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

PUBLIC FINANCING? OBAMA AND MCCAIN APPEAR SPLIT
(Jeff Zeleny and Michael Luo, New York Times)
Senators Barack Obama and John McCain are beginning to lay the groundwork for divergent ways of financing fall campaigns for the presidency. Mr. Obama, who has shattered fund-raising records for candidates of either party, is sending fresh signals that he may bypass public financing for the general election. He argues that his small contributors, many of whom have given again and again over the Internet, have injected a new democracy into fund-raising, with the result that a kind of “parallel public financing system” has been created. Mr. McCain, conversely, increasingly offers indications that he will partake in public financing, a decision that would bar him from accepting private donations for the fall and limit his general spending to the $84.1 million that the Treasury would provide. His campaign recently began returning contributions that had been designated for the general election, asking the donors instead to contribute to a special fund, not subject to the public financing limits, for legal and accounting costs in the fall campaign.

GOING WHERE REPUBLICANS FEAR TO TREAD
(John Dickerson, Slate)
How many points do you get for just showing up? John McCain will get an idea at the end of the month when he travels to venues where Republicans don't usually campaign. McCain is planning to speak in inner cities, heavily African-American sections of the South, and poor sections of Appalachia. Most of his stops will be in areas where voters have traditionally supported Democrats. Can McCain win over many new voters in these areas? Probably not. In 2000, President Bush got just 9 percent of the total black vote. He improved slightly to 11 percent in 2004. If McCain winds up running against Barack Obama, his opportunities in the African-American community will diminish further.  McCain's strategists are mapping the tour—and his campaign—on the theory that even if voters disagree with McCain, they come away with a favorable gut-level sense of his character when they get to see him up close. This is what aides think helped him win New Hampshire in 2000 and what they think sparked his comeback this election. With this tour, McCain is hoping not so much that the people in the hall fall for him as that the cameras capturing the event can convey some of his appeal to independents across the country.

CLINTON AND OBAMA VIE FOR WOMEN OF PHILADELPHIA SUBURBS
(Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal)
With polls showing a closer Democratic contest in Pennsylvania, both candidates have stepped up efforts to court a prized constituency: the young, college-educated women who reside in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Sen. Barack Obama returned Wednesday to these suburban battlegrounds, and Sen. Hillary Clinton will head this way later in the week. A Quinnipiac University poll out Tuesday shows Sen. Obama has narrowed the gap in the state to just six percentage points. He now trails Sen. Clinton 44% to 50% among likely primary voters, compared with 41% to 50% last week. Among Philadelphia's suburban voters, Sen. Obama now leads 53% to 42% after trailing by a 44%-to-52% margin last month. Sen. Clinton's 24-point lead among women in the state last month, meanwhile, fell to 13 points... Sen. Obama can credit his gains in the suburbs to voters like Lorri Primavera, a 48-year-old jeweler from Wallingford. "From the beginning, I felt like I was going to support Hillary, but I'm definitely leaning toward Obama now," she says. "I always felt that having a woman in office would shift the way things are being done, but I'm getting more of a feeling that it doesn't have to come from a woman."

MORE: Shift in Pa. Population Has a Liberal, Urban Edge (Paul Nussbaum, Philadelphia Inquirer)
Slowly but surely, Pennsylvania is tilting southeastward. As the population shrinks in western Pennsylvania and grows in eastern Pennsylvania, the politically pivotal state is becoming more suburban, more Democratic, more eastern. It is becoming more like New Jersey and less like Ohio.

FOREIGN POLICY: 2 CAMPS SEEK MCCAIN'S EAR
(Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rohter, New York Times)
Senator John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity, and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world. But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — is expressing concern that Mr. McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

DAVID BROCK, DEMS PLAN $40 MILLION HIT ON MCCAIN
(Ben Smith, Politico)
Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Senator John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist. The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA... After a dinner Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of liberal megadonor George Soros, at which Brock and the consultant Paul Begala laid out the group's plans, Brock said his group now has commitments worth $7.5 million – almost twice what the Fund for America is expected to report raising in the first quarter of this year. He said the group would begin running ads before it meets its $40 million goal. Brock suggested that the group could do the work of a press corps that, he says, has "fallen down on the job" when it comes to McCain.

CHELSEA CLINTON FINDS HER VOICE
(Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post)
The once and perhaps future first daughter is branching out in ways that the Clinton campaign -- which practically had to beg the candidate to allow her to appear in Iowa late last year -- never imagined. She regularly calls donors to thank them for contributions, an important task usually reserved for her parents; she records automated telephone calls to voters; and this week she posted a "welcome note" on her Facebook page, launching her first real effort to use the networking Web site on her mother's behalf. Yet a certain tension persists between the high school and college student of the 1990s, whose private life was zealously guarded while her father was president, and the accomplished professional woman courting publicity and playing a familiar role in American politics: enhancing a candidate's image as a parent and an embodiment of family values. Clinton has declined interviews; only a few authorized insiders are allowed to talk about her; she is even shielded by her mother at difficult moments as the campaign has tried to use her wattage to attract votes without exposing her to the rigors, such as talking with the news media, that most adult public figures expect. That has produced some hostility between her and reporters, and led to criticism that she is trying to have it both ways.

THE ARIA OF CHRIS MATTHEWS
(Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine)
For as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback — to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the ’60s and the O’Neill-Reagan battles of the ’80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-’90s, when “Hardball” started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga. Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.