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

WOE IS HE
(John Judis, New Republic)
Obama does have an astounding eloquence, and an ability to put a position across, but that eloquence has been reserved largely for anti-war and good-government positions. His stance against the war may resonate (though that will depend on whether McCain's qualification as commander-in-chief trumps his unpopular stance on the war). But where McCain is most vulnerable and where voters are most likely to smile on a Democrat--on everyday economic issues--Obama's heart doesn't appear to be in it. These difficulties were clear before Obama spoke in San Francisco, but they're much more glaring now. In the speech, Obama appeared to say that Pennsylvania voters' opposition to gun control or abortion or immigration or free trade was pathological--a product of what Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse once called "false consciousness." On the other hand, he implied that when he voiced opposition to an issue like free trade--Obama has consistently hammered Clinton on her support for the North American Free Trade Agreement--he was simply pandering to these voters' displaced anxieties. He was saying to these upscale San Francisco Democrats, "I am really one of you, and I am not one of them."

MORE: Obama's Flaws Multiply (John Fund, Wall Street Journal)
All of this makes Democrats wonder if Mr. Obama is ready for prime time. But they have themselves to blame for letting him get this far largely unexamined. While Republicans tend to nominate their best-known candidate from previous nomination battles (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and now John McCain), Democrats often fall in love during a first date. They are then surprised when all the relatives don't think he's splendid... Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager and an undeclared super delegate, is worried. "With the Wright controversy still lingering and now Obama's unartful comments," she told CNN, "it will paint the picture of Obama as being 'out of sync.'"

FAITH IN SPOTLIGHT, CANDIDATES BATTLE FOR CATHOLIC VOTES
(Robin Toner, New York Times)
There is widespread agreement that American Catholic voters are far more diverse than monolithic. Even so, both the Clinton and the Obama campaigns have hired Catholic outreach directors, deployed an army of prominent Catholic surrogates testifying on their behalf and created mailings that highlight their commitment to Catholic social teachings on economic justice and the common good. Dismayed at losing so many Catholic and other religious voters to the Republicans in 2004, Democrats talk far more often, and more comfortably, about their values and the importance of their own faith these days... Catholics play enough of a role as a swing vote to draw the intense focus of political strategists. Catholics were a reliable part of the urban, New Deal coalition for many years but trended Republican in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming an important element of the so-called Reagan Democrats. After swinging back to the Democrats in the early 1990s, and then voting 53 percent to 37 percent for Mr. Clinton in 1996, they voted narrowly for Al Gore in 2000 but then returned to the Republicans in 2004.

MCCAIN ECONOMIC PLAN TO SHOW A MIXED APPROACH
(Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Mixing austerity and tax cuts, Sen. John McCain is laying out an economic plan that includes increased Medicare premiums for wealthy seniors and a one-year freeze on spending along with a proposal to review a vast swath of federal programs. In a major economic speech Tuesday, the likely Republican presidential nominee also acknowledges economic distress among students and families. He plans to aid students caught in the credit crunch who may have trouble obtaining college loans and to call for another big tax cut -- this one helping families with children. The proposals, combined with those he has already put on the table, show the Arizona senator's mixed approach to economics. He pushes tax cuts, a traditional Republican favorite; government reforms, such as an end to pork-barrel projects; and new spending for those he sees as deserving, such as students looking for loans and homeowners who need to refinance their troubled mortgages. He hopes his new plans, along with a series of ideas already laid out, will persuade voters that he understands times are hard.

DEMOCRATS ON THE FENCE LOOK AT VIABILITY
(Tom Infield, Philadelphia Inquirer)
For them, it's not a question of which candidate is right on the issues. They believe either one would pull the troops out of Iraq. They believe either one would be an advocate for the environment and a friend of the middle class. For undecided Democratic voters in the Philadelphia area, the question that rises above all others is this: Which candidate would better be able to stand up to Republican Party assaults and capture the White House this fall? Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton? Or Sen. Barack Obama?

A SPEECH ABOUT NOTHING
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Barack Obama delivered a speech in Pittsburgh on Monday on the economic stresses facing American workers. In the speech, he devoted one clause in one sentence to the single biggest factor affecting the workplace: technological change. He then devoted 45 sentences to one of the least important: trade deals. Economists differ over how much outsourcing will change the American job market in the future, but there is little evidence that trade has been a major cause of job loss or even wage stagnation so far. As Robert Z. Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in a recent study: “The recent increase in U.S. inequality ... has little to do with global forces that might especially affect unskilled workers — namely, immigration and expanded trade with developing countries.” And yet all Democratic domestic policy discussions have to start with trade and, in 99.9 percent of the cases, end with trade.

BARACK OBAMA'S COUNTERPUNCHING STYLE
(Avi Zenilman and Ben Smith, Politico)
The response was signature Obama: Attack first, sort out the details later, if at all. No apology, no immediate regret, just a sharp counterattack. For a candidate sometimes mocked for being too soft to win a political fistfight, he has shown an uncanny ability to take a punch and then rear back and deliver one in return. When Obama responds this way, it leaves him open to charges that he's undermining his so-called politics of hope. But, showing remarkable dexterity, he has a knack for using these flare-ups to pivot back to the central theme of his candidacy: that politics is broken, and he knows how to change it. Obama, it turns out, has been a devout observer of a philosophy future President Bill Clinton laid out in 1981. "When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don't sit there and take it,” then-Gov. Clinton told Time magazine. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.”

AT CLINTON'S SIDE IN PENNSYLVANIA, RENDELL IS A DEDICATED AND OFTEN BLUNT PROMOTER
(Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times)
Few presidential candidates have ever had the benefit of a local promoter like Mr. Rendell, who before being elected governor was the mayor of Philadelphia. He is campaigning as vigorously for Mrs. Clinton’s election as he would for his own, and constantly talking her up with remarks that, alas, sometimes go off message. (On Monday, he shrugged off the impact of Mr. Obama’s comments. “It will cost a couple of points at the margin, but it won’t be a sea-changer,” the governor said.) But Mr. Rendell is at the ready. He helps craft Mrs. Clinton’s messages, escort her around the state and introduce her at events. He has enlisted his fund-raisers to assist her, ginned up endorsements and coaxed some superdelegates into staying neutral until after the Pennsylvania primary. He has made commercials for her. He juggles state business and her political business with equal urgency — haggling over financing for a development project in Wilkes-Barre and an airport expansion in Erie one minute, calling in to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC the next. His credibility as a local spokesman automatically vaulted him into the national spotlight.

A NATION OF BRIDGES
(Michael Chabon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
I don't hear bitterness or anger when Mr. Obama speaks, or sense it lying at the back of his writing or oratory. Mr. Obama doesn't need a Branch Rickey to lay a cool, restraining hand on his shoulder. Because Jackie Robinson kept his head, fought his lonely battle, played the game so fiercely and so unanswerably, Barack Obama grew up in an America that was measurably different than the one that Robinson inherited. When those contemporary political equivalents of the bleacher bums shouting epithets at Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente went looking for a vein of rage in Barack Obama, they came away disappointed. They had to go looking elsewhere -- in the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- and try to make the case that, as if by the magic of their own fear and intolerance, Rev. Wright's anger and bitterness belonged to Mr. Obama himself. I saw grace, the grace of Robinson and Clemente, in the way Mr. Obama balanced a steadfast refusal to surrender to anger with an equally staunch refusal to deny or repudiate its enduring legacy, for good and ill, in the history of race in America. There was grace in the intelligence and abandon of Robinson running the bases, in the fatal arc of a Clemente throw to home from deep right field, in the steadiness and candor that Mr. Obama brought to bear in making his difficult speech on race in America.