nominee."
-- West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller (NYT, 4/11/92)

"Indeed, reports circulating on Capitol Hill said the Clinton campaign was mounting a strong campaign to swing uncommitted senators behind the Arkansas Governor, and that Ronald H. Brown, the party chairman, was taking part in them."
-- NYT, 4/29/92

"I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that would keep Bill Clinton from having a majority of the delegates by the end of the primary season."
-- Democratic Party Chairman Ronald H. Brown (NYT, 4/29/92)

"Mr. Brown added that he had long hoped for an early nominee 'so we can focus our time and attention on George Bush.'"
-- NYT, 4/29/92

I'm going to blame the inspiration for this on Joe Sudbay.

Yeah, I'm ashamed of myself for taking such an easy shot..

(The real ad is here.)

Vets for Freedom is a swiftboating group now attacking Barack Obama with a nasty smear ad suggesting that he would put America's enemies first. Apparently, John McCain approves -- he calls the group a "wonderful organization."

In addition four of his campaign officials are connected with the group: Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, both campaign co-chairman, also both sit on the Vets for Freedom board of advisors. The group's executive director, Pete Hegseth, is on McCain's Virginia steering committee along with the group's treasurer, Wade Zirkle. (Update: Hegseth says the McCain campaign's announcement of his role on the steering committee was in error, though the McCain website has not been updated since the announcement in January. In addition, Max Boot, McCain's foreign policy adviser, also sits on the Vets for Freedom advisory board.)

All four men are in violation of McCain's recently announced conflict of interest policy, which states: "No person with a McCain Campaign title or position may participate in a 527 or other independent entity that makes public communications that support or oppose any presidential candidate."

Earlier this month, the campaign asked GOP consultant Craig Shirley to leave the campaign because of the same sort of conflict. If McCain also asks these four men to leave the campaign, the challenge for him will be to explain he lavishly praised as a "wonderful organization" as recently as April 8.

McCain's praise for Vets for Freedom came at a rally staged for the media. At the rally, McCain was introduced by David Bellavia, a Vets for Freedom co-founder and candidate for Congress in New York's 26th district. In his introduction, Bellavia likened Barack Obama to Tiger Words, bringing a big smile to McCain's face.

Take action:

• Call John McCain at (703) 418-2008 and ask him tell his swiftboating pals to stop their smears

For more background:

• Lieberman, Graham Violating McCain Campaign's Ethics Rules? (Pitney and Stein, HuffPo)
• Busted: McCain Message Coordination w/Anti-Obama VFF (Steven R, Daily Kos)
• Joe & Lindsey Violate McCain's "Ethics" "Rule" (TeddySanFran, Firedoglake)
• McCain advisers on independent group attacking Obama (Mark Silva, The Swamp)

Note: All the video of McCain, Lieberman, and Graham was made possible by the Democratic Party's  Flipper TV project which collects and makes available raw video of McCain available for YouTubes like this.

So John McCain is trotting out a familiar argument today, slapping Barack Obama with the "surrender" label for supporting a timetable in Iraq:

For him to talk about dates for withdrawal, which basically is surrender in Iraq after we're succeeding so well is, I think, really inexcusable.

This is the same John McCain who supports a timetable of his own. In a speech describing what America would be like at the end of his first term, he said:

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom

McCain says that the problem with Obama's appoach to Iraq is that if we withdraw our combat forces, the country would descend into chaos, and we would be forced to return.

But if he believes that, wouldn't his plan present same problem? Like Obama, he plans on leaving some troops in the country, but not in combat roles.

For some inexplicable reason, John McCain has chosen Memorial Day to defend his opposition to Jim Webb's new G.I. Bill -- opposition that he shares with George W. Bush and a handful of other right-wing Republicans.

The Bush-McCain argument against the new bill is hardly inspiring -- if G.I. benefits are expanded, they say, military reenlistment rates will plummet. The New York Times responds:

They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.

They have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying — as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are — to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.

Their reasoning is flawed since the C.B.O. has also predicted that the bill would offset the re-enlistment decline by increasing new recruits — by 16 percent. The chance of a real shot at a college education turns out to be as strong a lure as ever. This is good news for our punishingly overburdened volunteer army, which needs all the smart, ambitious strivers it can get.

This isn't really a partisan argument. It's more like Bush-McCain versus the world.

Webb's legislation passed with 75 votes. And last month, John Warner, the former Republican Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee joined in the criticism of McCain's argument:

“I think this argument that it’s going to hurt retention is very thin and tenuous, very thin and tenuous,” said the former chairman. “The flip side of that is, putting a big piece of cheese out there will induce more qualified people to join just to get this. It should be a tremendous incentive for recruitment.”

McCain's opposition to the expansion of G.I. benefits is oddly stubborn. Then again, given McCain's fabulous wealth -- he owns ten homes and flies around the country in his wife's private jet -- it might just be that John McCain is out of touch with normal Americans.

From Recount, here's the unfolding of Joe Lieberman's capitulation to Bush lawyers on counting unpostmarked, undated, unsigned overseas ballots received after election day:

Overall, overseas ballots received after election day boosted Bush's total by 739 votes. (Gore actually lead Bush by 202 votes in the ballots cast and received on or before election day.) Of the 2,411 late ballots, 680 were later determined to have been illegally counted by The New York Times.

An analysis by Princeton and Harvard researchers found that if these 680 illegal ballots hadn't been counted, Bush's final margin would have been closer to 251 votes. That probably wouldn't have been a big enough difference to swing the election even if SCOTUS hadn't stopped the recount and nothing else had changed, but it does make it all the more clear that Al Gore actually received more votes than George Bush on election day -- even when you ignore GOP voter supression tactics or the butterfly ballot.

And in the context of the recount, it pretty much killed Gore's chances of winning. As Kevin Spacey says sarcastically at the end of the scene: "Thank you Joe Lieberman."

(As an aside, Barack Obama once called Lieberman his "mentor." It's proof that he's not perfect, and hopefully he learned from that mistake!)

In poll after poll, more voters say they would vote for Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton against John McCain.

Why is this? What is his problem with voters?

If he's not careful, he might actually get elected president.

(Note: The dataset for this chart includes every poll on pollster.com that featured both an Obama-McCain matchup and a Clinton-McCain matchup. In other words: no cherry-picking. Obama's advantage is real.)

File this under the category of "no shit":

Seriously, who doesn't know this? It's like the MSM hasn't been beating this into our brains every single day of the week since March. And now TPM -- without offering any fresh analysis of its own -- is not only pimping the meme, but embracing it's ties to Newsweek, another MSM creature?

Lame.  And don't give me that arrogant "Well, if you think Obama is the nominee, why should we cover Hillary?" response. It doesn't matter what I think -- you're still covering the primary, so you should do a fair job of it.

Yes, he's kinda' sorta' dancing at the beginning of the clip...for about 5 seconds.

I'm going to sleep now. Hopefully when I wake up Paul Krugman will have gotten some sense knocked into him. He could start by reading this article by John Harwood:

Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic analyst of voting trends, wrote the book on the core issue in the endgame of the party’s nomination fight. Its title is “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.”

One might conclude that Mr. Teixeira is troubled by Senator Barack Obama’s performance in recent primaries against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton among the voters known by nicknames like Joe Sixpack or Nascar Dad or Waitress Mom.

Actually, he is not.

Mr. Obama, who leads the delegate count, “is clocking in where he needs to be” with white, working-class voters to win the White House in November, Mr. Teixeira said.

Happy Memorial Day (or whatever it is we're supposed to say on Memorial Day)!

I just finished watching Recount on HBO. I thought it was a pretty good movie, especially if you're a political junkie.

It's impossible to watch it and not think about what would have happened if so many voters hadn't been purged from the rolls, if the butterfly ballot had been designed better, if Al Gore had pursued statewide recounts from the beginning, if the SCOTUS hadn't ruled they way they had, if the networks hadn't called the state while the panhandle was still voting, etc.

After the election, a consortium of media organizations took a look at some of those issues, and released the results of their study in November, 2001. Although the study found that under the most inclusive standard (and, indeed, under most standards) Al Gore received more votes than George W. Bush, most journalists followed The New York Times' lead and focused on what the results would have been had the SCOTUS allowed the recount to continue.

By that standard, Bush received more votes, but to determine what that standard was, the consortium relied on on county canvassing boards to declare how they would have counted ballots. So it's not ultimately clear what really would have happened.

More importantly though, that's not the real issue -- the issue is that even leaving aside things like the butterfly ballot (which hurt Gore) or voting in the panhandle (which likely hurt Bush), Gore almost certainly received more actual votes than Bush in Florida. I wonder if the media would have covered their results differently if it hadn't been after 9/11; I suspect that the coverage would have been very different.

The NYT has a cool "what if" scenario calculator if you'd like to play around with the possibilities.

My biggest complaint about the movie had nothing to do with the movie itself -- I was hoping to see a preview for Entourage. I'm seriously in need of some new episodes, especially now that the Sopranos are gone. When is their next season?

This is pretty funny--Jake Tapper decides to take whack at Barack Obama, calling him a "one-man gaffe machine." He lists as evidence a couple of trivial items:

• Obama inadvertantly said Sioux City instead of Sioux Falls (Obama corrected himsef quickly)
• Obama called Sunrise, Florida Sunshine instead.

Next, Tapper links to this report by David Wright with the headline "Obama Gaffes on Iraq and Afghanistan." Sounds promising, but I can only assume Tapper saw the headline and read no further. When you actually read the updates to Wright's original story, you realize Obama never gaffed and Wright essentially retracted most of the story.

Tapper then launches into his own supposed Obama-gaffe (about FARC). It sounds like gaffe alright, but then in two separate updates Tapper is forced to walk significant parts of it back. Maybe if he had just talked to the Obama camp in the first place (I thought that is what reporters did?) then he wouldn't have gotten so much wrong.

Still, despite all that, I like Tapper's blog. I mean, he's wrong an awful lot, but he's entertaining, and sometimes he does some really great reporting.

Two of John McCain's campaign co-chairs, Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, turn out to be advisers to an anti-Obama 527. There's nothing illegal about this, but it does violate McCain's stated policy of not not having members of his campaign team also work with 527s involved in the presidential campaign.

It should be fun to torment him over this inconsistency, but the thing that really caught my attention was the ad itself. It closes with a loaded rhetorical question: "If Barack Obama won't listen to us, who will he listen to?" Nothing surprising about that kind of attack coming from the GOP, but the funny thing is that John McCain is the one listening to terrorists and quoting them on the campaign trail. For example:

General Petraeus is correct when he says that the central battle ground in the struggle against Al Qaeda is Iraq and Osama Bin Laden just confirmed that. So General Petraeus and I and Osama Bin Laden are in agreement. It is hard to understand why Senator Clinton and Senator Obama do not understand that. I don’t know if its naïveté or what the problem is, but it’s obvious that they are dead wrong.

Can you imagine if Barack Obama had said he agreed with bin Laden on something, especially if he then used it in a political attack against McCain? It's amazing what the press let's Teflon John get away with.

Daily Kos diarist IAmNobody conducts a brilliant analysis:

This is what IAmNobody found:

• Daily Kos: The 100,000 posts were made by 8,939 users. The top 20 users posted 8% of all posts. 1,219 had posted at least 20 times accounting for 68% of all posts.
• H44: The 100,000 posts were made by 310 users. The top 20 users posted 45% of all posts. 171 had posted at least 20 times accounting for 99% of all posts.

Hillary Clinton, defending her remarks:

I was making the simple point that given our history, the length of this year's primary contest is nothing unusual.

There's a lot of things you could say about 2008, but making the claim that it's length is "nothing unusual" is not one of them.

First, take a look at the number of days that lapsed between the first competitive contest and June 1:

• 1968 -- 81 days (first contest was NH on Mar 12).
• 1992 -- 104 days (first competitive contest was NH on Feb 18 due to Harkin).
• 2008 -- 150 days (first contest was IA on Jan 3).

Second, look at the number of days that elapsed between the candidate's campaign kickoff announcement and June 1?

• 1968 -- RFK had been a candidate for 76 days (announced March 16).
• 1992 -- Bill Clinton had been a candidate for 242 days (October 3, 1991).
• 2008 -- Hillary Clinton will have been a candidate for 498 days (January 20, 2007).

I'm getting so sick of Hillary Clinton's bull.

Bill Clinton today:

Clinton also spoke against bullying superdelegates to make up their minds, saying, "I cant believe it. It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out. 'Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.'"

Give me a freaking break -- this false claim about electability is based on an analysis by Karl Rove. Is Bill Clinton really asking superdelegates to trust that criminal with an unbiased analysis?

When you actually look at all the national polls with both candidates, it's obvious that Barack Obama is stronger than Hillary Clinton. Here's a chart based on data I posted yesterday:

Every single month this year Barack Obama has done better against John McCain than Hillary Clinton. It's true, he took a big hit in March as McCain wrapped up the nomination and the Jeremiah Wright issue flared up.

But despite that, Barack Obama still did better than Hillary Clinton. Even if you think he's a weak general election candidate, you have to conclude from this data that Hillary Clinton is weaker.

More importantly, this data shows that except for the possible exception of the month of April, it's virtually impossible that Barack Obama has any meaningful problem with whites, at least relative to Clinton.

So when Bill Clinton tells superdelegates that his wife is doing better than Barack Obama in general election polls, it's just not true. So now the question is: how much longer are the undeclared superdelegates going to sit there and keep on taking Bill Clinton's lies?

Even if you set aside Clinton's RFK remarks, her historical analogies were absurd. Bill Clinton had the nomination wrapped up long before June of 1992, and it wasn't a secret. Here's Tim Russert on April 8, 1992:

As Russert says, even if Jerry Brown had won every single remaining delegate at that point, he still could not have secured the nomination. Surely, Hillary Clinton is aware of this fact.

I wonder if there are any Hillary quotes from before June 1992 indicating she felt that Bill had won the nomination? That would really complete the circle -- and I don't think anyone smart would bet against the existence of such a statement in the public record.

Whether its the Iowa caucuses, when the campaign would end, or whether the voters or superdelegates should have final say, the only unifying theme of Hillary Clinton's arguments about how the process should work is her breathtaking cynicism. Here's a new video showing two of her biggest flip-flops:

Clinton's arguments about the nomination process are transparent. It's obvious what she 's up to: taking one last shot at winning the nomination.

Here's Barack breaking it down on his plane ride back from Puerto Rico:

He's only half-right when he says Michigan and Florida are Hillary Clinton's "last slender hope." The truth is she can't win the nomination, but Michigan and Florida are her only hope for extending the campaign.

You've got to be kidding me:

1. Hillary Clinton is claiming that she is the victim of her remarks
2. Terry McAuliffe is blaming Barack Obama on FOX News Sunday.
3. Howard Wolfson is supporting both Clinton and McAuliffe on Face the Nation and calling Obama's response to the situation 'inflammatory.'

Unreal. Remember this is what Barack said:

"I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make, and I think that is what happened here," he said in an interview with Radio ISLA. "Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it, and I will take her at her word on that."

And this is what the Clinton campaign calls 'inflammatory'? What assholes.

Here he is at the Wesleyan Commencement Cermony, speaking in Teddy Kennedy's place:

I've been away from the computer and all sources of news until just a few minutes, so I'm getting back up to speed on the goings on since early this morning.

Anything major happen since then? I did notice on MTP, Tim Russert disproved Hillary Clinton's claim about Bill Clinton and 1992 with a clip of...himself, from spring 1992. Tim Russert must love his job: he may be the only person in America who can play a clip of himself to prove a point about political history.

You may never again hear Barack Obama talk about somebody's "last slender hope," and if he does, there's almost no chance it will get you as fired up as this will. From CNN:

 Sen. Barack Obama accused Sen. Hillary Clinton of stoking anger in Florida and Michigan over the Democratic Party's decision not to recognize the states' primary votes.

"They weren't stirring it up when they didn't need the delegates," he said. "Let's not sort of pretend that we don't know what's going on. This is, from their perspective, their last slender hope to make arguments about how they can win."

On what the Rules and Bylaws Committee should do (Bloomberg):

"I just want them to decide how to approach this in a way in which the Florida and Michigan delegates are seated and they are happy," Obama said yesterday. "I want to be looking at them when I'm standing on stage in Denver in August," he said, referring to the Democratic National Convention.

Reuters reports that he is looking forward:

He said on Saturday he would need to "pivot quickly" in June, if he obtains the number of delegates to secure the nomination, to engage in a search for a vice presidential running mate.

Barack is operating from a position of strength, and it's clear that he's decided now is the time to bring this process to a close. Finally -- enough is enough. Time to move on.

Update: Jimmy Carter weighs in:

"I'm a superdelegate," Carter said. "I think a lot of the superdelegates will make a decision quite, announced quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3...I have not yet announced publicly, but I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up."

Carter was asked if Clinton was achieving anything by continuing in the race.

"I think not," he said. "But of course she has the perfect right to do so."

From what I know about 1968, I can't imagine having been involved in both Democratic and Republican politics. It turns out that it wasn't much of a problem for Hillary Clinton though (and it hasn't seemed like much of a problem for her in 2008 either, I might add). The more you learn, the stranger it gets:

[Hillary Clinton] might have been the only 20-year-old in America who worked on the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire that winter and for the hawkish Republican congressman Melvin Laird in Washington that summer.

The passage comes from a September 2007 NYT profile of Clinton's 1968. (In light of her claim to have found her voice after winning New Hampshire, its title is pretty funny:  "In Turmoil of ’68, Clinton Found a New Voice.")

For all her leftward movement, Ms. Rodham still kept a toe in the Republican Party, working as an intern in Washington that summer. Mr. Schechter, who supervised the Wellesley internship program, sent her to work for the House Republican Conference, then headed by Mr. Laird, the Wisconsin congressman who would later become President Richard Nixon’s defense secretary. ... At the end of the internship, Ms. Rodham proudly posed for a photo with House Republican leaders, including Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan. The photo hung in her father’s bedroom when he died in 1993.  

According to the profile, Clinton also attended the 1968 Republican National Convention as a supporter of Nelson Rockefeller, and watched Richard Nixon's acceptance speech from the floor, which she now says ended her commitment to the Republican Party.

Another interesting note: although she didn't participate in the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she did witness the riots there, making her RFK comment all the more bizarre -- she saw with her own eyes that 1968 is a horrible example of party unity.

The 1995 Seattle Mariners slogan was "Refuse to Lose," but when
game 5 of the 1995 ALDS went into extra innings, the game was tied.

Barack Obama has just retired Hillary Clinton in the top half of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the American League Championship Series.

He's the home team, and he's leading 9-7, so he's already won, not just the game, but also the series.

But Clinton is insisting on taking the field to play out the final meaningless frame. It's never been done before in the history of baseball, but Obama, being a gentleman, is obliging.

Strangely, the umpires don't do anything to stop the game from continuing, even though it's completely under their control.

After Clinton finishes her warm up pitches, Obama steps up the plate. Clinton delivers three fastballs, each right over the heart of the plate, but Obama doesn't lift the bat off his shoulder. He strikes out in three pitches (West Virginia), clearly mailing it in in the hopes of avoiding injury.

Clinton, not recognizing the reason for Obama's nonchalant attitude, taunts him mercilessly. "You can't hit my kind of pitches!" she she screams.

Of all the typos in the world...to make this one, with John McCain of all people. Well, oopsie doopsie. (From my post "John McCain and his lobbyist gambling buddy" published earlier today.)

Yeah, I know, I've got a 10-year-old's sense of humor. (Update: Another one.)

Mac Daddy McCain loves rolling the dice (from Connie Bruck's profile in The New Yorker):

"McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight." (Emphasis added.)

As a Las Vegan, McCain's affinity for gambling doesn't bother me in the slightest, though it might irritate his family values base.

What really interests me though is the relationship between McCain and his gambling buddy Wes Gullet. Gullet is a lobbyist, and he once worked for McCain, both on the campaign trail and in the Senate.

John McCain (or his body double) playing craps in Las Vegas, summer 2006.
The source of the photo thinks they are at Mirage, but it's actually Bellagio.

It would be a great story for an intrepid reporter willing to dig a little deeper into their relationship. Even better, it involves the biggest land swap in Arizona history -- and one of McCain's top contributors was the primary beneficiary.

Here are the key elements of the story:

• Wes Gullet is an old friend and gambling buddy of John McCain. They rolled dice together in 14-hour-long sessions in Las Vegas.
• Gullet was McCain's campaign manger and top senate staffer and is now a lobbyist.
• Gullet was hired to lobby McCain on the largest land swap in Arizona history, exchanging private land in the wilderness for valuable federally-owned land rady for development.
• McCain, who initially opposed the swap, changed his position and supported it after Gullett was hired.
• The land swap benefited one of John McCain's top fundraisers who has hauled in more than $100,000 for his Presidential campaign.

All the elements all the elements for a great story -- Vegas, gambling, corruption, visually compelling Arizona landscapes, etc. And it's a true story. But with scattered exceptions, the media has ignored it.

Hattip to commenter SeattleAJ, who discovered the link after I first posted about McCain's interest in craps. Details below the fold. (Update: I've rearranged the material in this post for presentation purposes only.)

The one thing that I'll give the Clinton campaign credit for is that last week they managed to completely overshadow the fact that Barack Obama secured a majority of delegates elected by the American people.

This, however, should not be a source of pride. It may have been a close nominating battle, but close is not tied, and Barack Obama won.

Now it's time for Clinton supporters to make a decision: are they going to help their candidate find some sort of way to get out of the race with at least some of her dignity intact? Or are they going to continue enabling her increasingly bizarre campaign?

I know there's a sense that Clinton supporters need to be coddled, treated with kid gloves. But I have enough respect for them to believe that they can handle a firm -- but polite -- message such as this.

I know the frustration of having your candidate lose. Barack Obama was not my first choice. John Edwards was. I still miss his presence in the race. But he didn't win. So I had to move on.

Marc Ambinder passes along stats touted by the Clinton campaign, characterizing them thusly: "Basically, we won the second half."

Since March 4:

Hillary votes: 6,519,685
Obama votes: 6,007,744
Margin: Hillary +511,941

Hillary pledged delegates: 510
Obama pledged delegates: 495
Margin: Hillary +15 delegates

Hillary contests: 7 (OH, RI, TX, PA, IN, WV, KY)
Obama contests: 6 (VT, WY, MS, GU, NC, OR)

Fine, except:

• 1,005 delegates is less than one-third of the pledged delegates, so it's really more like the third period (of a hockey game).
• +15 net margin in pledged delegates? Even if that number is right...it's not enough to change the fundamental math.
• The calendar in the "third period" was much more favorable to Hillary than Obama
• She only won Indiana with the help of McCainiacs
• The popular vote metric is meaningless, but if it weren't meaningless, I'd offer a reminder that 362,000+ McCainiacs voted for Clinton.

Then there's always the part about how Barack Obama won the pledged delegate majority in the second half or third period or whatever we're calling it.

And that fact pretty much will end the game.

The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama was soaring in February, crushing John McCain in poll after poll, while Hillary Clinton struggled far behind. Then came along March and April and changed all that around (according to the CW); suddenly, Clinton was on top and Obama was looking up to her, at least when it came to general election polling against John McCain.

Well, turns out...that's not exactly true. It is the case that Barack Obama tanked (to be blunt) from February to March -- but in every single month this year, he's done better versus John McCain than Hillary Clinton.

Here's a look at a brief analysis I conducted using polls on pollster.com, excluding polls which only had one candidate versus McCain (Data: Obama, Clinton). I sorted the polls by month, and calculated a simple average for each candidate. Here's the data for how each candidate fared against McCain for each month:

January 2008 (11 polls)

• Clinton: McCain +2.1% (44.9C, 47.0M)
• Obama: McCain +0.5% (44.8O, 45.4M)

February 2008 (25 polls)

• Clinton: McCain +1.9% (44.4C, 46.3M)
• Obama: Obama +4.0% (46.90, 42.9M)

March 2008 (31 polls)

• Clinton: McCain +2.2% (44.3C, 46.4M)
• Obama: McCain +1.3% (44.1O, 45.3M)

April 2008 (36 polls)

• Clinton: Clinton +0.2% (44.9C, 44.8M)
• Obama: Obama +0.5% (45.1O, 44.6M)

May 2008 (21 polls)

• Clinton: Clinton +1.5% (45.9C, 44.3M)
• Obama: Obama +2.5% (46.1O, 43.7M)

(The numbers don't all add up due to rounding.)

As you can see, versus McCain, Obama was stronger than Clinton in each month, either leading by more, or losing by less. Overall, he led 51% of the polls and tied in another 9%; Clinton led 41% and tied in 7%.

Even though March and April were tough months for Obama, especially after his exceptional February, he did better than Clinton -- and in April, better than McCain. And now, three weeks into May, it looks like he's mostly made back most of the ground he lost in March due to the Wright flareup.

Once upon a time (December) in a far away land (Iowa), the protector of Michigan, the defender of Florida, the savior of June...thought the campaign would end on February 5.

She's unprincipled. Hypocritical. Untethered. Delusional.

When will the superdelegates finally end this thing? We the people have already spoken. Barack Obama has won the pledged delegate majority.

The important part of the nominating contest is over, yet they dither. And now they have earned the blame for enabling Hillary Clinton's psychosis, and for forcing us to endure its consequences.

The time has come for them to put her -- and us -- out of our collective misery. There's too much at stake in 2008.

Another really strange aspect to Clinton's remarks today: if you accept her claim that she was merely pointing out an example of another campaign that had extended into June to show the process should continue, she was picking a really bad one.

The question she was responding to ("You don't buy the party unity argument?") came in the context of a discussion of the rationale for continuing her campaign.

In her answer, she cited Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign (falsely) and the 1968 campaign.

Even if she hadn't raised the assassination, highlighting 1968 would have been a strange way to make the point she was trying to make. At the time of RFK's death, there were three candidates with substantial delegate totals and the convention itself was a disaster. (It's also not entirely clear whether RFK would have won the nomination. Humphrey had the delegate lead.)

So if her point was that she wouldn't mind a campaign like 1968, no thanks.

(Update: Also, as KRK notes in the comments, in 1968 there were far more delegates left to be selected in states than there are today.)

I'm going to revise my earlier assessment. I still think there are two interpretations.

1. She is a psychopath and was intentionally raising the specter of assassinations.
2. She is completely untethered to reality, and flippantly tossed out the notion of an assassination as part of a remarkably weird (and bad) argument.

And I'm not sure that these options are mutually exclusive. In either case, she demonstrated she is not fit to be President of the United States of America -- nor is she fit to be vice president.

Update: Video Olbermann's Special Comment added to this post. (Transcript here.)

...you have to admit that she's incredibly gaffe prone.

And if you are an undeclared superdelegate, you have to wonder: would the disclosure that John McCain had cancer surgery in February been bigger news had it not been for Clinton's continued presence in the race?

It's not just the drama about her remarks today, it's also her pursuit of the vice presidency.

I'm under no illusion that the media would be doing a fair job if Clinton were out of the race, but by staying in it, she's certainly making it easier for them to give John McCain a free pass.

From The Field:

The endorsement by US Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-California) of Obama today sends an extremely firm message to the Clinton campaign, and not only because he was, until today, a Clinton superdelegate.

The Field has learned that Cardoza is the first of a group of at least 40 Clinton delegates, many of them from California, that through talking among themselves came to a joint decision that all of them would vote for Obama at the convention. They have informed Senator Clinton that it’s time to unite around Obama, and that they will be coming out, one or two at a time, and announcing their switch between now and the convention if Senator Clinton doesn’t do the same.

If you're into digg, you can digg Al's article here.

Update: Aravosis points out that the the window of time between now and the convention is large. The supers need to act -- and now.

Clinton raises the potential of assassination as a rationale for remaining in the race.

This is a thought that has no place in the public sphere.

She should never be president. She will never be president.

TPM has a longer clip with more context; I don't think it mitigates her comment one iota, you can judge for yourself. TPM also has her attempt to clarify her remarks.

Update: I see two explanations for Hillary Clinton's remark:

1. She is a psychopath
    
2. It was an innocent remark, but one that proves yet again that she is so gaffe-prone that she would be a disastrous nominee

You can guess which ONE I believe. In either case, setting aside for a moment the nature of her statement, it isn't a rationale; her remaining in the race is not a necessary precondition for becoming the nominee if Obama were to withdraw for whatever reason.

And once again it all comes down to the people that are enabling Hillary Clinton: the undeclared superdelegates.

Update 2: I was just watching Chris Cilizza, EJ Dionne, and Michelle Bernard on Hardball -- of the three panelists, only Michelle Bernard was willing to straightforwardly point out how horrific Clinton's comments were. The other two were disappointingly cautious.

My reason for opposing the selection of Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama's VP is simple: I wouldn't vote for her for president, so why would I want her within a heartbeat of the presidency?

As Clinton loyalists begin to make the case for Clinton as veep, however, their arguments will be mostly political, claiming that Barack Obama needs Hillary Clinton to win. As Dianne Feinstein said today:

The weight of the states he carried versus the states she carried, it's different. And, therefore, if you combine them both, you've got the best electoral path.

There's a problem with that argument, though. Not only is Obama leading McCain by 9 points in the latest Ohio poll and by 8 in the latest Pennsylvania poll (and by 7 in the latest Virginia poll), he also does at least as well as Clinton nationally.

Pew is one of the national polling organizations to reveal demographic breakdowns. Take a look at their most recent polling, conducted just after the second Wright flareup at the end of April. Compare the Obama-McCain matchup to the Clinton-McCain matchup. They both win, but would anybody in their right mind trade Obama for Clinton?

It's not just polling data; Barack Obama does not need Hillary Clinton for fundraising either, nor does he need her for grassroots support. With 1.5 million donors and volunteers across the nation, he is now more powerful than her; it's an amazing thing, but it's true.

In part because of that, if Obama did pick Clinton it would be seen as a sign of weakness, not just because he selected someone who had ruthlessly attacked him for months, but also because he'd be sending a signal that he tacitly agreed with her attacks.

For Obama, the weakness he would project by selecting Clinton would present a far greater electoral risk than the challenge he faces of uniting the Democratic Party.

Don't forget, the most important political endorsement this year has already taken place: George Bush embraced John McCain. And that more than anything else will help pull the party back together.

In a Senate election, the popular vote has clear meaning. In a presidential election, the popular vote is less meaningful because the electoral college is what matters, but at least there's a relatively uniform set of rules from state to state. (If Bush had clearly won Florida, there would have been heartache, but not nearly as much controversy.)

But in the Democratic presidential nomination process, there just isn't any such thing as the national popular vote. For better or for worse, the national party created pledged delegates to reflect the popular will. The national party then empowered each state party to come up with its own method for selecting the delegates, subject to approval.

As a result, there is no uniform voting procedure; adding up the total "votes" is really a meaningless exercise (which I've spent too much of my time doing). It should be noted that Obama leads in this metric, adding another layer of dishonesty to Clinton backers who claim she leads the popular vote, but that fact shouldn't count in Obama's favor.

What matters is that Barack Obama has won a clear majority of the delegates selected by the people. The fact that Hillary Clinton has spent the past few days trying to obscure that fact tells you all that you need to know about her commitment to democracy.

...but he sure does love him some espresso.

Who's he winking at anyway? I swear I see Joe Lieberman's reflection in his eye.

p.s.: I mostly took the ads down(I left one up on pages with posts). The ads were annoying me, and according to Google AdSense, they paid out $8.11...for 15,502 page impressions.

PocketNines makes it in an excellent diary over at Daily Kos. The Cliffs Notes version: Obama is still a lock to win the nomination even if Michigan and Florida are seated in full, and by giving Clinton everything she wants, her rationale for taking the campaign to the convention disappears.

I've never seen someone yawn as big as the guy behind Hillary Clinton...and then, well, I won't spoil it for you, but all I'll say is that even Jerry Seinfeld wouldn't have said it was a scratch.

Update: I swapped out the Kimmel video with this one from Leno that's even funnier.

Update 2: I bumped this and changed the headline which no longer made any sense with the new video still. Whatever you do, just watch the clip -- it's hilarious.

John McCain's been a busy fellow: yesterday, he divorced his two most controversial pastor-endorsers, John Hagee and Rod Parsley. I'm not worried about losing a political issue -- they were both bad men, and McCain was right to dump them. Anyway, if there's any relationship that should be relevant to the 2008 campaign, it is the one between George Bush and John McCain.

I've (somewhat relucantly) decided to put up ads from Google AdSense as an experiment, at least for a few days. The downside is: ads. The upside is that they may give me another justification to spend so much time blogging, which hopefully you'll be pleased about, but John McCain won't. (Update: I'm blocking ads from newsmax.com and humanevents.com, but it's taking forever for the filters to take effect, so you may see some of them for a bit.)

John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog and Arianna Huffington at HuffPo are stepping up to the plate and targeting the undeclared superdelegates.

They are absolutely right: we have nobody to blame but the superdelegates who refuse to make a decision.

No matter how distasteful Hillary Clinton's antics may be, she is merely taking advantage of the opportunity they have provided. It was utterly predictable that she would do this, and the time has come for them to stop it.

Let's not forget that Barack Obama has already won a clear majority of pledged delegates. The people have already spoken. There are no more excuses for waiting. As Clinton supporter Paul Begala said:

"These superdelegates are super ratifiers. That's all they're going to be, that's all they should be by the way. Because I think they are an abomination against democracy."

Begala is right. It's time for superdelegates to release their stranglehold on this process. Let us move on.

Earlier today in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Hillary Clinton endorsed the Republican Party's decision to cut in half the voting power of the Florida delegation to the RNC.

Why should they have been cut in half? "Because it was a Republican decision" to change the primary date, she said.

The problem? Democrats also supported the decision. In fact, it passed the state senate by a 37-2 margin and it passed the state house by a 118-0 margin. Moreover, the state party leadership steadfastly stuck with the January 29 date even though they knew the DNC would not seat the Florida delegations.

Clinton herself supported the DNC's punishment when she signed a pledge to honor the DNC's rules. The key line in that pledge: "the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will strip states of 100% of their delegates and super delegates to the DNC National Convention if they violate the nomination calendar."

And now, even though Clinton is conceding that the Republican Party was correct to penalize its delegation, she is refusing to agree to a compromise that would apply the same exact penalty to the Democratic delegation. The basis of her refusal is a demonstrably false claim.

And that of course leads us right back where we started: for Hillary Clinton, Florida has nothing to do with principle.

It's just another power play.

Update: I should also mention that the final resolution of this will have no impact on whether or not Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination. As Al Giordano makes clear, Barack has got it locked up, even if you count Michigan and Florida at full strength. It will, however, take longer, which means more distractions from Clinton.

More importantly, it weakens the ability of the DNC to control a nomination process that we can all agree is horribly deficient. If every state can do whatever they want whenever they want, we're never going to improve the process.

Note: I swapped in a new version of the clip that fixes a typo. The old version with typo is here.

Sorry for the light posting -- I'm working on a new video which I hope will be done within the next hour or two. (It focuses on this interview by Clinton earlier today.)

Avi Zenilman reports that Harold Ickes says the Clinton campaign wants Michigan's uncommitted delegates to stay uncommitted.

In a conference call with reporters, Clinton Senior Adviser Harold Ickes clarified their position on Michigan -- they don't want the 55 "uncommitted" delegates to go to Obama (his name did not appear on the ballot in Michigan). ... UPDATE: Wolfson says that most -- if not -- all of the uncommitted delegates would likely go for Obama.

The issue here is that according to Michigan's delegate selection plan, "uncommitted," which received 40% of the vote, got 55 delegates.

According to the exit poll, most of the uncommitted voters favored Obama (about 70%). Almost all of the rest favored Edwards -- about 30%.

If the Clinton folks think they have any sort of legitimate claim to those 55 uncommitted delegates, they are on even more crack than I ever could have imagined. (Wolfson's update suggests there is a dose of reality somewhere in Clinton-land.)

Even if they recognize that the uncommitted delegates will go for Barack, there are a couple of explanations for why they might continue pushing for them to be formally uncommitted. First, if they are uncommitted, there is more uncertainty, extending the process. Second, if they are uncommitted, then they may think they have a stronger argument for only counting Clinton's votes in their fictitious national popular vote metric.

Whatever. If they are seriously thinking along these lines, they really are delusional.

One other point: the exit poll numbers I've cited focus on the percentage of people who voted uncommitted but say they would have voted for Edwards or Obama if their names had been on the ballot.

It's worth remembering that almost one-fifth of all people who voted for Clinton say they would have supported either Obama or Edwards had their names been on the ballot (about two-thirds of these folks would have supported Obama).

At least with Florida, their argument can be spun in such a way that it is believable. In Michigan, there's just no way to take them seriously.

If Hillary Clinton can't win...why is she spreading so much toxic waste? (It's really true that she can't win, by the way, not even if Michigan and Florida are seated at full strength. See Al Giordano for the details.)

The usual suspects: she's delusional (thinks she can win), she's negotiating (wants VP), she's spiteful (angry that she lost, or as ctk points out in the comments, angry that Obama has said "no" to her VP aspirations), and that she's undermining Obama (for 2012).

There's some truth to all of those, but here's a different idea: this could mostly be a cynical attempt to retire her mountain of debt.

A little bit of stand up comedy, a little bit of blunt talk, and a lot of wisdom. From yesterday, in Kissimmee, Florida.

Hillary Clinton has overcome way more sexism than anybody should ever have to, and that is part of what makes her such an inspiring candidate for so many people.

But sexism is not what cost Hillary Clinton this campaign: Iraq was, and what's more, she knows it -- or at least she should know, because her staff does. On February 17, 2007 she told people who disagreed with her vote on Iraq to choose from the other candidates:

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

What she needed to do was admit making a mistake. Instead, she told her critics to buzz off. It was an arrogant decision, and it will go down as one of the worst in the history of Democratic nomination campaigns. It was the decision that sunk her campaign, and she owns it entirely.

So I decided to torture myself by looking at a few different ways of tallying the popular vote. Since there's no concept of the national popular vote under Democratic Party rules, there's an unlimited number ways you can slice the pie. Thus, one of the many problems with using the popular vote as meaningful measure is that nobody will ever agree on how to count it. (Here's some other problems.)

Anyway, here's five different ways you could count the popular vote, some more reasonable than others. (I didn't waste my time considering the methods that exclude caucus-only states.)

Guardian:

Israel and Syria announced today they have begun indirect talks to reach a "comprehensive peace" in the first formal negotiations between the two mutual enemies for eight years.

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert: "It is always better to talk than to shoot."

George Bush: "F**king appeasers. Bring it on."

John McCain: "All I know is they would never endorse me."

p.s.: Israel is also talking to Hamas. John McCain...is talking to himself. Or something.

Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog underscores the essential point:

Does anyone else find it disturbing that despite knowing Obama, our nominee, was heading to Florida to mend fences and start the general election campaign against McCain, Hillary Clinton decided to go to Florida to rub salt in the wound? That says it all, really.

Hillary Clinton is doing more for John McCain than his eventual choice for VP could ever do.

Hillary Clinton on WMJI in Cleveland, Ohio earlier today:

I think that what's happened with Florida and Michigan raises serious questions about the principles of our party.

Now obviously, I did well in both states, but beyond that, it just says 'wait a minute, the Democrats are going to be disenfranchising people?'

The Republicans made a decision right after those states held their elections, they quickly said 'okay, we're going to penalize you a little, but we're going to seat your whole delegation, your going to have half a vote, let's just go on.'

And here we are, months later, talking about denying people their rights to be heard, and yet 2.3 million people showed up in Michigan and Florida.

This is not about us for Bill and Hillary Clinton. It's about them, and their needs. We fought for them during impeachment, and she thanked us by trashing MoveOn.org. I have to say, more and more, I'm agreeing with Rachel Maddow -- the only way to end this race will be to push Clinton out of it. Politics can be a rough business, and at some point you have got to take a stand.

Update: It's important to remember that Clinton is attacking the Democratic Party for a decision that she herself embraced. NYT from last September:

Clinton, Obama and Edwards Join Pledge to Avoid Defiant States

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., Sept. 1 — Three of the major Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday pledged not to campaign in Florida, Michigan and other states trying to leapfrog the 2008 primary calendar, a move that solidified the importance of the opening contests of Iowa and New Hampshire.

... “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” Patti Solis Doyle, the Clinton campaign manager, said in a statement.

And on Michigan she said:

It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything.

So to the extent that Clinton's criticisms have any validity, she has played as much a role as any other candidate in creating this mess.

WSJ:

All she ever asked was let everybody vote and count every vote. Do the right and decent thing by Florida and Michigan. Don’t let the Republicans look more enlightened than us, which they do today. Which is unbelievable, I never thought I’d see that.

Our rules are the same as the Republicans. We could have seated Michigan and Florida delegates with half delegates and seated their superdelegates, and we’d be on our way to a resolution of this.

"All she ever asked": What bull. Clinton knew the rules, accepted the rules, and indeed defended the rules -- until they didn't work for her.

"Don't let the Republicans look more enlightened than us": If Republicans are gaining an advantage over us, the only reason is because the Clintons have given them all the ammunition they need.

"Our rules are the same as the Republicans.": Our rules are not the same as the Republicans. On what planet does he live?

"We could have seated Michigan and Florida delegates with half delegates and seated their superdelegates": So he's okay with cutting the votes in half as long as the superdelegates count full? What a crock.

The Clinton campaign was $19.5 million in debt as of April 30. In early May she loaned even more money to the campaign. How much more in debt are they now? And if they pay back the debt with a big speech or book, won't that be illegal?

Update: My original post said Clinton was $31 million in debt. (As did the article I linked to.) Turns out the article was wrong -- it's $21 million, just as Howard Wolfson said it was. I regret repeating the Los Angeles Times' error. (Heh -- always wanted to blame the LAT for something!)

Update 2: Turns out the re-updated article was also wrong, or at least misleading. It included $1.4 million that Clinton says she loaned the campaign in May. But since there is no way to to verify that, I'm just going to go with the actual FEC report which says $19.5 million.

Partners in crime?

I've crunched the numbers, and over the past month, one out of every ten votes for Hillary Clinton has come from a John McCain supporter.

These McCainiacs for Clinton vote for Clinton in the Democratic primary, but in the general election they say they will choose John McCain -- even if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination.

In all, over the past six primaries, they have cast about 362,000 of Clinton's 3.6 million votes. They're having a major impact -- without them, Clinton would not have won Indiana earlier this month.

I don't know whether these voters are part of Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos or if they are acting on their own initiative, but it doesn't matter. They will not support Clinton in the fall, a fact that must be taken into account by undeclared superdelegates as they assess Clinton's flimsy popular vote argument.

I think Rachel Maddow has it exactly right:

Tonight, Hillary Clinton signaled that as long as superdelegates stand on the sidelines, she isn't getting out of the race, and as long as she's in the race, she'll do whatever it takes to win, even if that means undermining Barack Obama's legitimacy.

So the time has come to push her out the race, and the only people who can do it are the undeclared superdelegates. They are the ones responsible for this mess, and they are the ones who must end it.

This is pretty funny. In Oregon, Hillary Clinton can't even beat John McCain:

• Clinton: 230,796 (86% reporting)
• McCain: 255,471 (86% reporting)

Meanwhile in Kentucky, Obama defeated McCain:

• Obama: 209,711
• McCain: 142,855

And in West Virginia, Obama also finished ahead McCain:

• Obama: 91,747
• McCain: 89,782

So Obama takes his two worst drubbings of the campaign...but still gets more votes than John McCain in each one of them. Hillary Clinton suffers a moderately large defeat, and also loses John McCain by a significant margin. Who's more electable now?

"You came out on a cold winter’s night in numbers that this country has never seen, and you stood for change.  And because you did, a few more stood up.  And then a few thousand stood up.  And then a few million stood up.

"And tonight, in the fullness of spring, with the help of those who stood up from Portland to Louisville, we have returned to Iowa with a majority of delegates elected by the American people, and you have put us within reach of the Democratic nomination for President of the United States."

Hillary lied...and we laughed!

Don't forget to read the fine print! In the meantime, here's some information on why the popular vote "standard" is bogus even when applied honestly.

Update: This is funny

"I won the popular vote" is the new "Iraq had WMD"

I just listened to Chris Matthews and Lisa Caputo try to figure out why so many of Clinton's primary voters say they won't vote for Barack Obama in the general election if he wins the nomination. They both beat around the bush for awhile before Matthews finally suggested that race was a factor, and he's probably right.

One thing they didn't note, however, is that 13% of Clinton's voters say they will vote for John McCain even if she wins the nomination.

That 13% is almost one-third of the 43% of Clinton voters who say they will vote for John McCain if Barack Obama wins the nomination. So while there's probably some racism and raw feelings, a lot of it is just that a lot of Democrats in Kentucky are just as conservative as Republicans in other parts of the country.

Update: I should note that by and large, I think MSNBC has done a good job tonight, at least compared to other networks in the past. They have consistently pointed out that Clinton's strength (or Obama's weakness) is regional.

This is a central point. Tonight, Obama speaks from Iowa, and he'll win Oregon -- both overwhelmingly white states. In fact, there is a smaller African-American population (in percentage terms) in both Oregon and Iowa than there is in Kentucky.

Clinton's campaign reacts furiously when rumors emerge that Barack Obama will claim a pledged delegate majority tonight -- something which will indisputably happen. Telling this truth, they say, would be offensive.

Yet even before Barack Obama speaks tonight, Hillary Clinton in her speech tonight infomercial for HillaryClinton.com claims that she has received more votes than any candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has ever before received?

A statement which would only be true if Barack Obama weren't also running, and hadn't received more votes than her?

Chuck runs through the scenarios for tonight, including how Barack Obama secures the pledged delegate majority, even if Michigan and Florida are included. (I don't think he includes the Edwards delegates from Florida, which is why he says Obama needs 31 or 32 from Oregon to cross that threshold.)

A couple other observations:

• The symbolism of Iowa isn't just about returning to where it all started -- Iowa is 91% white non-Hispanic. The point couldn't be more clear: he does not have a problem with whites. To be sure, there are certain regions of the country where he has not done well with whites during the primary. But as today's poll in Pennsylvania shows, primary performance does not necessarily indicate general election performance.
• Barack has an outside shot of winning enough pledged delegates tonight to be able to reach the magic number of 2,025.5 without getting the support of any new superdelegates. (He still wouldn't reach the magic number until June 3, however.)

When Barack Obama secures the pledged delegate majority tonight, the key point is that he will have won the democratic part of the Democratic Party's nomination process -- and that victory is the most important reason why superdelegates will support him at the convention in August.

Here's some terrific quotes (mostly via Jake Tapper) from Clinton supporters on the topic:

Paul Begala: "These superdelegates are super ratifiers. That's all they're going to be, that's all they should be by the way. Because I think they are an abomination against democracy."

Charlie Rangel: "It's the people [who are] going to govern who selects our next candidate and not superdelegates."

John Corzine: "I feel superdelegates will end up trailing along with the conclusions that I think the voters express."

Elaine Kamarck: "The superdelegates are not interested in overturning the will of the people and they never have been, and there’s no indication they ever would…Now if the will of the people is a complete dead tie, then I think we’re in new territory and perhaps the superdelegates will play a role at that point."

Julian Epstein: "If there was a perception that one candidate won the popular vote and won the vote of delegates, and that that decision was then overturned by a smoke-filled room of superdelegates, I think it would lead to a civil war within the party."

Jake Tapper asks Barack Obama:

You're likely to be the Democratic nominee but you will also likely lose Kentucky overwhelmingly tonight, and one of the reasons for the likely loss is what's been evident in previous primaries -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia -- your message is not resonating with white working class voters. Do you acknowledge that this is a problem and how do you intend on remedying that for the general election?

I guess Oregon doesn't count? It's true that 88% of Kentuckians are white non-Hispanics, but so are 81% of Oregonians. As Andrew Sullivan noted yesterday:

Male median income in Oregon: $41,536; Kentucky: $39,595; Female median income in Oregon: $32,390; Kentucky: $29,392. Oregon is slightly more prosperous than Kentucky, but its share of blue collar jobs is not far off Kentucky's.

The gap is a little bit bigger if you look at just the white, non-Hispanic population, but not big enough to validate the premise of Tapper's question. Moreover, as this poll from Pennsylvania shows, Tapper's assumption that primary results forecast general election performance is flawed: Obama now leads McCain by eight points in the Keystone State.

As for the difference between Kentucky and Oregon, it seems that regional and cultural differences would be the biggest factor to consider. It's also relevant that Obama has campaigned far more extensively in Oregon than Kentucky.

No, it's not a day for celebrating Mark Cuban. It's Cuban Day. And McCain is marking it by attacking Obama. Too bad he can't keep his story straight. (h/t: SeattleAJ)

HuffPo is promoting what it calls McCain's "New Iran Gaffe." It's a video of John McCain doing battle with Joe Klein at a press conference over whether or not Barack Obama has ever indicated he would personally sit down for talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here's Joe Klein on the issue:

On Friday, I promised to check into whether Obama had ever said that he would negotiate--specifically, by name -- with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Indeed, according to the crack Time Magazine research department and the Obama campaign, he never has. He did say that he would negotiate with the Iranian leadership -- but, on matters of foreign policy and Iran's nuclear program, the guy in charge is the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As of today, John McCain was still accusing Obama of wanting to negotiate with Ahmadinejad.

I am sympathetic towards what Klein is trying to do here. The problem is that if we want to make this a debate about whether Barack Obama referenced Khamenei or Ahmadinejad, it's clear that he referenced the latter.

The real issue is that the reference consisted entirely of two words, and expressed a willingness, not a pledge. More importantly, the two words were just one part of Obama's response to a question submitted by a voter on YouTube. In fact, in the only specific reference to Iran in his answer, Obama was clearly talking about staff-level contacts, not presidential level.

Do you miss hearing Mark Penn's name? If so, the WSJ has the cure:

Clinton Keeps Up Fight As Staff Tensions Rise

Heading into twin Democratic primaries Tuesday in Kentucky and Oregon -- which the two candidates are expected to split -- Sen. Hillary Clinton is vowing to stay in the race to the end, even as her staff and supporters show further signs of fraying.

In an interview in Bowling Green, Ky., on Sunday where she was campaigning ahead of Tuesday's vote, Sen. Clinton said, "I'm still here because I think I would be the best president."

However, faced with growing pressure to drop out of the race, Sen. Clinton is getting hit with conflicting advice from within her own camp. Some of her top strategists are warning that she is injuring her political future by staying in. Others -- notably her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and strategist Mark Penn -- are urging her to remain in the race.

In case you've forgotten, until March, Mark Penn's lobbying subsidiary was headed by John McCain's top adviser, Charlie Black.

Friends helping friends?

This is hilarious. John Cole:

I Almost Forgot To Mock This

Mark Levin at the Corner:

Missed Story [Mark R. Levin]

How many people showed up for Obama’s rally in Kentucky? Oh, he didn’t campaign there?

Answer: 8,000

Your average drive-by ranting commenter at this crappy little website has better research skills than the National Review. Not that this should surprise anyone.

Update - Callous self-mockery is afoot at The Jed Report: As noted in the comments, I made a rather significant typo when first posted this, writing Juan instead of John. Perfect timing for a monster mistake, eh? (I shouldn't mock others in my first post of the day, I guess!)

If you like installing software before most everyone else, you can start using the new Firefox 3 web browser now -- just download it here.

Predictably some of my extensions don't work on Firefox 3 (I miss Google Browser Sync the most, but that should be updated soon, I would hope). There's some UI changes that will take a little getting used to (I am not a fan of the 3D look for the tabs, and the folders look weird on the bookmarks toolbar.

But those two complaints aside, the browser is blazing fast, especially with some Flash animations which used to bring my machine to a standstill. It's really a noticeable, positive difference.  I haven't used it long enough to get a sense of how stable it is, but so far, so good.

In case there is any confusion, allow me to underscore the point I was making in my post "The victory Barack Obama should declare tomorrow." As the title of the post implies, I believe Barack could make several different declarations of victory tomorrow. Here are three notable ones:

Oy vey...

As Ben Smith notes, Bill Clinton cited Rove's analysis yesterday, before it was reported anywhere else.

Welcome to Bizarro World: there's a growing consensus that Barack Obama should not declare victory tomorrow when he secures a majority of pledged delegates. The essential argument: if Obama says the contest is over, he will appear arrogant, and there will be a backlash from Clinton supporters.

With all due respect to Clinton supporters, they should not be the exclusive drivers of Obama's decision here, if for no other reason than the ones that will lead the backlash against him are already trying to undermine him and will never support him.

The thing that should drive Obama's decision with respect to a declaration of victory is simple: the state of the campaign. So let's review the facts.

1. Neither candidate actually becomes the nominee until August at the convention. Until that point, the question is whether one of the candidates emerges as the "presumptive" nominee.
2. The Democratic Party has no formal definition of presumptive nominee, and the very word itself denies finality; presumption expresses a probability.
3. Any reasonable observe would conclude that Barack Obama is already the presumptive nominee. (Since Edwards' endorsement, I have yet to hear any remotely plausible argument for how Clinton wins the nomination.)

So if Barack Obama is already the presumptive nominee (a fact which both Bush and McCain clearly understand), what is the debate about?

I think the answer is legitimacy. And that's why it's so important that Barack Obama declare a victory tomorrow.

After tomorrow, he can -- and I think he will -- say that that he has won the primaries and caucues. When he crosses the pledged delegate majority threshold, the voters will have spoken, and to let that moment pass without noting it would be an insult to the majority of Democratic voters who have chosen Barack Obama.

Given the interest in Geraldine Ferraro's threat that she might not vote for Obama (who she says is sexist) in the fall, I thought it might be useful to take another look at the data that I complied a few days back about race and gender in the primaries.

The following table is summary, showing the number (in millions) of votes for each candidate from voters who said that either race or gender was important in their decision making process.

As you can see, race was essentially a wash, but gender was a big net positive for Clinton.

Overall about one-fifth of Democratic primary voters said that race or gender was important to them.

In May of 2006, John McCain said former Sec'y of State James Baker was one of the "smartest" men he knew and that he was likely to ask Baker to serve as a diplomatic envoy to the Middle East. Speaking to an Israeli newspaper, McCain added "I know you in Israel don't like Baker."

Five months later, on October 6, Baker said "talking to an enemy is not, in my view, appeasement." It was the exact opposite of McCain's current dogma, yet within a matter of days, McCain had once again included Baker on the list of his potential Middle East envoys.

For the record, James Baker endorsed John McCain in February.

It's yet another striking example of the straight talk express is coming off the rails. The video is from an October, 2006 interview on Hannity & Colmes. Thanks to Carthage for the tip!

Update: Cognitorex (Craig Johnson) found this segment and posted it on TPM Cafe on May 18 (after having written about it in October of 2006).

It is going to be seriously hot in Vegas today.

If you're viewing this post from the home page, you need to click here to watch the video of Barack's full speech. Otherwise, it should start playing automatically.

I've also posted local Portland TV coverage of the rally (including KGW, which has the best report) and some cool aerial video shot from a helicopter, along with some good stage views.

I'm sure by the time I wake up a ton more stuff will have been posted -- I'll update in the late morning, Pacific time.

The best local coverage was on KGW, but it's not on YouTube, so I set up a special page if you'd like to see it. (I highly recommend it!)

I've now posted video of the full speech here, but these aerial helicopter and stage view shots from CNN are pretty cool. It's just a raw video feed, so the editing is a bit choppy, but you get a sense of just how massive -- and historic -- the event was.

And it's still May.

American Street has a couple other videos from the event.

So John McCain's lobbyist problem forces him to fire yet another top official on his campaign...and his response is to attack Barack Obama over Bill Ayers. In the words of McCain flack Tucker Bounds, Ayers is "an unrepentant domestic terrorist...if Barack Obama is going to make associations the issue, we look forward to the debate about Senator Obama's associations."

Ha! Talk about a non sequitur. These lobbyists were top officials on John McCain's campaign! We're not talking about flimsy associations (like G. Gordon Liddy, perhaps?).

There's no equivalence -- whatsoever. What a stupid argument to make.

Of course, what's really going on here is that the McCain campaign is doubling down on its only strategy for the fall elections: portraying Barack Obama as a radical terrorist sympathizer.

But if John McCain really wants to make being terrorist sympathizer a central plank of his campaign, it's about time he explained why he sided with pro-life extremists and opposed essential new legislation to protect women's reproductive health clinics across the nation from a wave of domestic terrorism.

75,000 people showed up to hear Barack Obama today in Portland, Oregon.

75,000.

That's more people than voted for Clinton in 14 states (including DC). It's as many as voted for her in her 8 worst states -- combined. At a rally!

Video Update: I've posted video of the full speech here. I've also posted local TV coverage here and some cool aerial footage from a helicopter here.

Update: The New York Times has some very cool pictures of the rally. Update 2: Al Rodgers has a beautiful diary of photos up at Daily Kos. And another: The Oregonian (thanks rosebud!).

A few more thoughts on Halperin's dissent from reality:

• The issue isn't whether Barack Obama actually becomes the nominee on Tuesday -- that can't happen until August, at the convention. The question is whether Barack can flatly state that he will win the nomination, without fear of contradiction.
• Now that Edwards has endorsed, Clinton's last hope (Michigan and Florida) is effectively off the table. Obama could fairly make the claim today that he will be the nominee.
• On Tuesday, when he secures the pledged delegate majority (even including Michigan and Florida) the math will be even more solid, and more importantly, the last major milestone will have been crossed -- one which undeclared superdelegates have already said will guide their votes.
• The pledged delegate majority isn't some arbitrary statistic invented by Barack Obama. It's a milestone that many superdelegates themselves say they recognize -- and it closes the final door to the Clinton candidacy, short of her concession or of the nominating convention itself.

Whatever Barack Obama says or doesn't say on Tuesday, there's one thing that even Mark Halperin won't be able to dispute: as of Tuesday, Barack will have won the primaries and caucuses, fair and square. And once that has happened, there's no way the superdelegates are going to turn things back.

If it's not over now, it will be then.

Kathleen Parker

Over at Too Sense, dnA takes on Kathleen Parker's incredibly divisive syndicated column published earlier this week. Here's a snippet from her screed:

WASHINGTON—"A full-blooded American." That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."

Whether Fry was referring to McCain's military service or Obama's Kenyan father isn't clear, but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race. ...It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Fry's political sense. ...Full-blooded Americans get this. Those who hope to lead the nation better get it soon.

Despite her attempt to focus on what she calls a "patriot divide," Parker's column is really about as open an embrace of white nationalism as you'll see in the mainstream media. Sadly, as dnA writes, she's a nationally syndicated columnist:

The fact that Parkers is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group shows how utterly mainstream nativist white thought is--you would never see Louis Farrakhan with a nationally syndicated column. Yet here is Parker, lauding the virtues of "full-blooded" Americans. ...

Steve Benen has already discussed this and pointed out that Obama's grandfather served in World War II but I want to further challenge the very premise that there is such a thing as a "full blooded American". What she means by this of course, is "white Americans". She makes this plain in that last paragraph.

I think dnA is right on this point. Some might object to characterizing Parker's column as white nationalism because she explicitly says that race is not the issue. The problem is that she turns right around and says the divide is between people who are "full-blooded Americans" and those who are not. And in her world view, only whites qualify as full-blooded.

As the campaign continues, we're going to see more of Kathleen Parker's brand of tribalism. The thing to remember is that dnA is right: there is no such thing as a "full-blooded American." There's only one kind of American, and we are all citizens of a nation founded upon a Constitution and governed by laws.

Halperin is worried about bias

Mark Halperin seems pretty upset by the New York Times' statement of the obvious: after Tuesday, it will be fair to say that Barack Obama will win the Democratic Party's nomination.

I don't know that it would be fair to call Halperin a Clinton loyalist, but I think his outrage is just a smidge over-the-top.

It's been quite some time since I've heard anyone outside of the immediate orbit of Camp Clinton make the case that at this point, she could possibly win the nomination, and on Tuesday it gets even harder. It's just a math problem.

To be fair to Halperin, the NYT article was short on specifics, but based on the paper's previous reporting, most of the undeclared superdelegates support the Pelosi standard. Given that Obama effectively needs just about one dozen superdelegates under the current rules (and 50 under the Florida rules), there's just no path to the nomination for Clinton.

Sure, Barack won't formally be the nominee until August. That's obvious -- that's why we're going to Denver. But it's equally obvious that he will be the nominee when the convention comes -- and that makes him the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

But if anyone wants to make an argument for how Clinton wins the nomination at this point, I'm ready to hear it.

Here's one issue that will sink McCain's prospects in Washington state and should put at least Missouri in play: his tireless work on behalf of Airbus in the European aerospace giant's bid for a $35 billion dollar defense contract for aerial refueling tankers. Airbus won the contract from Boeing, in large part because of subsidies from the French and German governments, costing jobs in Washington, Missouri, and Kansas, and sending most of them overseas.

The most galling thing about this is that several of McCain's top aides were paid lobbyists on the deal for Airbus. This is a perfect example of why the Democratic Party has such a big political advantage over the Republican Party in 2008: when they attack candidates who stand by Barack Obama, they use flimsy guilt-by-association attacks that don't even work in conservative districts in Mississippi. When we attack candidates who stand by John McCain, it's on real issues that have real impacts in people's lives.

From today's Times:

Senator Barack Obama has chosen to spend Tuesday night not in Kentucky or Oregon, the two states that will be holding their primaries that day, or even at his home in Chicago. Instead, Mr. Obama’s staff announced on Saturday, he will be returning to Iowa, where he won the Democratic caucuses way back in January and has at least two good reasons to revisit now.

Much more than nostalgia seems to have motivated that decision. If things continue to go as well for Mr. Obama this week as they have so far this month, with a romp in North Carolina, a strong showing in Indiana and daily growth in his support among party superdelegates, he could actually end up with enough pledged delegates to proclaim, without fear of contradiction, that he is now the Democratic nominee for president.

Not bad, coming form Hillary Clinton's home town newspaper.

(5:28AM: I updated this post with the paragraph about Iowa.)

If anyone still doesn't understand why Barack Obama is for all practical purposes the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, the explanation is right here in this chart: his delegate math is unbeatable.

The chart shows how many more superdelegate votes Barack needs to hit 2,025.5 total delegates by the time voting ends on June 3, based on very conservative projections for the remaining contests.

Given that Obama picked up more than 50 superdelegates in the first two and a half weeks of May, he's a stone-cold lock to be at 2,025.5 by June 3 -- and probably sooner.

But what about Florida and Michigan? Aren't they Clinton's nuclear option?

Saturday seemed to be a pretty slow news day, so I decided to finish up a facelift/redesign for the blog.

I had two goals. First, come up with a way to highlight some posts longer than others without interfering with the stream-of-consciousness of a blog. (That's what the left-hand sidebar is intended to accomplish.)

Second, I wanted some way to put up links to articles or blog posts that I thought were interesting or cool, but that I wasn't planning on blogging about. (That's the "stuff I should have blogged" sections on the right-hand sidebar.)

I also of course want to keep the blog easy to read and navigate. Please feel free to give me feedback on the new look -- I'd love to hear any ideas you have, good, bad, or indifferent!

• Maryland DNC member Greg Pecoraro endorsed Obama
• Kansas Dems named Obama-supporter Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson as an add-on
• BHO supporters outnumbered HRC supporters at the Nevada convention in Reno, picking up an extra pledged delegate (and I would guess making it even more likely the add-on will be for Obama)
• Here's one with a question mark: I've seen Yvonne Atkinson Gates listed as undeclared, but in this AP article yesterday, she's listed as an Obama supporter.

So for the day that would be +3 for sure, with an additional 2 possible (the Nevada add-on and Yvonne Gates).

As you can see from the chart in the sidebar, assuming he splits the add-on superdelegates, Obama already has enough delegates locked down to clinch the nomination at 2,025.

There's something anti-climactic about the delegate math at this point, however; everybody, including the the Clinton campaign, knows its pretty much over. Right now we're in the transition phase to having a nominee.

My best guess (and it's purely a guess) is that once Michigan and Florida are resolved, giving Clinton a symbolic victory, she'll concede the nomination and endorse Barack.

• On Tuesday night, Barack Obama will be in Iowa, a state he hopes to turn from red to blue. His message: this is the general election. He might not "declare victory" as such, but he will secure the pledged delegate majority (whether or not Michigan and Florida are counted). I suspect he will at least present himself as the "presumptive presumptive nominee" and given the widespread acceptance that he is already the de facto nominee, the May 20 victory storyline may no longer be as urgent.
• Clinton says she leads the popular vote, which is wrong, but it was in response to a voter's question, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
• The Las Vegas Gleaner continues its humiliation of my governor (Pervus A. McSkanktard, aka Jim Gibbons) and the idiots who support him.
• What went wrong with Hillary's campaign, in their own words.
• An unfair shot at Ron Paul -- I am not a Paultard, but the reason he opposed the Burma resolution is the same reason he opposes all resolutions condemning foreign governments. He believes in non-internvention, unless the U.S. itself is threatened.
• Embittered Republicans desperately clinging to a failed political strategy. (And part 2.)
• Embittered Bush desperately clinging to John McCain.
• Jonathan Chait catches McCain inventing words from Obama. (Reminds me of Gore and the Internet.)

Stuff I did blog, but you might have missed:

• Iraq is the central battleground in the war on terror, and John McCain takes Osama bin Laden's word for it.
• John McCain's 2013 gambit raises a new question: if elected, will he run for a second term?
• Buchanan's paranoid racial fears are wrong: exit polls show Obama's race was not a net positive in the primaries.

Who would have figured it...Mac Daddy McCain likes to throw the bones (from a May, 2005 profile of John McCain in The New Yorker by Connie Bruck):

McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight. “Craps is addictive,” McCain remarked, and he headed for the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet tables.

Fifteen dollars might not seem like a lot, but most serious players place odds bets and take advantage of other wagering opportunities, easily placing hundreds of dollars on the table per roll.

Here's a camera phone picture of John McCain (or someone who looks exactly like him) throwing dice in Las Vegas. Even though the site I found it on says it was taken at Mirage, I'm pretty sure McCain is actually at Bellagio in the dice pit closest to the main tower elevators. (I think that's the Fontana Lounge in the upper right hand corner of the picture, and it is apparently daytime.)

I think the picture is from summer 2006

A Las Vegan, I'm glad that he likes to play -- I don't think there's anything wrong with it at all. I do wonder what his "traditional values" political base would think, though. Maybe he and Bill Bennett went on junkets together?

Here's the full excerpt of the story about McCain playing craps from The New Yorker.

How dare CNN suggest that people in China are clinging to hope? Time to reject and denounce!

Even though you've almost certainly already seen the bonus clip that starts this video, you probably haven't seen it in a while -- I know that I hadn't until SeattleAJ reminded me about it earlier in the evening.

Simply put: Worst. President. Ever.

I'm disturbed by the amount of chatter about Mike Huckabee's bad joke yesterday at the NRA meeting. I'm not saying this in defense of Huckabee; he screwed up and I'm sure he knew it as soon as he said it. My concern is that if we make too big a deal of it, we end up amplifying the idea behind the joke, and that can be dangerous. Perhaps I'm just superstitious, but I think this is one of those cases where less is more.

So I'm reading an article on Salon by Paul Maslin about Barack Obama's electoral map and he offers this overview of my home state:

Nevada -- 5 votes -- I suppose the Silver State should not be compared to anything, so unique is its economy and social structure. Democrats have done relatively well here the last four elections, winning narrowly in 1992 and 1996 and falling just short in 2004. Obama has a wellspring of younger, unaffiliated voters to draw upon, but McCain does enjoy a closer proximity and shared desert identity. This one should go down to the wire.

Basically, it's a punt. No problem -- everybody does it. His description of McCain's proximity to Nevada amused me though -- I hadn't even consciously realized that I'm about an hour or so away from Arizona as I write this. I really don't think it'll make much difference though in November, win or lose.

The thing that it really brought to mind though is a profile I once of someone (I think it was David Boies, Al Gore's recount lawyer) who frequently vacationed in Vegas in order to hit the craps tables. Boies or whoever it was frequently went with McCain. Again, this is all a very foggy memory, and I couldn't find the article in a quick Google search, but I'm going to keep on looking -- not as an attack or anything, but just because I'm curious. Ring any bells for you?

From CNN earlier today, Edwards interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. I'm biased, but he's a damn good surrogate. I think probably he and Claire McCaskill are now the top two.

I know he says that he has ruled out the VP spot, but what I'd tell him is this: it ain't your choice -- and if you get asked, you'd better say yes.

McCain on Hamas (2006) and on smearing Obama (2008)

My initial assessment of the McCain campaign's response to Jamie Rubin's op-ed was a bit too sympathetic. In my defense, it was a reflexive sympathy after seeing new video that added context to his answer, but now that I've had some time review all the video, it's seems to me that rather than supporting the McCain campaign's defense, it actually undermines their case.

While it's true that McCain did make some tough remarks about Hamas (notably to CNN), he also embraced talks without setting conditions. He's flip-flopped between then and now, but he also flip-flopped back then -- telling three different stories in two different interviews on the same day.

Apparently, there was a second question that didn't make its way into the HuffPo clip that I posted earlier this morning and it adds important context. Here's a transcript, including a portion of the first answer:

MCCAIN: They're the government and sooner or later we're going to have to deal with them. ... It's a new reality in the Middle East and I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, then they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.

RUBIN: So should we, the United States, be dealing with that new reality through normal diplomatic contacts to get the job done for the United States?

MCCAIN: I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see other ways we can engage with them, and if there aren't any, there may be a hiatus, but I think part of the relationship is going to be dictated by how Hamas acts, not how the United States acts.

Perhaps I'm being too kind, but I think this walks back the allegation against McCain rather significantly. His message to Sky News was still far more nuanced than his message to CNN, but neither was it a clear embrace of relations without conditions.

YouTube can cut both ways, it would seem, and this time it may have helped McCain.

That being said, there is still no justification for John McCain's unpresidential attacks on Obama.

Update: I just watched the clip again and wonder if I'm being too easy on McCain. The thing that really strikes me is that his answer to the first question is just so different than his answer to the follow-up, which is different to his CNN interview on the same day. It's almost like he couldn't keep his story straight in the space of a two minute interview. Certainly, if a Democratic candidate ever said something like this, he or she would not be treated nearly as charitably as I did in my initial writeup.

At HuffPo, Max Bergman finds a 2003 transcript in which John McCain endorses direct negotiations with Syria even though in his own words they were "sponsoring and harboring terrorists."

McCAIN: I think it's very appropriate that Colin Powell is going to Syria. I think we should put diplomatic and other pressures on them. It's also a time for Mr. Asad Bashar to realize that he should be more like his father was. I think he's too heavily influenced by a lot of the radical Islamic elements and--and militant groups.

LAUER: Do you think Syria meets the criteria set forth by the president in his post-9/11 address to Congress that they pose an imminent threat to the US in that they are either sponsoring or harboring terrorists?

McCAIN: I think they're--they're sponsoring and harboring terrorists.

(H/t to Jonathan Martin, along with a reminder that Drudge does for the GOP what HuffPo does for the Dems.)

Earlier this morning I predicted:

Prediction before the day is out...some Bush-McCain hack will attack Obama for criticizing the President while he is overseas!

I was just kidding, but one of Ambinder's "well-connected Republican readers" actually went there:

He could have publicly declined to comment on the President's comments citing the long standing custom of not criticizing a sitting president while abroad. ... I thought he was supposed to be a new kind of politician, but he played right into the hands of McCain. Somewhere McCain is smiling about all the Jewish votes he just secured in Florida.

I'm Jewish, and the Jewish Americans that I know were offended that Bush used the Israeli Knesset as a  prop for a domestic political attack. Israel is an important issue for McCain -- but for Republicans, Israel has more to do with John Hagee and Christian Zionism than their concern for Jewish Americans.

I especially resent the fact Jewish Americans are constantly used by the Republican Party to justify their policies in the Middle East, which have more to do with energy policy and satisfying the evangelical right than any particular concern for Jews. They are aware as anybody of the fact that along with African Americans, Jews are just about the most loyal Democratic ethnic/religious group.

I don't think Bush's offensive remarks yesterday will do anything to change that.

So the McCain campaign is responding to the Jamie Rubin interview by pointing to another interview on the same day in which he had a very different attitude towards Hamas.

I guess this means that his campaign's defense is that he can't keep his story straight?

Bush's decision to elevate Barack Obama to the presidential level was a huge mistake -- and Barack is taking advantage.

Here he is in Watertown, SD taking on Bush-McCain. It's a fun speech -- like watching him in the gas tax debate, except about an issue that really matters.

Some of the best lines:

• "The president did something that presidents don't do ... and that is launch a political attack targeted to the domestic market" while speaking to a foreign audience.
• "That's exactly the kind of appalling attack that has divided our country and has alienated the world. ... McCain embraced Bush's attack"
• "If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America that's a debate that I will have at any time in any place -- and that is a debate I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for."
• "They have to explain why we are now in our sixth year in Iraq."
• They've got to explain why Osama bin Laden is still at large. They have to explain why Iran and Hamas are now both stronger than ever. That's the Bush-McCain record.
• "John McCain still has not spelled out one substantial way that he'd be different than George Bush when it comes to foreign policy."
• "John McCain has nothing to offer but the naive and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington" alone will achieve our global objectives.

Prediction before the day is out...some Bush-McCain hack will attack Obama for criticizing the President while he is overseas!

Bumped at 10:55 (originally posted at 9:20 w/o video).

George Bush must really hate John McCain. How else can you explain his decision to insert himself so clumsily into the presidential campaign?

At a time when John McCain needs a divorce from President Bush in the worst way possible, Bush hugged McCain even closer. And, remarkably, McCain returned the embrace.

That's Bush-McCain unity.

And you better believe it'll help bring together not just the Democratic Party, but everyone who wants to see America change direction.

So thanks, President Bush. You've finally done something useful.

This is as fired up as I've seen Barack in a long time (except for the weekend of Annie Oakley). It reminds me of his speech in Wisconsin after the Potomac primary.

I've got a feeling we'll be seeing more of this from him as we begin the transition into the general election.

(Speaking of the general election, here's how the Edwards endorsement effectively shatters Clinton's dream scenario about Michigan and Florida.)

Shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections two years ago, John McCain told a British news program that the U.S. should recognize Hamas as a legitimate governing authority:

They're the government and sooner or later we're going to have to deal with them. ... It's a new reality in the Middle East and I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, then they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.

Today, barely two years after embracing an open attitude towards Hamas, John McCain says that he will be their "worst nightmare." McCain's reversal would have been stunning on its own, but the reason for his hypocrisy is truly appalling: McCain flip-flopped on Hamas to smear Barack Obama.

McCain made his comments in Davos, Switzerland during an interview conducted by James Rubin for Sky News TV. Rubin, who wrote an op-ed about the interview in today's Washington Post, is a Clinton supporter, and deserves all the credit in the world for stepping up when he didn't have to. His article offered a full and unambiguous defense of Barack Obama, and more importantly, I suspect he had something to do with the Huffington Post getting its hands on the video from Sky News TV.

During his paranoid racial meltdown yesterday, Pat Buchanan said that Barack Obama would never have won the Democratic nomination were it not for his race. Buchanan complained that Geraldine Ferraro had been criticized for making the same point, which he called "the truth."

But the real truth is that Pat Buchanan is completely wrong: among voters who said race was an important factor in deciding their vote, Hillary Clinton has won more votes than Barack Obama.

We know this from exit poll surveys in which Democratic primary voters were asked whether race was an important factors in deciding their votes. (The surveys cover 27 states with about 30 million voters.)

I plugged all the numbers into a spreadsheet this evening and here's what I found:

• 19% (5.4 million) of Democratic primary voters said race was an important factor in their decision.
• Of these voters, 50% (2.7 million) voted for Hillary Clinton.
• 48% (2.6 million) voted for Barack Obama.
• Among voters who said race was important in the decision, Clinton won roughly 100,000 more votes than Obama.

Existenz makes an excellent catch: today, John McCain said Ronald Reagan refusal to negotiate with Iran for the release of American hostages exemplified his philosophy of "peace through strength."

Um...what about Iran-Contra and the arms-for-hostages scandal? Here's video:

For more details, check out Existenz's post.

Update: Just to be clear, McCain's specific reference is to the first hostage crisis and Iran-Contra deals with a subsequent one. His larger point -- that Reagan refused to negotiate, in the process strengthening American security -- was manifestly false.

McCain celebrates his 69th birthday with Pres. Bush on Aug. 29, 2005 as Katrina flooded New Orleans

John McCain's declaration that he hopes the U.S. will be mostly out of Iraq by 2013 is a clear attempt to begin fixing the damage done by his one hundred years gaffe. The problem is that it doesn't really clear up the underlying issue. If he had stated a goal of being completely out of Iraq by 2013 (other than embassy officials and the like), he would have settled it. Instead, the only thing that is really new here is that McCain is setting a timetable for ending our "combat role" in Iraq -- he still fails to say how long our "military presence" (his words) will last.

But the real question McCain's 2013 gambit raises is whether or not he plans to run for re-election.

It's critical to know the answer to this because if he does not plan to run for re-election, how will we be able to hold him accountable? If he only plans a one-term presidency, then he will be an instant lame duck -- and will have no political incentive to keep his promises.

There's plenty of reasons to suspect he does not plan on running for a second term. First, if re-elected, he would turn 77 in the first year of his second term. It's true that his mother is doing wonderful at age 96, but his father passed away at the age of 70. He's a cancer survivor, and claims to be in good health, but hasn't released his medical records yet, and when he does, he only plans to release portions of them.

It's a touchy subject, but it is a very important one, and the American public deserves to know his answer.

A classic moment in the history of schadenfreude (things really get going at about 4:10):

For several weeks now, Hillary Clinton's only conceivable path to the nomination involved securing a favorable deal for seating the Michigan and Florida delegations. Now that John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama, however, even that path has disappeared.

To understand why it has disappeared, let's take a step backward and review the situation. Clinton's goal is to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations according to the January primaries, with each delegate counting as one vote. If that happens, the biggest question will be what to do with the 55 uncommitted Michigan delegates.

On election day, 40% of Michigan voters chose uncommitted. Of those, 77% favored Obama and 19% favored Edwards. Since virtually all uncommitted voters were either Obama or Edwards supporters, now that Edwards has endorsed Obama, there's really no fair argument to deny Obama those 55 delegates.

Chuck Todd and the MSNBC political team catch another important ramification of the Edwards endorsement: on Tuesday, when Barack passes 1,627 pledged delegates, securing a majority, he will also win enough delegates to secure a majority of even if Michigan and Florida.

Here's their math, including the Edwards delegates:

• Including Michigan and Florida, the pledged delegate majority is 1,784
• They estimate Obama will have at least 1,667 pledged delegates after voting ends on Tuesday (it will probably be higher).
• Under the most Clinton-friendly scenario, Obama will get 67 delegates out of Florida and 55 delegates out of Michigan for a total of 122.
• 1,667 + 122 = 1,789 -- which would put him just over the top.

Making the argument even stronger, they didn't add in the 13 pledged delegates that Edwards would get out of Florida in any deal -- giving Obama at least 1,802 delegates by Tuesday night.

Moreover, their scenario is conservative in other ways: it's unlikely that the final Florida/Michigan deal will be this friendly to Clinton; it's unlikely that Obama only picks up 50 delegates on Tuesday; and MSNBC's baseline pledged delegate count currently gives Obama slightly fewer pledged delegates than do other counts.

I'm just catching up on goings on (I wrote the two earlier posts last night).

• "President" Bush sinks to a new low -- attacking Barack Obama while on foreign soil.
  • McCain supports Bush's attack.
• Obama has picked up 4 superdelegates so far today and 6 more of the Edwards delegates.
• John McCain is running an ad called 2013 and suggesting he wants to be mostly out of Iraq by then. Three thoughts:
  • Politically, McCain is once again struggling with his one-hundred years gaffe -- hoping to use the 2013 date as a way of blunting the use of that gaffe.
  • McCain is also subtly suggesting he'd just be a one-term president if elected. (If that's true, the question is why doesn't he think he'd be able to run for re-election in four years?)
  • Does this suggest McCain is about to flip-flop on the Iraq war? Straight-talk much?
• McCain's wife sells $2 million of her investments in Sudan.
• Obama wearing the flag pin more often. (Good idea -- symbols matter.)
• California court ruling sets stage for gay marriage. (Another example of why so many good things can happen in 2008.)
• Andrew Sullivan isn't excited by an Obama-Edwards ticket (which if you think in Yglesias Award terms, might actually be an argument for it)

Finally, a commenter (Praxxus) comes up with a name for that new GOP attack ad: "Applause-Gate"

So Pastor John Hagee, the nutty religious figure whose endorsement helped John McCain nail down the GOP nomination, has now apologized for his anti-Catholic comments. Reading between the lines, it seems Hagee apologized in order to inoculate John McCain from blowback against his campaign's smear tactics against Barack Obama.

As the McCain camp steps up their dishonest campaign, keep these two points in mind:

1. The only relevant issue is what Barack Obama believes. If we're debating what someone else believes, then it's not about Barack Obama. (For more, read Andrew Sullivan's March 16 post.)
2. George Bush is the reason why John McCain wants a personality-driven campaign. John McCain is directly responsible for enabling many of the worst policies of the Bush Administration, most importantly the war in Iraq. If the election is a referendum on John McCain's political alliance with George Bush, he cannot win.

The temptation will be strong to fire back with Hagee or some other nutjob when McCain's campaign launches a dishonest smear. At times, that will be appropriate.

But we should always remember: as long as we keep George W. Bush's presidency at the center of this campaign, there's just about no way Barack Obama can lose. After all, they don't call Bush Mr. 28% for nothing.

Oh noes! Barack was using some humor to make a point...and it turns out he fibbed!

So here's the deal...he told this crowd in Indiana that he once gave a speech where nobody clapped...but the truth is...he received a standing ovation at the end of his speech!

Personally, I think this will absolutely 100%might be the end of his campaign...what do we do now?

(In all seriousness, if this is the best they can come up with...November will be easy!)

I posted this chart yesterday, but it's worth another look. Despite the feverish intensity of this campaign, despite the endless hours, turned into days, turned into weeks that we've spent analyzing every nuance of it...nothing has changed in four months.

The campaign is over. On Tuesday, Barack Obama will reach the most important milestone so far in the campaign, 1,627 pledged delegates. That won't make him the official nominee -- that can't happen until the convention in August -- but it will be the most concrete sign yet that Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

This Nov. 2007 exchange between John Edwards and NBC's Brian Williams is priceless:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Senator Clinton yesterday told an interviewer that she was certain she would be the nominee.

JOHN EDWARDS (Laughs): If she's certain, she's living in a fantasy world. I've been through this before in 2004. Governor Dean looked like he had an absolute lock on the nomination, and he didn't win a single primary or a single caucus. I would say don't count your chickens before they hatch.

David Shuster included the clip in this report showing how Edwards played the role of attack dog against Hillary Clinton in the early stages of the nomination battle:

Obviously, I'm biased here, but when I see the case being made for Obama choosing Edwards as his veep, I get pretty fired up. I think they looked like a great team yesterday, and I hope it happens.

Yesterday, Chuck Todd -- before news of the Edwards endorsement -- assessed the impact of Edwards' exit from the race and concluded:

Edwards ended up greatly helping Obama, by deciding to stay in the race after New Hampshire and then exit it before Super Tuesday

Avi ZenilmanBen Smith and Democratic Convention Watch take a look at what happens with the Edwards delegates.

The short version is that 16 Edwards delegates have already been named. He's slated to get another 3 in Iowa, but now that he has officially ended his campaign, Edwards' Iowa co-chair is urging that state convention delegates there support Obama, so it's possible that Obama will pick up those 3 instead of Edwards.

Technically, the 16 pledged Edwards delegates are now free agents, effectively superdelegates. (The total could go up to 19 depending on what happens in Iowa.) Since the pledged were selected by the Edwards campaign, and the Edwards campaign apparatus is urging its delegates to unify behind Barack Obama, I suspect they will mostly be loyal, but there's no absolute guarantees.

Olbermann was at his finest this evening, delivering a devastating Special Comment on George W. Bush.

The only way the Bush Presidency could have been worse is if the American public hadn't recognized what a disaster it has been for our country and the world. Thankfully, they have, and that gives me hope that we can turn things around starting next January when Bush finally leaves office.

It's just incredible that MSNBC still puts Pat Buchanan on the air. About an hour ago on Hardball he said:

What were the African-American community in Philadelphia that gave him 90% voting on if not the fact that Barack Obama was one of them. West Virginia, Hillary, was one of us. That's the same thing. But West Virginia gets trashed, and Philadelphia is wonderful.

And:

If Barack Obama were not an African American he would have been beaten by John Edwards. He would not be the nominee. It is far more of a positive for him, not only in the African-American community, but with the Chris Matthews' of the world and in the liberal suburbs far more than it is a negative.

Update: View the full ten-minute segment here.

As a reminder, about two months ago, Buchanan wrote this on his blog:

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

When is MSNBC going to fire this guy? It's long overdue.

He's having a racial paranoia meltdown on MSNBC right now. I'm going to post it it on YouTube soon.

In meantime, I'll leave you with these words written by Buchanan in March:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Here's Colbert's parody:

• ABC News | WSJ | AP
• Interesting note: MSNBC just noted that yesterday, Edwards won 7% of the vote in West Virginia. There's still a lot of people out there who really like John Edwards (including me).
• Last Friday, Poblano (aka Nostradamus) predicted the Edwards endorsement would happen this week
• John Edwards is not a superdelegate, but he does have 19 pledged delegates.

On CNN, Hillary Clinton offers an unambiguous defense of Barack Obama from McCain's Hamas attack, and -- remarkably -- admits her "white Americans" comment was probably the stupidest thing she could have said.

Update: To be clear, even if this change in tone is real, I'm with RenaRF: I won't do it either.

Update 2: At MyDD, Todd Beeton welcomes Clinton's conciliatory tone, saying "I'm glad to see this shift...I can only hope that now her most ardent supporters will follow her lead."

John Edwards' silence (until last week) since he suspended his campaign in late January has been frustrating, even for former supporters like me. In a strange way though, it may turn out that by haivng sat on the sidelines -- and even by having hinted that he might prefer Hillary Clinton, or at least her health care plan -- Edwards may have upped the impact of an endorsement of Obama, should he make it soon. (Perhaps today?)

Throughout the campaign itself, John Edwards was clearly aligned with Barack Obama in the sense that they were the two leading candidates for change. Don't get me wrong, they were rivals -- in Iowa, Obama skillfully blunted Edwards late surge by focusing on the outside groups (527s) spending on his behalf, and Edwards criticized Obama for not being (in his view) combative enough.

Still, on balance, it seemed pretty clear to me that Edwards preferred Obama to Clinton.

But the real question is, when Edwards quit the race, did it help Obama or Clinton more? In late January, before he exited, Poblano looked at the demographics and projected that an Edwards withdrawal would boost Obama by about 2-4 points nationally.

Presenting the return of Hillary Clinton's Bosnia and Back Again -- I guarantee you'll enjoy it, or your money back:

It's been about a month since I posted it to YouTube, and somehow today seems like a good day to watch it again. I still love Andrew Sullivan's description: No one left to lie to.

In her explanation of the endorsement, Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, praises Barack Obama's strong record on choice, adding:

Further, I believe Sen. Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. He leads in pledged delegates, superdelegates, the popular vote, and cash-on-hand. As a former elected official, I know that having the three "m's" of a campaign - money, message and manpower (or womanpower!) - are how we win elections. Sen. Obama will be our next president.

You might remember that in New Hampshire, Clinton sent out a deceptive mailer questioning Barack's commitment to reproductive freedom. Some credited that mailer with her strong performance with Granite State women on election day.

With all the attention to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, it's easy to forget that by February 19, we'd already selected 70% of the pledged delegates heading to Denver, and Barack Obama had already built a nearly unbeatable lead. After yesterday's primary, we've now selected 94% of the delegates, and even though Barack Obama has just endured the toughest stretch of the campaign so far, he's only yielded 6 delegates from his lead.

So as far as delegate math, nothing much changed since February. But what about intangibles, like trends in national support for the Democratic nomination? Here's data from 187 different polls, averaged by month:

You can see the meteoric rise of Barack Obama from November to February, and his steady climb since then. Clinton, on the other hand, has hovered between 42% and 44%.

And most importantly, Barack Obama has led Hillary Clinton since February.

Contests won with 65% or more

In part because of the 9:1 delegate disparity in his blowout wins compared to Clinton's, Obama didn't need a win in West Virginia -- like John McCain, he just needed to pick up a few delegates and move on.

Well, even if he only ended up accomplishing the bare minimum, he did what he had to.

And now it's on to Oregon and the final stages of the campaign.

(h/t to kubla000 whose Daily Kos diary inspired this post.)

In other news: Obama picked up another superdelegate tonight, Awais Khaleel of the College Democrats of America. (A second superdelegate, Lauren Wolfe, also endorsed Obama, but she won't have a vote unless the Michigan delegation is seated.)

Even more news (3:57AM update): Another two superdelegates endorse Obama, Indiana Rep. Pete Viclosky, and Democrats Abroad Chair Christine Schone Marques (who will get 1/2 a vote).

Travis Childers' victory is the huge silver-lining for the night, but as Independent Don suggested to me earlier in the evening, it's worth keep our eyes on the vote totals in West Virginia.

At this moment, despite losing West Virginia in a rout, it looks like Barack Obama may end up with more votes than John McCain. Here are the latest numbers with 99% of precincts reporting:

• Barack Obama: 91,652 votes
• John McCain: 89,683 votes

Who knows if Barack can hang onto his lead, but with 99% reporting, it looks pretty good. It would pretty hilarious if even after suffering his worst primary performance of the entire campaign, Barack Obama still ended up with more votes than his general election opponent.

Update: However these numbers end up, I congratulate Hillary Clinton's supporters for their huge victory tonight. I might not approve of her campaign, but I do respect her grassroots supporters, and I think we are all looking forward to the day when the party is unified again and we are working together to defeat John McCain. The results tonight in West Virginia and Mississippi indicate just how well-positioned the Democratic Party is for a huge victory in November.

I'm shocked (in a good way!) -- Democratic Congressional candidate Travis Childers has defeated his Republican opponent in Mississippi, winning a solid 8 point victory.

For Barack Obama, Mississippi contest is far more significant than the Democratic primary in West Virginia. The Childers-Davis campaign was the third Congressional race so far this year in which Barack Obama was a central issue, and it was the first in which Republicans used the association between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright to attack a Democratic candidate.

The fact that the Republican attack on Obama and Childers campaign failed in a conservative, formerly Republican district (Bush won 62% of the vote there in 2004) pretty much conclusively debunks the idea that Barack Obama will be a drag on Democrats in conservative strongholds, particularly in the south. (Edit: In more blunt terms, what I'm saying is that tonight's results should satisfy concerns that downballot Democrats could be damaged by racist campaigns in similar districts.)

Meanwhile, Obama was featured prominently in positive advertisements in Bill Foster's victory in Dennis Hastert's old Congressional seat earlier this year. So it's not just that Obama isn't a negative -- in many Republican leaning districts, he is a big political plus.

Tim Russert earlier tonight:

The Clintons are over $20 million in debt in their campaign, half of which is out of their own personal finances. If that money is not repayed to them by August -- the convention -- they lose it. They can't get it back. They can't raise it other ways. They sacrifice all but $250,000 of it. So it's a big hit. I talked to someone very close to the Clintons today and he said, "well, you know if they have to put a couple more million dollars in the race if they think they want to go forward, they will, because to them $10-$15 million invested in the campaign, they can get it back with book deals and speeches and so forth."

Barack Obama and Claire McCaskill in Cape Girardeau, MO earlier today

Leaving aside the spin, the most important thing that happened tonight with respect to the mechanics of the Democratic nomination process is that Barack Obama picked up another 9 (+/- 1) delegates.

As you can see from the countdown numbers in the sidebar, after projecting out the remaining contests and the 49 uncommitted and unselected add-on delegates, Barack Obama needs just 14 more delegates to hit the 2,025 number by the time the last add-on delegate is selected in the middle of June.

He'll hit 2,025 before then, but as you can see from these numbers, Obama is in a race against the finish line. There's just no chance that Hillary Clinton will get 93% of the available delegates.

It was an insta-call for Clinton tonight in West Virginia -- 2:1, at least, according to MSNBC. Roughly a 10 delegate swing to Clinton.

• TPM makes a great catch -- in The Hill's roll call of Senatorial interest in the VP slot, three Republicans said no, citing age. All were Republicans, and one was younger than McCain.
• MSNBC has exit poll data up for West Virginia, but the early results seem funky. Since they update the exit polls as actual results come in, I'd wait to make any projections based on them.
• ABC needs to improve the quality of its political reporting.
• Josh Gerstein takes a look at the lobbyists surrounding John McCain and the foreign interests they represent.
• The AP reports that John McCain faces "Boeing Blowback" for helping Airbus beat out Boeing for a $35 billion defense contract.
• My former governor (who, unlike my current guv, is one of the nation's finest) explains why McCain was wrong to support Airbus and oppose Boeing.

Keith Olbermann just asked a funny question, given the the nature of the delegate math. "What are we all (the pundits) still doing here?"

It's been a wild two months -- yet since the end of February, the race has been fundamentally unchanged.  Here's a flashback to March:

The similarities are eerie, eh?

From the Obama campaign memo on WV and the state of the campaign:

MYTH 1: The Primary has left Democrats divided.
FACT: Democrats are united behind Barack Obama, even more so than Republicans are united behind McCain

• May 12 Washington Post poll shows that Obama wins 81% of Democrats in a matchup against John McCain.
• Indeed, more Republicans crossover to vote for Obama (15%) than do Democrats for McCain (13%).
  • NOTE: In 1996, Bill Clinton won 84% of Democrats.

MYTH 2: The Primary campaign has hurt Obama with swing voters and Republicans:
FACT: Obama is winning the swing voters against McCain by a wide margin.

• Obama holds a 51-42 lead among Independents in the Washington Post poll.
  • NOTE: Clinton loses 46-49 to McCain among Independents.
• Not since 1988, when George Bush beat Michael Dukakis 57-43 among Independents, has a candidate won such a large margin among swing voters.
  • In his two victories, Clinton only managed a 6-point margin over the Republican among independents in 1992 and an 8-point margin in 1996.
  • Indeed, no Democrat has won a majority of Independent voters since exit polls were first conducted in 1976.  

This is pretty big news, and I think I'm justified in breaking the embargo. Hope you agree. (And hopefully the Obama campaign will understand.)

::

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, Tuesday, May 13, 2008. Embargoed until 10PM Eastern.

Yeah, it's snark. ;)

(APPLAUSE) Thank you. We began this campaign sixteen months ago on a cold day in Springfield, Illinois. Now, more than thirty million votes later, we've built a grassroots political organization, fueled by volunteers and donations from millions of Americans. After forty-eight contests, we've won 32 primaries and caucuses to Senator Clinton's 17. We've earned over sixteen million votes -- more than anyone else -- and we've won over 1,600 pledged delegates to Clinton's 1,444.

If we continued this campaign, we'd be on pace to secure a majority of pledged delegates by May 20. Recently, we overtook Senator Clinton's lead among the superdelegates, the insiders who can -- if they choose -- overturn the will of the people. After tonight, we'd need just 145 more delegates to claim victory, less than half the number needed by Clinton.

But tonight, the people of West Virginia have spoken, and I must accept their verdict, which is that Hillary Clinton should be the next presidential nominee of the Democratic party.

I understand the historical legacy that has led to tonight's results, but I have no hard feelings. Change is not easy -- I've always understood that.

And despite efforts by other campaigns and some in the media to goad me into labeling the people of West Virginia as this or that, I understand that doing so would be divisive, counter-productive, and bad for our country. In short, it would be unpresidential.

But none of that matters now. What's important is that another 0.7% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention have been selected, and most of them will be supporting Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, in turn, has argued that those delegates are worth more than others. There is no easy response to such a compelling argument.

Consequently, I am announcing that effective immediately, I am suspending my presidential campaign.

If you haven't already had a chance to read it, you'll enjoy Jeffrey Goldberg's refutation of the lie spread by John Boehner and others that Barack Obama called Israel a "constant sore." (Obama was actually referring to our inability to resolve conflict in the Middle East.) Here's a snippet:

I have no doubt that Mr. Boehner will issue a correction to his press release in which he states the obvious, which is that Obama expressed -- in twelve different ways -- his support for Israel to me.

If he doesn't, however, I would, sadly, have to agree with my colleague, the less-forgiving Andrew Sullivan, who called Boehner's statement a "flat-out lie." In fact, I would add to Andrew's post, by calling Boehner's statement mendacious, duplicitous, gross, and comically refutable. So Mr. Boehner, do the right thing, and correct the record. I'll be happy to post the correction right here.

Episodes like this one are a good reminder that if you think we've seen a lot of lying so far in the campaign, it's time to buckle up. Some of these right-wing hatchet men are going to make Hillary Clinton look like Mother Theresa by comparison. And so far, unfortunately, John McCain seems quite comfortable playing their game.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D-OR), a Clinton endorser and superdelegate,
at McCain campaign event on Monday (AP Photo/Greg Wahl-Stephens)

I'm still mystified by the decision of Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski to attend a John McCain campaign event yesterday in Portland.

The entire message of the event was that John McCain is not George Bush, and having the Clinton-supporting Democratic Governor of Oregon at his side was quite valuable in making that point.

I just don't understand why Kulongoski would decide to help McCain in this way, especially eight days before the primary -- which Barack Obama is expected to win.

Making things more confusing, at the same time as Kulongoski was standing next to John McCain, Bill Clinton was also in the state campaigning for Hillary.

If I were in Kulongoski's shoes and decided to attend a campaign event, I'd have been with Bill.

But Kulongoski chose McCain. Strange.

Jeff Mapes, a reporter for The Oregonion, called it "a curious episode." Mapes reported that the governor's spokeswoman denied his appearance was political and said that he would support Obama if Obama won the nomination. Mapes also noted that McCain and Kulongoski met privately after the event, but had no information on what was said, though he surmised it was "congenial."

DCW has a nice write-up of the days super events:

• Former DNC Chair Roy Romer, who says the race is over.
• New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
• Indiana Congressman Joe Donnelly

Add these to Anita Bonds, and the tally is 4-0 (plus that pledged delegate switch of Jack Johnson). And James Carville is musing about the race coming to an end.

First, some good news. Two more superdelegates, and one of them is a switch:

• Anita Bonds, an undecided superdelegate from DC where she is Chair of the Democratic Committee, joins the Obama bandwagon.
• Prince George's (Maryland) County Executive Jack Johnson switches back to Obama from Clinton, who he had supported since February.
  • Update: Johnson is actually a pledged delegate. Although his vote has the same weight as a superdelegate, I don't think the Obama game plan involves pursuing any pledged delegates other than the ones pledged to Edwards.

A new poll from ABC News:

• Obama leads Clinton 53%-41%
• Obama leads McCain 51%-44% and Clinton leads McCain 49-46%
• Clinton does slightly better with Democrats than Obama (85%-10% compared to 81%-13%), but Obama does much better with Independents (51%-42% compared with 46%-49%) and also better with Republicans (15%-83% compared with 10%-87%).

Closer to home:

• My governor (Republican Jim Gibbons, embroiled in a nasty divorce) has filed papers to evict his wife from the governor's mansion. (You can usually find some funny commentary on the divorce at the the Las Vegas Gleaner.)

And finally something that's just interesting:

• A series of maps on American Ethnic Geography, including religion, language, politics, and more.

Louisville, Kentucky - May 12

Over the past four and one-half months, Barack Obama has contested 48 different primaries and caucuses against one of the most powerful families in American political history -- and he's come out on top.

He hasn't won every contest and he's made his share of mistakes. But viewed in perspective, what he has accomplished has been historic. And in the process, he's demonstrated the overwhelming strength of his candidacy.

It's amazing how far Barack Obama has come, from trailing Clinton by more than twenty points in national polls to the cusp of the Democratic nomination:

It's not just the polls -- Obama has done well where it counts, on election day. Ever since the first delegates were awarded in Iowa, he has led Hillary Clinton among democratically selected pledged delegates. And next Tuesday in Oregon, he will clinch the pledged delegate majority, securing his wire-to-wire dominance in this important category.

This is weird: today, Oregon's Democratic governor Ted Kulongoski stood by John McCain's side at a campaign event designed to distance McCain from George Bush's failed energy policy.

Gov. Kulongoski

Dem gov puts wind in McCain sails

PORTLAND, Ore. - John McCain got an unexpected boost in his bid to woo independent and Democratic voters here this afternoon: a shared stage with Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski.

Kulongoski is a Democrat who has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. So local reporters were stunned to see him turn up at wind-power firm Vestas near Portland International Airport along with McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The event, a major speech on global warming, was designed to pitch McCain's environmental views to moderate western voters.

Why would a Democratic governor (and superdelegate) stand by McCain's side for such an important campaign event?

Making things more curious, it turns out Kulongoski is a Hillary Clinton supporter and as he stood beside McCain, Bill Clinton was on the trail in Astoria, Oregon, 90 miles away, also taking about energy policy.

So instead of going on the stump with a former President to support a Democratic candidate, Kulongoski decided to lend his credibility to John McCain's campaign.

Strange.

I'd love to know if the Clinton campaign was aware of Kulongoski's decision to attend the McCain event, and if they were, whether they encouraged or discouraged him from attending.

I know that if I were a Democratic governor who was supporting a Democratic presidential candidate, there's no chance in hell that I'd go to a Republican presidential candidate's campaign event, especially if that event were one week before my state's primary. And if there were a perception that my candidate's campaign was working to undermine the party's likely nominee, I'd be extra-sensitive to appearances.

Something just doesn't seem right here. What's going on?

Update @ 5:09PM: An Oregon resident suggests in the comments a plausible, non-nefarious explanation -- Kulongoski may have attended the event to support the company and the issue, rather than McCain. I'm not totally sold on this -- the theme of McCain's event was to establish his independence from Bush, and I can't imagine Kulongoski wouldn't have understood the significance of his presence. Then again, politicians make dumb mistakes all the time. Perhaps this was one.

The outcome of tomorrow's vote in West Virginia is not in doubt, and neither is the impact it will have on the nomination process, which will be commensurate with its 0.9% share of pledged delegates.

So to make things interesting, the number I'll watch is percentage of each candidate's voters who say they plan to vote for John McCain in November regardless of who wins the nomination.

This assumes that the exit poll will have the same questions as it did in Indiana and North Carolina, where voters were specifically asked who they planned to vote for in November, regardless of how they voted during the primary.

The fact that West Virginia is a semi-closed primary (Democrats and unaffiliated voters can participate, but not Republicans) is largely irrelevant -- just under 70% of West Virginia voters are eligible to vote.

In North Carolina, which also had a semi-closed primary, 16% of Clinton's voters said they planned to vote for McCain even if she won the primary. (Oddly, in Indiana, which is open, 13% of her voters said the same.)

Assuming the exit poll has the same question, I'll set the over-under at 15% for the percentage of Clinton supporters who will vote McCain even if she wins the nomination, and I'll set the over-under at 4% for Obama.

If the only thing you cared about was winning an election, would you rather be (a) John McCain, the candidate who had forged a political alliance with the least popular incumbent president in recent American history, or would you rather be (b) Barack Obama, the candidate whose ex-pastor had repeatedly made statements that much of the electorate had found offensive?

Purely based on electability, I'd pick Obama any day of the week -- and two recent surveys support that decision. In late April, an NBC/WSJ poll determined that Bush was a more significant albatross for McCain than Wright is for Obama (at least in the opinion of voters). Today, Gallup crunches numbers from another recent survey and comes up with the same result:

Obama picks up his fourth superdelegate of the day, Keith Roark of Idaho. One week ago, Roark tipped his hand:

"Every time I say this, it's a guaranteed applause line," [Bill Clinton] said. "You can drop me in the middle of Idaho where there's not a Democrat in 200 miles and an elk would applaud me on that."

Idaho Democrats called Clinton's comments an insult. They said the state party is making a comeback - after suffering setbacks during Clinton's two terms in office.

"If Bill Clinton had done for elk in Idaho everything he did for Democrats, we'd have far fewer elk," said Idaho Democratic Party Chairman Keith Roark - an uncommitted superdelegate - Wednesday morning.

This was brilliant:

1. Denial: “But Senator Clinton hasn’t conceded yet! She doesn’t admit that she’s lost! She keeps moving the goal posts, continues playing the race card, it therefore must not really be over for her. We need her permission to move on!“
2. Anger: “If the rest of you don’t lash out at what’s upsetting me in exactly the way I am, you’re as bad as she is!”
3. Bargaining: “This means that Obama has to put Clinton on the ticket (like Andrew Sullivan says, ‘hello again to all that!’). Oh, wait, scratch that: he has to put a Clinton supporter on the ticket. Or maybe he has to put a different woman on the ticket… or how about…”
4. Depression: “Where’d everybody go? God, I miss the adrenaline of when this was a real contest!”
5. Acceptance: “Oh, goodie: More adrenaline to come! A general election campaign! Of course Obama will choose his running mate according to his standards. I bet it’ll be as smart a move as those that got him here!”

Al is also thrilled about the Akaka endorsement. Typical, eh?

So according to one count, as of this morning, since Tuesday Obama has picked up 20 superdelegates and Clinton has picked up 0.5. With today's announcements, the numbers probably look like this:

• Obama: +23
• Clinton: +0.5

So here's my spin prediction for Camp Clinton: "Hey, we're both in double-digits!"

Ben's on fire today:

• The candidates and the calendar (an awesome Krauthammer smackdown)
• Six ways for Hillary Clinton to lose.
• Quick hits: MoveOn: 'Obamacan', Sublimminable, Obama heading to Michigan, and Obama's Jewish Roots
• Supers for Obama: Tom Allen, Dolly Strazar, Daniel Akaka, and Keith Rourk

And coming soon, I predict, Ben will blog the endorsement of Obama by Sen. Daniel Akaka.

Mother's day brought us a new advertisement from the McCain campaign, featuring John McCain's mother, Roberta McCain, still sharp after 96 years.

The ad is a reminder of just how freaked out McCain's advisors are about his age, and how desperately they want to reassure the public that McCain is not too old to serve as president for four years. (If elected, McCain will turn 73 in his first year in office and will be 76 by the time the 2012 presidential campaign begins.)

Implicitly, the argument of this ad is that McCain comes from a good gene pool: his mom is in great shape at 96, so there's nothing to worry about. But there's a simple problem with that argument: like most (okay, all) people, John McCain has two parents.

If his campaign wants us to believe he is capable of serving a full term as president on the basis of his mother's health, it's relevant to ask about his father's health.

Sadly, John McCain's father passed away 27 years ago, in 1981. He was 70. (McCain's father, also named John, was a second-generation Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and like his son, attended the Naval Academy.)

The article is here, but what amused me most wasn't the article itself, but rather McCain adviser Mark Salter's 3-page long e-mail to the Newsweek editor whining about the magazine's supposedly pro-Obama slant. Here's an excerpt Salter's squeal:

To see how completely Evan and Richard have accepted the Obama campaign spin look at the example of an illegitimate smear they cite: Senator McCain raising the Hamas spokesman’s comments welcoming Obama’s election. The Senator has never said that Senator Obama shares Hamas’ goals or values or proposed a relationship with Hamas different than the one he would propose. On the contrary, he publicly acknowledged that he doesn’t believe Senator Obama. [Jed: This must be a typo, but what a typo!] He did note that there must be something about Obama’s positions, particularly his repeated insistence that he would meet with the President of Iran (Hamas’s chief state sponsor), that was welcomed by Hamas. Imagine if a right wing death squad spokesman announced that they welcomed McCain’s election. Would Evan or Richard treat that as an illegitimate issue or would they examine which of McCain’s stated positions might have found favor with the terrorists? That seems obvious on its face to me. Rather than argue that his position on Iran is the right one and has no bearing on how Hamas views him, Senator Obama makes a false charge that we accused him of advocating a different relationship with Hamas than Senator McCain’s supports. His false characterization of Senator McCain’s statement was accepted uncritically by Evan and Richard.

Here's what Salter was responding to:

At the time of the Pennsylvania primary, the McCain campaign sent out a letter suggesting that Obama was the candidate of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group ("Barack Obama's foreign policy plans have even won him praise from Hamas leaders," read the letter). McCain, by contrast, portrayed himself as "Hamas's worst nightmare." (In fact, Obama and McCain have the same position on Hamas —no talks, no recognition, no outreach.)

Judging by the 4:1 ratio of Mark Salter's response to the allegedly offending passage, it seems that he might have overreacted just a trifle. I don't know much about who he is, but so far, he sure does sound like he wants to be the second-coming of Karl Rove. Fortunately, however, he doesn't appear to be nearly as effective.

As for the issue at hand, I'll just go back to Andrew Sullivan's formulation of the way to respond to the type of attack being pushed by Salter and McCain: it is dishonorable to give groups like Hamas or al Qaeda influence over this presidential election.

If Salter and McCain want to attack Barack Obama on policy grounds, then by all means, they should. But there should be zero tolerance for using the words of foreign agents in political smears.

I didn't even know he was once a host of Inside Edition. (Be warned -- he drops a few loud F-bombs.)

Update: Rude. CBS had the video taken down from YouTube. Here's another version:

h/t: Oliver Willis

On two occasions last week, John McCain attacked Barack Obama by making a campaign issue out of an interview last month in which a member of Hamas praised Obama. As Obama told Wolf Blitzer on Thursday, McCain's attack was a smear, intended to raise doubts about Obama's commitment to protecting America and its allies. The truth, as Obama said, is that there is no difference between the two candidates when it comes to policy towards Hamas.

This isn't the first time John McCain has inserted the words of foreign agents into the 2008 campaign. In late March, McCain actually used the words of Osama bin Laden to slam both Democratic candidates:

A few weeks back, when McCain first tested his Hamas gambit, Andrew Sullivan formulated a simple, powerful response to these types of attacks:

Honorable campaigns do not allow foreign agents, especially terrorist organizations, to insert themselves into American presidential politics. No respectable foreign governments do such a thing; and the gambits of al Qaeda, Hamas, or any other grouping to play one candidate against another should in general be ignored, not exploited.

Sullivan's answer is absolutely right. Debates about policy are fair game. But using the words of foreign terrorists as a political attack in a presidential campaign is completely unacceptable.

John McCain may be securing some political advantage -- but he's doing it at expense of dignifying terrorist organizations, something that no presidential candidate should ever be willing to do.

HRC is $20 million in debt. Yikes. (h/t: AMERICAblog)

As I showed here, in Indiana, there were about 110,000 pro-McCain voters in the primary, 75% of whom supported Hillary Clinton.

How might these voters have impacted the demographics of the exit polls?

As with Ohio, the results in Indiana are narrowing. Hillary Clinton now leads by just under 1.1% -- down from 1.4% on election night. It won't make a difference for the nomination battle, but it does strengthen the argument that were it not for McCain supporters, Hillary Clinton would not have won Indiana.

Let me run through numbers for you based on the new vote totals.

1. Hillary Clinton has 644,594 votes and Barack Obama has 630,599 votes
2. About 83,500 McCain supporters voted for Clinton
   
   • According to the exit poll, if Clinton were to win the nomination, 16% of primary voters would vote for McCain, 41% of whom voted for Clinton in the primary. As a result, 6.6% (16% * 41%) of Indiana primary voters voted for Clinton but plan to vote for McCain in the fall even if she wins the nomination
   • 6.6% of Indiana primary voters is 83,563. (13% of Clinton's total vote.)
3. About 27,500 McCain supporters voted for Obama
   • Also according to the exit poll, if Obama were to win the nomination, 18% of primary voters would vote for McCain, 12% of whom voted for Obama in the primary. As a result, 2.2% (18% * 12%) of Indiana primary voters voted for Obama but plan to vote for McCain in the fall even if he wins the nomination.
   • 2.2% of Indiana primary voters is 27,544. (4.4% of Obama's total vote.)
4. After factoring out the McCain supporters who voted for each candidate:
   • Clinton received 560,941 votes from sincere supporters (48.2% of the vote)
   • Obama received 603,055 votes from sincere supporters (51.8% of the vote)
5. Therefore, among voters who are not committed McCain supporters, Barack Obama won a 3.6 point victory, a swing of nearly 5 points from the current vote tally.

Keep in mind I'm not taking a position on why these McCain supporters voted for Clinton. It doesn't matter to me whether it was the Limbaugh Effect or whether they were honestly expressing their choice for second-place. What matters is they don't intend to vote for either Obama or Clinton in November, and I think any fair analysis of Indiana must factor these voters out of the equation.

As a postscript, what about North Carolina? Using the same method as above, 16% of Clinton voters in North Carolina were actually McCain supporters, compared with 3% of Obama supporters. Factoring out the McCain meddlers for both both candidates, overall Obama would have won 61%-39%, a 22-point win instead of 57%-42%, a 15-point win.

John Edwards on Face the Nation this morning:

As a former Edwards supporter, I was disappointed by his decision to stay on the sidelines during March and April.

But with the nomination process essentially over, the challenge now is to unify the Democratic Party, and Edwards' perceived impartiality might actually prove to be an asset. Along with his wife Elizabeth, he does have real credibility with Clinton supporters at the grassroots and netroots level. I think that if (really, when) he comes out strong for Obama, a lot of people who supported Clinton will listen to him.

At this point, as Edwards says, we know it will be Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. The question now is how we end the campaign and unify as a party to take on John McCain. From what I saw today, John Edwards is ready to play a leadership role in helping that process along.

John Aravosis introduces The Monica, and awards the Clinton campaign the first four Monica award for continuing their disgraceful search for "damaging information" on Obama. The name of this award may seem a bit shocking, but it is absurd for the Clintons of all people to launch a character-based assault on their opponent. And if they can't stand the heat...

As some of you might know, I supported John Edwards before he dropped out. Since then, I've been for Obama, but I still have affection for Edwards' campaign. This video is the best explanation I can offer.

Most of my friends and family are like me; they supported Edwards, but are now enthusiastically behind Obama. (Full disclosure: one of my relatives was a Clinton supporter, but she long ago saw the light, and is for Barack now!) In our cases it's clear that Edwards' withdrawal was a boost for Obama. And, I think it's fair to say, it was also a boost for us to become a part of this movement. For the first time, we've got a Democratic presidential nominee who is willing to try to change the way the game is played.

Despite our personal stories, there's plenty of room for debate about whether or not Edwards' withdrawal and subsequent decision to stay on the sidelines helped or hurt Barack Obama. I think in caucus states on Super Tuesday, it definitely helped Obama for Edwards not to be a candidate. In some primary states like Oklahoma and Tennessee, it probably hurt. I'm sure it helped in a big way in California. It also definitely helped Obama for Edwards not to be on the ballot in most of the February contests after Super Tuesday.

Whatever the impact of Edwards' withdrawal, I think that while he was still in it, he helped Obama frame Hillary Clinton's central problem: her credibility. Last fall, Clinton was riding high on the "inevitability" meme. Then, on October 30, the Democratic field gathered for a debate which I still believe began the long, slow, painful demise of her campaign. As these videos show, John Edwards played a key role -- probably the key role -- in provoking her catastrophic performance:

So even if John Edwards has been strangely silent for the last few months, I do believe that he deserves credit for helping expose the true nature of the Clinton candidacy. I'm curious now about his re-emergence, and hopeful that he begins to take a more active role in this campaign, helping to unify the party now that we have a nominee.

Over at MyDD.com, Todd Beeton lays it out for his fellow HRC supporters: "A Vote For John McCain Is A Vote Against Hillary Clinton." Amen, Todd -- and thank you.

Well, DCW has gone ahead and given all you mothers out there a Mother's Day gift -- Obama is now the superdelegate leader by their count.

As for the countdown, based on my projection that Clinton and Obama will split the remaining 50 add-on delegates, and that Clinton will win a nine delegate edge in the remaining contests, then Obama only needs 24 more delegates to lock up the magic number by the time last add-on delegate is selected. (That would be on June 21.)

Of course, given that Obama has picked up 26 superdelegate endorsements in the last week alone, 24 should be a piece of cake, and he'll actually hit the 2,024.5 magic number sooner -- ideally right after the Oregon primary on May 20th. (Note that it doesn't really matter how many superdelegates Clinton gains or loses -- Obama is in a race against the finish line, not Clinton.)

p.s.: Happy Mother's Day to everybody who qualifies (especially including my own mom, and both my grandmas)!

Barack visits Bend, Oregon's PV Power, a green collar employer focused on solar power

From the Seattle PI political blog:

Obama brings campaign to Bend

P-I columnist Joel Connelly was in Oregon Saturday following Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as they continue campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Connelly reports that Obama became the first major presidential candidate in 40 years to visit eastern Oregon when he stumped in Bend Saturday afternoon (some may debate whether Bend is in eastern Oregon, but it is east of the Cascade Mountains). A crowd of about 2,000 jammed the gym at Summit High School to hear Obama, who is inching closer to locking up his party's nomination.

Obama was introduced by Bend resident Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medger Evers and the first woman to lead the NAACP.

Connelly says the crowd was enthusiastic but "there were a fair number of undecided" voters.

Connelly, by the way, is a great columnist -- his latest ("Obama shows he can go the distance on long, dirty trail") is a good read.

::

Update: Just as I posted this blog entry, HMJ from Bend, OR wrote in with a wonderful writeup of Barack Obama's town hall in Bend. I've posted it along with a picture she was able to take.

Eugene, Oregon - Friday, May 9, 2008

Lost in the discussion about demographics is the fact that throughout this nomination contest, Barack Obama has been unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom about how campaigns are run and elections are won.

I'll admit an initial skepticism to Obama's approach to the electoral map. At the beginning of the race, I didn't think the map could change. The idea of building new coalitions and increasing youth turnout seemed romantic, at best.

Boy, I was wrong. I remember a post by Atrios shortly after Iowa that went something like this: "Obama supporters have a way of telling you: trust us, it'll all work out. And you think they're crazy. And maybe they are. But then it does work out. And you start to say to yourself: maybe they know what their doing."

Well, there's no longer a question about that. Clearly, the Obama campaign knows what it is doing. And that's why it's important that today they announced the official kickoff of Vote for Change, a 50-state (no, not 57...) voter registration drive. The Obama effort to reshape the electorate has no equivalent on the Republican or Democratic sides and is a powerful argument for the Obama candidacy.

Skeptics like Paul Krugman may scoff at the notion of trying to change the game by bringing in new voters to the system. And to be fair, it won't be easy. But given the fact that Democrats haven't won a majority since 1976 when Jimmy Carter won 50.1% of the vote, wouldn't it be crazy not to at least try?

(This will be my last post on Krugman's Friday column -- my other two are here and here.)

Krugman says:

the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprecedented, at least in modern times...Mr. Obama appears to have won the nomination with a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites.

Ah, yes -- the "African-Americans and eggheads" theory of the Democratic Party. Let's look at the stats about Clinton:

• In February, 85% of Clinton's support came from whites and Hispanics
• From March-May, 93% of Clinton's support came from whites and Hispanics.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama had a broader coalition:

• In February, 60% of Obama's support came from whites and Hispanics
• From March-May, 59% of his support came from whites and Hispanics

Now neither of these numbers are representative of the Democratic electorate, about three-quarters of which is white or Hispanic. And certainly both candidates would have work to do to unify the Democratic Party. But at least from my perspective, it's pretty obvious which of the two candidates is more capable of putting together a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to defeat John McCain -- Barack Obama, because he starts with one.

Krugman:

Mr. Obama’s white support continues to be concentrated among the highly educated; there was little in Tuesday’s results to suggest that his problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished. ... Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths.

Ah yes, he asks how and why without asking whether or if. Perfect.

The problem here is with Krugman's assumption -- that Barack Obama's support from whites is whithering.

On the surface, Krugman's assumption seems like it might be correct -- in February, Obama won 42% of the white vote and from March to May he won just 38%.

But Krugman doesn't take regional differences into account, nor does he take the influx of pro-McCain voters into the primary into account. After adjusting for those voters and eliminating home states (IL and NY) as well as western states (AZ, CA, and UT), none of which had primaries in March-May, the "withering" shrinks. Taking these factors into account, Obama won 40% of the white vote in February and 39% from March to May.

Narrowing it down further, in Ohio and Mississippi, Obama won 35% of the white vote (40% if you include Texas). In Pennsylvania, he won 37%. And in Indiana and North Carolina, he won 41%.

So this "withering" narrative is manifestly false (especially with respect to Obama's position in national polls circa November/December 2007).

The cool thing about each media organization having a different way of tabulating superdelegate totals is that Obama will surpass Clinton in the superdelegate category umpteen times. He's already done at least twice before with Politico and ABC. Now he surpasses her again, this time with the New York Times. Now that is momentum!

An hour ago, the AP had him within 1/2 a superdelegate of the lead, and that will probably change now that Obama has added two more superdelegates, both from the Virgin Islands -- one of them a switch from Clinton to Obama. (Carole Burke, who was undeclared, is now for Obama, and Kevin Rodriguez, who was for Clinton, is now for Obama.)

As for me, I'm waiting for Democratic Convention Watch to make the call. Why? Because I think their blog is pretty cool.

John McCain has all sorts of problems with lobbyists. Earlier this year, he was accused (without any meaningful evidence) of having an affair with one. In retrospect, however, that unfair allegation seems insignificant.

Since then, we've learned that his three of his top aides and advisors were lobbyists for Airbus, and that John McCain personally intervened to help Airbus pursue a huge contract from the U.S. Air Force. Airbus won the contract, taking jobs away from Boeing and other American companies and sending them overseas.

And now Newsweek reports that the man McCain selected to run the Republican convention is a lobbyist, and not just any lobbyist. The man, Doug Goodyear, is CEO of DCI Group, a lobbying firm that earned millions advocating for ExxonMobil, GM, and others.

But that's just typical influence peddling. Here's the really troubling thing about Goodyear's firm (remember, he is CEO):

The firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to "begin a dialogue of political reconciliation" with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing "falsehoods" by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. "It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago," Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta's record in the current cyclone crisis is "reprehensible."

Someone needs to tell John McCain that it's just not cool to reward lobbyists who once represented repressive regimes with leadership positions on a presidential campaign.

Update --The lobbyist resigns his position:

“Doug Goodyear resigned as convention coordinator and issued a two sentence statement: ‘Today I offered the convention my resignation so as not to become a distraction in this campaign. I continue to strongly support John McCain for president, and wish him the best of luck in this campaign.’ Goodyear is chief executive of DCI Group, a lobbying firm that Newsweek reported in a story posted online was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Myanmar's junta.”

Good. Lobbyists for foreign governments -- especially brutal dictatorships -- should not be rewarded with political patronage. It still raises the question: why did John McCain offer this lobbyist such an important role in first place?

Update 2 -- Ambinder reports a second lobbyist for the firm who was actually in charge of the account in question remains with McCain:

What becomes now of Doug Davenport, the DCI lobbying czar who is a campaign regional manager? A campaign spokesperson referred comment to Davenport, who did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment. As the head DCI lobbyist, Mr. Davenport would have been directly in charge of the Myanmar account during 2002.

Goodyear and Davenport were brought to the campaign by manager Rick Davis. This episode will increase criticism by some McCain allies that Davis has paid insufficient attention to McCain's brand by appointing so many lobbyists to key campaign positions.

Poblano makes a good point about Tuesday's primary in West Virginia:

One unrelated point that's probably not worth a post unto itself. The Obama campaign has one more vulnerability in this race, which is that the results of West Virginia are going to be much worse than most of the media seems to understand. We're talking a 25-point loss if he has big momentum coming out of North Carolina. That's on a good day. On a bad day, he could lose by 40-50 points. Congressional Districts throughout the Appalachians that are similar to West Virginia have gone to Clinton by 2:1 or 3:1 margins.

As such, the Obama campaign will have to fend off one last bad (though almost certainly not terminal) news cycle. And therefore, I'd expect them to hold back any truly huge superdelegate endorsements (Edwards, Gore) until that time. This is not based on any inside knowledge; it's just too logical a strategy for things to proceed any other way.

Of course, it won't make a difference for the outcome of the nomination battle, but it does mean that there will be a day or two of buzz about Clinton's performance, and she will probably once again play her card. Such is life, though. She's done.

I'm a huge fan of Paul Krugman and I can't count the number of times that I defended him in the face of criticism from Obama supporters. Indeed, my first ever recommended diary at Daily Kos consisted of a string of Paul Krugman columns extolling the virtues of John Edwards. (I was a vigorous Edwards supporter until he dropped out of the campaign.)

But as much of a positive voice as Paul Krugman has been for the left, his recent musings on the 2008 campaign have become increasingly useless. His column yesterday ("Think about November") was especially stupid. I don't use that term lightly -- I'd never want to go toe-to-toe with Krugman on any sort of intellectual horsepower competition. But this particular column was dumb, short-sighted, and way beneath his standards.

Ed Espinoza (aka Mr. Super), who just endorsed Barack Obama:

Lots of variables tossed around recently as to how to consider who should be the Democratic nominee.  Pledged delegates, popular vote, electoral vote, who leads in general election match-up polling, who has more blue state and/or red state wins.  Peter Funt satirically wrote that Senator Clinton has won more "new" states whereas someone else noted that Senator Obama has won more square ones.

This can be easily simplified: the one who figures out how to win the most delegates is the winner. 

Daily Kos diarist svotaw1992 had some time, a spreadsheet, and a little bit of curiosity -- and discovered that Ohio's official results show Clinton winning a narrower victory than originally. Apparently, now that Ohio has finally finished counting all of the roughly one hundred thousand provisional ballots, Clinton's final margin of victory was 8.7%, not the double-digit win reported on election night.

Now at this point, it doesn't make any difference as far as the nomination goes, but for two months we've suffered through discussion after discussion about how Clinton destroyed Obama in Ohio. Now, all that turns out to have been based on numbers that exaggerated the size of her win. Moreover, since exit poll data is based in part on actual vote results, the exit poll data also exaggerated the size of her win.

Here are the final totals (svotaw1992 has the gap at 8.8% which is correct if you exclude the Edwards votes, which I include to get the 8.7% margin).

• Clinton: 1,259,620 (53.49%)
• Obama: 1,055,769 (44.84%)
• Edwards: 39,332 (1.67%)

Here's what other sites were (and probably still are) reporting.

• CNN and MSNBC: Clinton, 1,207,806 (54%) to Obama 979,025 (44%)
• RealClearPolitics: Clinton, 1,212,362 (55.2%) to Obama 982,489 (44.8%)

Again, I'm not up in arms about this, and certainly don't take anything away from Clinton for having won, but it's something people should be aware of when thinking about the contours of this campaign.

Update: After posting this, it occurs to me that these new numbers also put Obama even further ahead in the "popular vote" -- adding another 26,022 votes to his lead over Clinton. Of course, the popular vote is a thoroughly flawed metric, but these numbers make it even harder for Clinton to reach Obama.

McCain starts to address an audience and...ooops...which side is up?

Dare I say...Barack Obama is going to put things rightside-up?

Now to be completely fair, McCain figured out his mistake rather quickly. The entire moment was actually kind of endearing, sort of like a fond family memory, if you know what I mean. It's a still capture from a Jeannie Moos essay on the campaign. Here's the key part:

(Thanks to reader SQ for the tip!)

Updates: Added full size picture. Changed title from "McCain Holds His Mic Upside-Down." Bumped at 4:40PM.

I don't know if Barack Obama takes the superdelegate lead today or this weekend (or maybe early next week?), but it