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

'RED PHONE' RESPONSE COULD DECIDE TEXAS
(Ben Smith and Beth Frerking, Politico) 
Republicans said it was just the faintest preview of what voters are likely to see in a general election — whether from McCain, the Republican National Committee or an independent group. "It's a love tap compared to the Wu-Tang fist of fury that's coming at this guy in the fall," said Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant.  A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Danny Diaz, put it in somewhat less colorful terms. "Republicans will focus on the critical issues confronting the nation," he said. "Sen. Obama's record on issues related to national security will be central to that discussion."  

A NOMINEE? OR A DEBACLE?
(Bob Herbert, New York Times)
If Barack Obama wins in either Texas or Ohio, the race for the nomination will effectively be over. At that point the Clintons, if they have any regard for the fortunes of the party, will be duty-bound to graciously fold their tents and try to rally their supporters behind a candidate who will be stepping into a firestorm of hostility from the other side. If Hillary Clinton wins both Texas and Ohio, the Democrats will need a trainload of aspirin and a shrink.

ON THE PRESS BUS, SOME QUESTIONS OVER FAVORITISM
(Jacques Steinberg, New York Times)
As the two Democratic candidates shuttled between Ohio and Texas this week before Tuesday’s potentially decisive nominating contests, questions over whether reporters were giving each candidate an equally fair shake were thrust into the center of the campaign itself. There were already indications that Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates were finding traction in casting the news media as a conflicted umpire, while also prompting some soul-searching among the reporters themselves. The night after Mrs. Clinton reprimanded Tim Russert and Brian Williams during the Cleveland debate on MSNBC for asking her a disproportionate number of “first” questions, she appeared Wednesday at a rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio. When someone stood to castigate the news media for being unfair to her, the audience cheered, with some even turning to cast a collective evil eye on the reporters in the high school gymnasium.

THE '60'S FETISH
(William Powers, National Journal) 
The 1960s are alive all over again in the Baby Boomer-run media, as reporters and pundits try to make sense of this political moment by returning repeatedly to a moment four decades old. The'60s fetish has been with us for a long time and was a motif of the 2004 presidential campaign. But it's back now in a new and more powerful way, thanks in part to the rise of Obama... If the race turns out to be Obama versus McCain, the obsession will only grow. Where Obama represents the RFK/MLK side of '60s culture, McCain, the former Vietnam POW, will become the embodiment of the anti-communist, warrior strain. America's Boomercentric newsrooms will churn out endless stories about the great dichotomy that supposedly lives on today. But does it really?

OBAMA WALKS A DIFFICULT PATH AS HE COURTS JEWISH VOTERS
(Neela Banerjee, New York Times)
Mr. Obama has also faced criticism over remarks he made about the suffering of Palestinians — remarks he says were incorrectly reported — and about who is advising him on foreign affairs. And he has had to beat back false tales, spread in viral e-mail messages, that he is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koran. In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible. Winning the trust of Jewish Democratic voters is all the more difficult for Mr. Obama because of the tenuous relations between blacks and Jews. He addressed that very issue at the Cleveland debate when he used the answer to the Farrakhan question to call for a renewal of the ties between blacks and Jews. But other issues he faces arise from his newness to national politics. While his positions hew to mainstream Democratic views, some critics have expressed concerns that they are not heartfelt.

CLINTON'S DAUNTING ROAD AHEAD
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
Victories in both Ohio and Texas would be incentive enough to continue her candidacy into Pennsylvania, but if Obama emerges with no significant damage to his delegate advantage, her prospects for ending the primaries with a lead in pledged delegates remain daunting, even if she were to win most of the remaining contests by a hefty margin. She needs a showing that will both add to her pledged delegate total and reverse the current flow of superdelegates in Obama's direction.

CLINTON QUESTIONS ROLE OF OBAMA IN A CRISIS
(Katharine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
At the rally, she belittled the idea that Mr. Obama’s 2002 speech “at an antiwar rally” prepared him to serve as commander in chief. She said he was “missing in action” on the recent Senate vote on Iran and as chairman of a subcommittee responsible for NATO policy in Afghanistan. Contrasting that with her own experience, she evoked foreign battlefields, recalling a trip to Bosnia as first lady, when the welcoming ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.” She said she had traveled to more than 80 countries and was “on the front lines” as the United States made peace in Bosnia and Northern Ireland and helped save refugees from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. She has served on the Armed Services Committee for five years and was also part of a Pentagon committee to plan for the military of the future.

THROW OUT THE MAPS IN 2008
(Michael Barone, RealClear Politics)
John McCain does not have the Texas swagger and up-front religious commitment that turned many voters away from Bush and his party. Barack Obama does not seem to have the wobbly moral compass that turned many voters away from Clinton and his party. The demographic factor most highly correlated with voting behavior in 2000 and 2004 was religion, or depth of religious belief. Within each relevant religious group, the more observant tended to vote Republican and the less observant Democratic. That may no longer be the case. Voters may well split along other lines, as voters in industrial states once split along lines of income or union membership, and voters in states with heavy early 20th century immigration split along sectarian lines (Catholic Democrats versus Protestant Republicans).

CLINTON HAS CONNECTIONS, WHILE OBAMA HAS MOMENTUM
(Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post)
This state has long been seen as strongly favorable to Clinton. She and her husband, Bill Clinton, visited so often during their White House days that the former president once joked that he ought to pay state taxes. The senator from New York has also lined up the support of most of the state's Democratic establishment, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who hosted a fundraiser for her last Sunday, and Claiborne Pell, the respected 89-year-old former senator. The demographics here would also seem to provide an advantage to Clinton -- Rhode Island is heavily blue-collar, working-class and the most Catholic state in the country. White Catholics have provided strong support for Clinton in other New England states.

TEXAS MAY BE HUCKABEE'S LAST STAND
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Both in public and in private, Mike Huckabee’s advisers have intimated that Texas would be his last stand. Yet Huckabee appears intent on going forward, regardless of what happens here... Even if McCain were to win each of the combined 256 delegates up for grabs in Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont and here on Tuesday, he’d still fall short by some estimates of the 1,191 pledged delegates needed to clinch the nomination. And 1,191, Huckabee reiterated Thursday, is “the magic number.”...  So with fewer delegates still available than what he would need to reach 1,191, Huckabee intends to fight on.