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

THE NEWSWEEK ROSTER

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...
(Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff)
McCain's denial that he had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist was firm, but it invited a game of catch me if you can.

HILLARY SHOULD GET OUT NOW
(Jonathan Alter)
Clinton has only one shot—for Obama to trip up so badly that he disqualifies himself.

HAND-TIED BY THE TIMES
(Howard Fineman)
In running for president, John McCain loses his voice.

HOW THEY HAVE LOST
(Jonathan Darman)
In defeat, the Clintons are remarkably adept at picking up the pieces.

OBAMA: GOOD FOR THE JEWS?
(Michael Hirsh and Dan Ephron)
Hillary Clinton's surrogates are questioning Obama's commitment to U.S.-Israel relations.
 

THE BEST OF THE REST: 

SOMBER CLINTON SOLDIERS ON AS HORIZON DARKENS
(Patrick Healy, New York Times)
To her longtime friends, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sounds unusually philosophical on the phone these days. She rarely uses phrases like “when I’m president” anymore. Somber at times, determined at others, she talks to aides and confidants about the importance of focusing on a good day’s work. No drapes are being measured in her mind’s eye, they say. “When this is all over, I’m really looking forward to seeing you,” she told one of those supporters by phone the other day. Mrs. Clinton has not given up, in her head or her heart, her quest to return to the White House, advisers say. But as resolute as she is, she no longer exudes the supreme confidence that was her trademark before the first defeat, in Iowa in January... If she is not temperamentally suited to reckon with the possibility of losing quite yet, advisers say, she is also a cold, hard realist about politics — at some point, she is known to say, someone will win and someone will not.

THE AUDACITY OF HOPELESSNESS
(Frank Rich, New York Times)
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work. But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

GOP FEARS CHARGES OF RACISM, SEXISM
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.  The RNC project is viewed as so sensitive that those involved in the work were reluctant to discuss the findings in detail. But one Republican strategist, who asked that his name be withheld to speak candidly, said the research shows the daunting and delicate task ahead.  Republicans will be told to “be sensitive to tone and stick to the substance of the discussion” and that “the key is that you have to be sensitive to the fact that you are running against historic firsts,” the strategist explained. 

AMERICAN ADAM
(John Judis, New Republic)
Obama's commitment to radical centrism could... be severely tested. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the support of popular movements, gave priority to getting their substantive legislative agendas adopted; and they succeeded by uniting their supporters and dividing their opponents. If they had focused first on uniting Democrats and Republicans behind common objectives, they probably would not have gotten their way... Jimmy Carter, too, provides a cautionary tale: The last Democrat to take office on a radical centrist agenda, Carter failed to tame Congress or K Street and was defeated for reelection. He had campaigned for the presidency on the presumption that reformers could overturn the status quo in Washington. In the end, he turned out to be wrong. The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam--to achieve a decisive and final break with history--has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past--in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities--has a way of lingering around. At the very least, it rarely recedes without a bitter fight.

END AND ENDGAME
(John Heilemann, New York)
Among many in the Democratic Party, the rap on the Clintons has always been that they’re self-regarding, self-centered, infinitely narcissistic. That they see the party as a vehicle for their ambitions, nothing more and nothing less. That their preeminent cause is their own power. How Hillary conducts herself in the days ahead will speak volumes about whether that is actually true of her. (Her husband is another story.) Her debate performance in Austin was gracious, if tough, and free almost entirely of witless ad hominems. When she spoke of being “honored” to share the stage with Obama, it even had an unmistakable valedictory feel. If this is the way she has chosen to go out, the ensuing enhancement of her reputation will be the silver lining to her loss, should losing be her fate. It will also set her up nicely for 2012 if the pessimism of her adjutants about Obama proves painfully prescient this fall—and you’d be a fool to believe this implication hasn’t crossed her mind. 

OBAMA'S RED STATE PROSPECTS UNCLEAR
(Alec MacGillis, Washington Post)
All along, Obama has argued that he can redraw the political map for Democrats by turning out unprecedented numbers of young voters and African Americans, and by attracting independents and even Republicans with his message of national reconciliation. But the picture emerging of his appeal in GOP strongholds and in swing states, even as he widens his delegate lead over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), is more complex than his claim to broad popularity in "red state" America would have one believe.

CLINTON TESTS OUT POPULIST APPROACH
(Perry Bacon, Jr. and Alec MacGillis, Washington Post)
Blasting "companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans" by shipping jobs overseas and railing that "it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly sounds like one of her old Democratic rivals, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Eager to recapture the white, working-class voters who favored her in some of the early primaries but who have since shifted to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton traded her usual wonky style this weekend for a fiery, populist tone in speeches in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.

IN PAINFUL PAST, HUSHED WORRY ABOUT OBAMA
(Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?...
“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.” Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months. Mr. Obama was 6 at the time, and like many of his admirers, he has only read about the violence that traumatized the nation. But those recollections and images are often invoked by older voters, who watch his candidacy with fascination, as well as an uneasy air of apprehension, as Democrats inch closer to selecting their nominee.

CHELSEA'S MORNING
(New York Magazine) 
Far from being "pimped out"-MSNBC correspondent David Shuster's ill-considered formulation that resulted in his suspension-she is orchestrating her own transformation from unwitting victim to willing agent in her parents' dreams of power and restoration, taking a leave of absence from her job to campaign full time. It was Chelsea's idea to take on a public-speaking role in her mother's campaign after last month's New Hampshire primary, answering questions from voters in open-press venues-knowing full well that such a high-profile performance could jeopardize her rabidly guarded private life... In the past few weeks, Chelsea has become perhaps her mother's most effective and mistake-free surrogate, sometimes even drawing bigger crowds than her father, whose ability to attract attention, sometimes for the wrong reasons, is decidedly a mixed blessing for his wife.