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

MCCAIN TO MEDIA: LET'S STAY TOGETHER
(Mike Madden, Salon)
The "Straight Talk Express" that McCain rode through New Hampshire and Massachusetts Wednesday was a swankier version than the one he had two months ago, with red velvet couches and slabs of marble holding lights to the walls. Eight reporters, plus Joe Lieberman, squeezed into the back lounge with McCain for an 80-minute trip from Portsmouth, N.H., to Boston, while his press secretary sat in the hallway... The tone was conversational, and it felt less adversarial than on other campaigns where candidates don't spend as much time with reporters. (Like Obama, for instance, who walked away from a tense press conference last week, growling, "I just answered, like, eight questions.") ... McCain clearly likes having the press around, more than most politicians do. Never mind that he jokingly calls reporters "Trotskyites" and "jerks." When an aide pulled him away from the conversation to make a phone call, he groaned... There is no question that McCain starts the general election out on much friendlier terms with the press than either Democrat, despite conservative protests of a liberal media bias. And there's no question that it helps him. When he ran against George W. Bush eight years ago, McCain joked that the national media was his base. ... This time around, facing a Democratic nominee who will almost certainly have more money and more enthusiastic supporters than he does, McCain may need that base even more.

THE DREAM TICKET WON'T HAPPEN
(David Broder, Washington Post)
Judging from what I was told in a canvass of both the Clinton and Obama camps, there is good reason to believe this pairing will never occur. Even if the long campaign does not leave bruised personal feelings, practical considerations for both candidates argue strongly against such a deal. For Clinton, partnering with Obama, with him on top of the ticket, would either leave her part of a defeated pair in a party that is not generous with second chances or, if they won, probably lock her out of a presidential race until 2016, when she would be 68 -- almost John McCain's age now. Knowledgeable Democrats see at least two more-attractive options for her. One is to return to the Senate, where she is popular, well-established and potentially in line to be majority leader, a position with real power. The other is to go back to New York, where Eliot Spitzer's resignation from the governorship on Wednesday leaves a potential opening for a new candidate in 2010. As for Obama, many of the same arguments apply -- with even greater force. He is less enamored of the Senate than is Clinton, but it could provide a comfortable resting place, for four or eight years. Or he could go back to Illinois and run for governor in 2010, when incumbent Democrat Rod Blagojevich would face a third term.

OBAMA WINS TEXAS
(John Dickerson, Slate)
Clinton won the state's popular vote and the primary, but that doesn't matter, because after a majority of the caucus votes were counted—the second step in Texas' two-stage process—it looks as if Obama won the delegates. Declaring Obama the winner makes sense. In this primary season, we've got to stick fast to the rules. As both the Obama and Clinton campaigns spin themselves into the topsoil, that's all we have to keep us from madness. Except that Obama supporters have been making a case that doesn't stick to the rules in arguing how Democrats should pick the party's nominee...Fair or not, if Clinton wins by superdelegates, that win would be perfectly legal. The Democratic Party, in all its wisdom, designed the system to allow for this possibility. It may subvert the popular will, but the rules are the rules. In claiming victory in Texas, Obama is making this very same case, because the Texas delegate win happened through a subversion of the popular will.

RACIAL ISSUE BUBBLES UP AGAIN FOR DEMOCRATS
(Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
After the Democratic primary in South Carolina turned racially divisive in January, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama essentially declared a truce and put a stop to fighting between their camps. But this week, race has once again begun casting a pall over the battle between the two... From virtually the start of the contest between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama in January 2007, they have sought to move beyond race and sex, acknowledging that their possible nominations would be historic, yet saying they were running on their qualifications. At the same time, each has used the issue against the other.

OBAMA ON OFFENSE
(Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal)
Anyone who doubts [the media's pro-Obama] bias has only to look at the past week's charges that Hillary Clinton and company have been playing the race card -- the latest in a series of such accusations made by Obama surrogates, carried forward by the media... In all, the pattern of these charges may well suggest a race card in play, only it wasn't the Clintons who were playing it.

MCCAIN, GOP MAY HAVE CAUSE FOR HOPE
(Jackie Calmes, Wall Street Journal)
Rarely have the stars aligned so squarely against the party in power in elections for the White House as it has for Republicans, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll bears out. Ultimately, voters choose a person for president, not a party, and Sen. John McCain seems to give Republicans a fighting chance.

MCCAIN MUST CHANGE ON SOCIAL ISSUES
(Rick Santorum, Philadelphia Inquirer)
I attended the Council for National Policy meeting last week in New Orleans and listened to John McCain address the who's who of Hillary Rodham Clinton's vast right-wing conspiracy. It was another chance for McCain to, in his words, "not just unite, but reignite the base." How did the crowd think he did? Let's just say it's hard to ignite anything with cold water and no fire. He talked about two legs of the Republican stool - spending/taxes and national security. But the third leg - social issues - went unmentioned. When questioned, he failed to connect with the people who care as much about why you vote the way you do as about how you vote. The vast majority of the people at the meeting and in the conservative movement will vote for McCain. I will. But will the people who make up the backbone of the get-out-the vote effort go to work for him? Only if he demonstrates that his vaunted pragmatism and open-mindedness will lead him to different positions on some issues.

GRAND OBAMA PARTY
(John McLaughlin, National Review)
What’s going on here? Why are Republicans and conservatives so strongly supporting the most liberal senator in the country? The answer is a simple case of “never overlook the obvious”: Obama attracts these unlikely supporters because he’s running against a woman who has an 80 percent unfavorable rating with Republicans. Why wait to vote against Hillary Clinton in November when you can do it now? Why waste a vote on Rev. Huckabee when God wants you to vote against Sen. Clinton? Luckily for Senator Clinton, there’s no crossover voting in the Keystone State. It’s up to Obama to win his own party’s voters, with no help from Republicans and anti-Clinton independents. If he can do that in Pennsylvania, the nomination is almost certainly his. If he can’t, his popularity among non-Democrats will be cited both for him (as evidence of his broad appeal) and against him (as evidence that Clinton is the truer Democrat). What both these analyses overlook is that most of those Republican and independent Obama supporters weren’t really voting for Obama; they were voting against Clinton.