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

THINKING ABOUT NOVEMBER
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
What can be done to heal the party’s current divisions? More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal. Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance. After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have “gone to the Republican nominee for many elections.” On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that “we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics.” That sort of thing has to stop. One thing the Democrats definitely need to do is give delegates from Florida and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention. And to the extent that campaigning matters, Mr. Obama should center his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race. The point is that Mr. Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year’s election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.

OBAMA SEEKS TO UNIFY PARTY FOR NOVEMBER
(Shailagh Murray and Perry Bacon, Jr., Washington Post)
Returning to Washington yesterday, Obama was mobbed by well-wishers as he walked onto the House floor. But behind the scenes, his campaign worked with a light touch to win over uncommitted superdelegates and allies of Clinton, mindful of not appearing overconfident and of the fact that they would need the backing of the candidate, her husband and their supporters in the fall. With numerous prominent Democrats believed to be waiting in the wings to endorse his candidacy, Obama appears poised to win the pledged delegates and superdelegates he will need to claim the Democratic nomination as early as May 20, when Kentucky and Oregon vote.

CLINTON ASKS SUPERS TO COMMIT IN PRIVATE
(Ben Smith and Amie Parnes, Politico)
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit to Capitol Hill this week may have been more about weighing her support than it was about wooing superdelegates. According to a senior Democratic aide, Clinton asked some uncommitted superdelegates if they could commit to her privately--without the political risks of a public endorsement--so that she could gauge whether she has the support she feels she needs to remain a viable candidate... One Clinton supporter familiar with the meetings described the senator's "ask" as "vague" ...Obama, by contrast, took the Hill by storm Thursday. In the morning, he met with a large group of uncommitted Blue Dog Democrats [the House moderate and conservative coalition] at a townhouse owned by UPS. Then he walked over to the House and spent half an hour working the left side of the chamber, shaking hands, signing autographs and posing for pictures. In the afternoon, he spent nearly three hours at the Democratic National Committee, where he met with a number of superdelegates, including four North Carolina congressmen. “We seem to be making progress,” Obama told reporters after his meetings ended on Thursday.

MORE: Obamamania Sweeps the Hill (Ryan Grim, Politico)
As Obama made his way slowly through the House mob, reporters piled up outside the nearest door to the House floor, craning their necks to get a look. Security guards pressed through the media crowd, repeatedly asking the Fourth Estate to keep a lane open for lawmakers. Supporters and opponents alike maneuvered to get face time, whether it was 73-year-old Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.) patiently waiting his turn or Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.), a Clinton supporter, giving Obama a big hug. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) had the man autograph today's copy of the NY Daily News. (Cover: "It's his Party.") Reps. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a Clinton backer, and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) gave him bear hugs on the floor, as well. Even Republicans were star-struck. Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said she was escorting a group of elementary school students onto the House floor when Obama made his entrance.

FOR HILLARY CLINTON, NO 'CLEAR PATH TO VICTORY'--NOR TO AN EXIT
(Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times) 
She's darting around the country like a full-fledged presidential candidate, but within Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's circle of advisors and donors, the conversation has turned to how she can make a dignified exit from the race. But for all the signs of normalcy, much of the infrastructure that keeps the New York senator's campaign going -- the aides, donors and political allies -- is resigned to the hard reality that the Democratic nomination now appears out of reach. One Clinton aide said Thursday: "There is a profound sadness" among the staff. "I don't think anyone sees that there's a clear path to victory here."... Ultimately, an aide said, Clinton will decide with her husband what to do; staff won't be consulted on so momentous a decision... Some members of Clinton's circle are thinking through the conditions under which she might concede the race. One supporter familiar with the campaign's operations said that Clinton wanted to go out on a positive note -- say, after winning in West Virginia and Kentucky, whose primaries are May 13 and 20, respectively.

MCCAIN SETS STAGE FOR FALL RUN
(Laura Meckler and Elizabeth Holmes, Wall Street Journal)
Sen. McCain received the gift of time to lay the groundwork for his fall campaign, as Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought each other for the Democratic nomination. Now that the Democratic fight appears to be nearing an end, the Arizona senator will soon find out how effectively he used the time. Sen. Obama already has begun pivoting toward the general election. Soon, he is likely to unleash attack ads aimed at defining Sen. McCain. With vastly more money, Sen. Obama will be able to flood the airwaves as voters are forming impressions. 

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

OPTIONS DWINDLING FOR CLINTON
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
In this case, a split was not a draw... In short, Mrs. Clinton could not have asked for a better second chance to turn this campaign around and to make her central case to superdelegates: that Mr. Obama was a damaged general election candidate who would get swallowed up by the Republican Party. Yet she was unable on Tuesday to build her base of support substantially beyond the white, working-class voters who had sustained her for the last month. That will not be lost on the superdelegates, the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately decide this fight. And the superdelegates are where the fight is moving: after 50 nominating contests, there are only 6 left, with just 217 pledged delegates left to be elected, not enough to get either of them over the 2,025 threshold necessary to win the nomination. Mr. Obama’s aides said Mrs. Clinton would have to win close to 70 percent of the remaining pledged delegates and superdelegates to win the nomination, a shift in the campaign’s trajectory that would seem possible only if some big development came along to hurt Mr. Obama.

MORE: Clinton Fails to Get Needed Game-Changer (Beth Fouhy, AP)
Her aides insist she will press anew for a resolution to the disputed contests in Michigan and Florida, both of which she won, but whose results were voided because the primaries were moved in violation of Democratic Party rules. Anticipating those efforts, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sent a memo to superdelegates reminding them of the math. He said Clinton would need to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates to win the nomination -- an extremely unlikely scenario, made harder by her poor performance Tuesday. "With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, the are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or millions of supporters, volunteers and donors."

OBAMA TAKES DECISIVE STEP TOWARD NOMINATION
(Ben Smith, Politico) 
Sen. Barack Obama took a large and potentially decisive step toward the Democratic nomination Tuesday night, making dramatic symbolic and numerical gains in North Carolina and Indiana. Obama’s emphatic North Carolina victory, and a narrow loss in Indiana, extended his lead in the count of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and in most counts of the combined popular vote. As important, they diminished Clinton’s rationale for urging Democratic superdelegates to override his delegate lead and give the nomination to her. Her case to party elders — that Obama was a flawed, flagging candidate — lost much of its altitude despite a nail-biting and narrow victory in Indiana. Her bread-and-butter pitch to voters fell prey to the doubts Obama’s television campaign raised about her sincerity. What had been, in the best of scenarios an up hill climb, became far steeper. 

MORE: What Happened in Indiana and N.C. (David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
There were unique findings in the two states that separated these voters from past contests — particularly the power of the issue of economic anxiety. Nearly seven in 10 Indiana voters said the economy was the most important issue, as did six in 10 North Carolinians. That degree of economic concern in Indiana was above financial angst in Pennsylvania or even Ohio, a state hit especially hard by unemployment. But unlike in Pennsylvania, the voters most anxious about the economy were not handily carried by Clinton. In Indiana, she won only a slim majority of these voters and in North Carolina, Obama won a majority. Also on the economic front, it appears Clinton’s gas tax proposal, which was heavily debated this past week, likely did not move votes to her side.

CLINTON AIDES DOUBTFUL ABOUT FUTURE
(Perry Bacon, Jr. and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post)
The outcome caused the candidate and her campaign to intensify their efforts to persuade party leaders to include the results of disqualified contests in Michigan and Florida, both of which she won. The Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws committee is scheduled to meet on May 31 to consider two challenges pending on whether, and how, to seat delegates from those states. "Absent some sort of miracle on May 31st, it's going to be tough for us," said a senior Clinton official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be frank. "We lost this thing in February. We're doing everything we can now . . . but it's just an uphill battle."

HOW DOES CLINTON LOSE?
(Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic)
MAY 20 -- THAT'S the date when the campaign unofficially expects to "clinch" the nomination -- when they'll officially have a majority of pledged delegates, which triggers, in their view, the standard for superdelegate decision-making set by party leaders like Nancy Pelosi. I expect -- and the Obama campaign expects -- to see the pace of his superdelegate pick-ups increase. They expect a few superdelegate defections from Clinton as well. Within the next few weeks, Obama might well pass Clinton in the number of superdelegate endorsements. Remember, though: the superdelegates are followers. They're politically wimpy... and they like to be wooed. EXPECT OBAMA in the next few days to prize unity above all else -- and to turn his attention away from Clinton and towards the notion of a unified Democratic Party and the race against McCain. The Clinton campaign will limp to West Virginia with just enough energy and barely any money. The campaign will point to the DNC rules committee meeting on 5/31, but DNC officials tell me that the staff recommendation provided to the committee -- a recommendation that has so far been kept secret -- is not unambiguously favorable to Clinton's interpretation of the rules.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

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

COMBAT AND COMPOSURE
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria. His astounding composure has come across as weakness in the midst of combat with Clinton, but it’s also at the core of his promise to change politics. He vows to calm hatred and heal division. This contrast between combat and composure defines the Democratic race. The implicit Clinton argument is that politics is an inherently nasty business. Human nature, as she said Sunday, means that progress comes only through conquest. You’d better elect a leader who can intimidate. You’d better elect someone who has given herself permission to be brutal. Obama’s campaign grows out of the longstanding reform tradition. His implicit argument is that politics doesn’t have to be this way. Dishonesty and brutality aren’t inevitable; they’re what gets in the way... Amid the storms of the presidency, their basic worldviews would shape their presidencies. Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight. If elected, she’ll have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.

FOR PRIMARIES IN TWO STATES, A VARIETY OF SCENARIOS
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
It’s almost over. Well, not quite. But the Democratic presidential primaries taking place on Tuesday in North Carolina and Indiana have more delegates up for grabs than any of the remaining contests. For political, demographic and mathematical reasons, those states have the potential to reshape the competition between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. It will be an opportunity for Mrs. Clinton to make the case that Democratic sentiment is swinging in her favor, and to slice into Mr. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates and in the popular vote (putting aside the disputed contests in Florida and Michigan). For Mr. Obama, it is a chance to tamp down talk that Mrs. Clinton has exposed him as a flawed general election candidate.

EIGHT QUESTIONS ABOUT TODAY'S PRIMARIES
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
Has Obama put the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy behind him? Will the gas tax holiday proposal help or hurt Clinton? Will a Clinton win in either contest guarantee that the race will go to the convention? After today, which state will be most important to determining the Democratic contest? Is there a person remaining whose endorsement could make a difference in the race? If Obama wins the nomination, can he win working-class white voters in November? If Clinton wins the nomination, will black voters support the Democratic ticket? Who do Republican leaders see as the tougher opponent -- Obama or Clinton?

FIVE THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN INDIANA... AND NORTH CAROLINA
(Carrie Budoff Brown, Politico)
Indiana: Before Barack Obama experienced a rough couple of weeks, his campaign was optimistic about his chances in this state. But with a black population of less than ten percent and swaths of blue collar towns and rural counties, Indiana is looking far more favorable to Hillary Clinton, who has blanketed the state with visits from her, former President Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea. Can she achieve a replay of Ohio and Pennsylvania, when the rural counties turned in huge margins for her? Or will Obama, with significant endorsements in southern Indiana, be able to cut into her support? And will Obama succeed in driving up his totals in Indianapolis and the northwestern corner of the state?

North Carolina: If Barack Obama's late decision to hold his election night rally in Raleigh is any indication (his campaign didn't settle on a location until Monday afternoon), the Illinois senator is feeling confident about his chances in North Carolina.  It’s a good thing, for an upset win by Hillary Clinton in North Carolina could shake up the presidential campaign if paired with a Clinton victory in Indiana.

DEMOCRATIC DIVISIONS WILL BE HARD TO BRIDGE
(James Carville, Financial Times)
Underlying all of this is the inevitable game of electoral chicken that is almost certain to erupt at the conclusion of the contest. The winner, with help from the loser, is not only going to have to bridge the fissures within the party but also to find a way to re-embrace those racial and gender identity voters who now find themselves aligned with a new wing of the party. If Mrs Clinton wins the nomination, do the Party B African-Americans who have embraced Mr Obama’s campaign feel comfortable remaining in the party and voting for Mrs Clinton? Conversely, are the Party A, older, college-educated white women comfortable embracing Mr Obama’s candidacy after supporting Mrs Clinton so fervently? Only time will tell and it is certainly not as simple or easy as it seems. When you consider that African-Americans make up slightly less of the Democratic party as self-identified evangelical or social conservatives do for the Republican party (about 25 per cent), you get a sense of how serious this could be for Democrats.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

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

SPIN SET, LET THE VOTING BEGIN
(Ben Smith, Politico)
Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton toured Indiana on Sunday, both calling themselves the “underdog.” But as they barrel into the biggest states left to vote, North Carolina and Indiana, polling and conventional wisdom have set clear expectations that belie that label. Obama, barring catastrophe, should win North Carolina handily. Clinton is expected, with somewhat less confidence, to win Indiana — and will likely be forced from the race if she fails to carry the state... With just a handful of smaller states left to vote after Tuesday, the candidates aren’t looking to surprise voters or build traditional political momentum. Rather, they are aiming to impress a small but important audience: the more than 250 Democratic Party officials, or superdelegates, who have yet to publicly back a candidate. That means Clinton, who trails in the overall delegate count, is the one praying for lightning to strike. 

NO ENDGAME
(Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker)
Whatever the outcome of this week’s primaries, the pressure to resolve the Democratic contest can only increase. How Clinton will respond is unclear: her campaign seems to have entered a new, almost mystical phase, in which the number of votes received or delegates pledged no longer matters. “We don’t think this is just going to be about some numerical metric,” Geoff Garin, one of her chief strategists, recently told the Washington Post. After her back-from-the-dead victory in Ohio, Clinton committed herself to soldiering on not despite but because of the fact that the situation seemed hopeless. For everyone “across America who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, and for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up,” she said, “this one is for you.” That message understandably resonates with voters who, when they are not bitterly clinging to their guns and their religion, are having trouble meeting their mortgage payments. As long as Clinton is willing to fight on simply for the sake of fighting, there really is no reason that this endless campaign has to end.

MCCAIN-JINDAL?
(William Kristol, New York Times)
A McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41. That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number. Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.

RUTHLESSNESS AND GRIT SEEN IN CLINTON'S STYLE
(Mark Leibovich and Kate Zernike, New York Times)
In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for “counting me out” and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to “close the deal” and declared that no one was going to make her quit. “She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her “testicular fortitude.” This kind of language and pugilistic imagery, however, also evokes the baggage that makes Mrs. Clinton such a provocative political figure. For as much as a willingness to “do what it takes” and “die hard” are marketable commodities in politics, they can also yield to less flattering qualities, plenty of which have been ascribed to her over the years. Just as supporters praise her “toughness” and “tenacity,” critics also describe her as “divisive,” “a dirty fighter” or “willing to do anything to win." The critics include supporters of Mr. Obama who subscribe to the notion, pushed by their candidate, that Mrs. Clinton, his opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination, represents the fractious politics of the past.

MORE: Hillary Clinton Would Be the Bigger Gamble (Clive Crook, Financial Times)
Clintonistas delude themselves that their candidate has been fully vetted, whereas Mr Obama is only now coming under scrutiny. This is an error. Mr Obama is not probing the many scandals of her past, because his campaign is positioned to be above all that. And Mr McCain is not doing it either – not yet – because he expects to be facing Mr Obama in November. If Mrs Clinton were nominated, you can bet that the scandals of the 1990s and before would be dusted down and freshened up. This points to the largest issue for Democrats to bear in mind. In US politics, Mrs Clinton is a uniquely divisive figure. To be sure, division is her element – as one can see, she relishes the fight – and a little of that in a politician is a good thing. But nothing could energise wavering Republicans to turn out for Mr McCain, or de-energise Mr Obama’s bright-eyed new Democrats, so thoroughly as the living prospect of another Clinton presidency. 

ABOUT THAT CRUSH ON OBAMA
(Kurt Anderson, New York Magazine)
With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama’s leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that’s embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk. Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. And … so … it’s all … his fault, that highfalutin Obama! Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks (hello, George Stephanopoulos!), instead of copping to the “elitist” sensibilities they obviously share with him (and the Clintons and McCain)—we travel abroad and read books, we have healthy bank accounts and drink wine; so shoot us—reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign’s faux-populist talking points about Obama’s condescension toward the yokel class.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

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

CLINTON MAY BE HOPEFUL, BUT OBAMA ROLLS ON
(Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, New York Times)
Have Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination improved as Senator Barack Obama has struggled through his toughest month of this campaign? After weeks in which her candidacy was seen by many party leaders as a long shot at best, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers argued strenuously on Thursday that the answer was most assuredly yes, that the outlook was turning in her favor in a way that gave her a real chance. Still, despite a series of trials that have put Mr. Obama on the defensive and illustrated the burdens he might carry in a fall campaign, the Obama campaign is rolling along, leaving Mrs. Clinton with dwindling options... Many superdelegates said they were queasy about Mr. Obama and his former pastor, and fearful of how the issue might be used in the fall. Still, they said they were not convinced that that made him a weaker general-election candidate than Mrs. Clinton, or at least not convinced enough to cast a vote that could be portrayed as overturning the will of Democratic primary voters and blocking the effort by Mr. Obama to become the nation’s first African-American president.

MORE: Obama's Wright Response Wins Him Superdelegates (Sam Youngman, The Hill)
While the reverend’s controversial remarks and his widely panned appearance at the National Press Club caused many pundits to wonder if superdelegates would be frozen into indecision, those who moved into Obama’s column this week cited the Illinois senator’s reaction as one of their reasons for backing him.

WHEN BLUE COLLARS ARE A TIGHT FIT
(Ronald Brownstein, National Journal)
After Hillary Rodham Clinton's decisive win in last week's Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama and his advisers quickly offered a series of explanations for her resounding advantage among working-class white voters there. In rapid fire, Obama and his team insisted that he had carried those voters in many other states, was improving his performance among them, and did not need them to win a general election; to the extent he faced a problem at all, Obama declared, the difficulty was age and not class. But exit polls from this year's Democratic primaries show that almost all of those assertions are debatable and some are flat-out wrong. Together, the arguments from Obama and his aides raise questions about whether his campaign is honestly confronting the challenge he is facing with working-class whites--or whether he is in some measure of denial.

DEMOCRATS SCRAMBLE FOR INDIANA
(Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal)
Determining the victor in Tuesday's presidential nominating contest in Indiana could very well be left to that most elusive of Democratic primary voter: the Republican. A confluence of unusual political events has Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton looking for traction in districts often ignored by Democrats in this deep red state. Several factors suggest that Republican voters may be attracted to the Democratic primary this year, including an open-primary scheme that allows voters of all political stripes to cast ballots, a settled nominating race on the Republican side and a downticket slate that includes few cliffhanger races to interest the Republican faithful... The Obama camp is applying a grass-roots organizational zeal to courting Republicans, much as it has done for younger voters in previous contests. The best example: Hamilton County, a suburban enclave north of Indianapolis that delivered 72% of its vote to President Bush in 2004. This week, the Obama camp opened its third field office there, in the county seat of Noblesville. 

UNLIKELY ALLIES FOR A GAS-TAX HOLIDAY
(Julie Bosman, New York Times)
Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton found themselves taking a lonely stand on the campaign trail Thursday, defending the proposed gasoline-tax holiday while critics from both parties lined up against it. 

MORE: Will Voters Accept Obama's Gas Plea? (Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal)
Sen. Barack Obama's argument that a gas-tax holiday makes no sense -- a stand that is winning plaudits from editorial boards and economists -- isn't always getting through to voters worried about rising gas prices... The political popularity of gas-price relief illustrates the uphill climb facing Sen. Obama. After making his plea Thursday at a retirement community in Columbia City, Ind., an older voter asked him why he couldn't support a gas-tax holiday that would be funded by a tax on oil companies, as Sen. Clinton has proposed, because it would offer some short-term relief. "A lot of us are short term," she quipped.

EVEN MORE: How to Beat Gas Tax Demagoguery (Jonathan Chait, New Republic)
Generally, betting on the intelligence of the American public is a bad move. But... I think this is a great fight for Obama right now. Here's how pointing out his refusal to pander on the gas tax helps Obama: 1. Obama needs to move the narrative past race/class/gender splits, and the gas tax -- a substantive issue where the campaigns clearly differ -- is the only path that's offering itself right now. 2. The specific substance of a candidate's positions matters less than the meta-narrative those issues create around the candidate. John McCain's endorsement of campaign finance reform helped him, not because the public was champing at the bit to ban soft money, but because it suggested that McCain was an independent-minded reformer. Opposing the gas tax suspension positions Obama the same way. 3. It allows him to tie Clinton to McCain. Her political strength is her wonkiness, and her weakness is her reputation for dishonesty and ruthlessness. This issue cuts away at her strength and  reinforces her weakness. 4. It lets him tie McCain to Clinton. McCain's biggest asset is his reputation as a truth-teller. By pandering on an issue where the whole news media knows he's wrong, McCain is squandering his most precious asset. So Obama hammering this issue now will pay dividends in the general election.

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

A STRAINED WRIGHT-OBAMA BOND FINALLY SNAPS
(Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor, New York Times)
Mr. Obama’s campaign has been striking for its discipline. This is a candidate who prides himself on his coolness and singleness of purpose, not to mention his ability to take on opponents as formidable as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, the former president. But Mr. Obama discovered one figure who has confounded him, his own pastor. In recent months, the candidate has tried to distance himself from Mr. Wright and his often radical views, even as he felt compelled to understand and explain his former pastor to a larger, predominantly white political world. As for Mr. Wright, he saw a cascade of perceived slights coming from the campaign of a bright young follower whose political ambitions were tugging him away from Trinity United Church of Christ. He saw the church he had founded coming under pressure from reporters and critics, forced to hire security guards. And he made no secret of whom he blamed: Mr. Obama’s political adviser, David Axelrod, a white Chicago political operative.

MORE: Loss and Furor Take Toll on Obama, Poll Finds (New York Times)
Fifty-one percent of Democratic primary voters say they expect Mr. Obama to win their party’s nomination, down from 69 percent a month ago. Forty-eight percent of Democrats say he is the candidate with the best chance of beating Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, down from 56 percent a month ago.

THE FOLLY OF MCCAIN CARE
(Jonathan Cohn, New Republic)
More than 30 states already have programs almost exactly like the one McCain just sketched out. They are called "high risk pools," and the idea is pretty straightforward: Private insurers agree to sell policies directly to individuals, even those with pre-existing medical conditions, as long as the state helps to subsidize the cost. But the whole reason conservatives like McCain prefer this approach to liberal schemes for universal coverage is that it involves minimal government regulation. As a result, private insurers have enormous leeway in dictating the terms of coverage. And one place they use that leeway is by setting high prices. A few years ago, a Commonwealth Fund study found that, on average, state high-risk pools offered coverage that was two-thirds more expensive than regularly priced coverage. In some states, the high-risk coverage was actually twice as high as regular coverage. At those prices, you might think the coverage was spectacular. Not so. While private insurers in high-risk pools are willing to accept people with pre-existing conditions, they're not generally willing to cover expenses related to those pre-existing conditions--at least not right away. Nearly all the plans surveyed had waiting periods of between six months and a year, during which the insurers would not cover care for prior medical problems.

WHILE CLINTON FOCUSES, OBAMA IS DISTRACTED
(Patrick Healy, New York Times)
Pumped up and focused, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is putting in 16-hour days in Indiana this week as if she — and not her embattled rival, Senator Barack Obama — needs a campaign-changing moment in Tuesday’s primary here. In fact, Indiana is a must-win state for her. Not only is Mrs. Clinton behind in accumulating presidential delegates, she now also faces a new test: Showing that she can seize the opportunity, created by the public fracas between Mr. Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., to win over a cross-section of Democrats in this broadly representative state. With Mr. Obama politically bruised by his former pastor, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on Tuesday are perhaps the best chance yet for Mrs. Clinton to prove that she is the stronger general-election candidate.

WRIGHT UPROAR BOOSTS CLINTON'S CONFIDENCE
(Mike Allen and John F. Harris, Politico)
For the past couple of months, Clinton has been resting her hopes — and resisting calls to drop out — on the possibility of a game-changer, some unforeseen event that would change the prism through which the media, superdelegates and average Democrats are viewing her uphill campaign against Barack Obama. It won’t be clear until the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina whether the game really has changed. But recent days have shown that the ground has shifted in important ways for her.  Some are concrete: better fundraising, well-timed endorsements and a spate of polls showing how Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has broken skin politically.Others are more intangible: crisp performances by Clinton at a time when the usually poised Obama has appeared more rattled than at any time in this campaign, as well as a Clinton campaign team that is no longer defeatist and morose behind the scenes.  By no means are they effusive. Under their best-case scenario, Clinton advisers believe she will be about 100 delegates behind Obama when the primary season ends on June 3. But if the mathematics of the race has not changed, aides believe the psychology has.

GO FOR THE BITTER BLOC
(Reihan Salam, Weekly Standard)
In a sense, Hillary Clinton's coalition of white working class and Latino voters represents a better path for the Democratic party's future than Barack Obama's coalition of social liberals and black voters, which, as John Judis has noted, resembles nothing so much as George McGovern's losing coalition of 1972. Granted, there are far more college-educated liberals now than there were a generation ago. But here's the thing--the McGovern coalition included all minorities, as though minority status were defining and rigid. To the extent Latino voters can be pried loose from neo-McGovernism, the whole enterprise collapses.. In doing so, [McCain] could remove places like Nevada, Florida, and New Mexico from the swing state column and improve his standing in increasingly blue-trending Colorado... It's a tall order. Still, if McCain manages to pull off a victory, Republicans will owe a debt to the path blazed by the Hillary Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania--not that they would ever thank such an unlikely benefactor, and not that she would ever want to be thanked.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

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

OBAMA'S SISTER SOULJAH MOMENT
(Richard Wolffe, Newsweek)
For a campaign that had little comment on Wright's media blitz on Monday, Obama's press conference was a complete reversal. Many pundits have wondered aloud why Barack Obama has not had a Sister Souljah moment in this campaign, evoking Bill Clinton's 1992 repudiation of the hip-hop star's inflammatory and racist comments. In Winston-Salem Obama went far beyond Clinton's criticism, disowning his former pastor—and running the risk of alienating a community on the South Side of Chicago that has been among his most ardent supporters. Yet it didn't sound as though Obama was in the mood for political calculation on Tuesday.

MORE:
Obama's Break with Ex-Pastor Sets Sharp Shift in Tone (Jeff Zeleny and Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
The first real evidence of whether the controversy has extracted a political price could come on Tuesday. Superdelegates suggested that they would watch closely to see how voters respond in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries and beyond.

Obama Breaks with Former Pastor (Ben Smith, Politico)
In the short term, this furor presents a delicate challenge for Clinton, who must ride the issue without seeming to stoke it. “Any attempt to keep the issue alive for its own sake will hurt whoever does that,” Shrum said. Conversations with uncommitted superdelegates Tuesday afternoon revealed no immediate shifts as a result of Wright’s or Obama’s words.

WRIGHT, JEFFERSON AND THE WRATH OF GOD
(John Nichols, The Nation)
Not all of what Wright says is comforting. Nor are his views universally appealing or entirely unassailable. But they are very much within the mainstream of American religious and political discourse. The problem is not Jeremiah Wright. The problem is a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune -- and a media that willingly invites manipulation. Let's not forget how Wright became an issue in the 2008 presidential race. Republican operatives, fretful about their party's political fortunes, decided that the only way to weaken the candidacy of Wright's longtime parishioner, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, was by suggesting the Democratic presidential front-runner was in the sway of an anti-American radical. That end was achieved by separating out from long and thoughtful sermons regarding matters biblical and political seemingly offensive phrases and then inviting the Grand Old Party's media echo chamber to repeat the sound bites until they became conventional "wisdom."

OR: Obama's Chickens Come Home to Roost (Robert Tracinski, TIA Daily)
he purpose of Obama's famous speech on race was to make Wright seem reasonable, understandable, even mainstream. The Obama campaign's hope, no doubt, was that this would make the Wright story go away. But Wright interpreted it as an invitation. If he's so understandable and mainstream, why not go on a media tour to explain himself to the world? And why not use Obama's own arguments to justify himself and browbeat his critics? All of this is why it is no use for Obama to backpedal from his association with Reverend Wright, or to denounce him now, six weeks too late.

OBAMA THE INEVITABLE
(Gabor Steingart, Der Spiegel)
The debate that has now begun comes too late for Hillary Clinton. The superdelegates, who can vote for the candidate of their choice without taking voter preferences into account, in fact have no other choice but to nominate Obama. They will have to suppress the growing fear that the Democrats cannot win the election against Republican candidate John McCain in November if Obama is their candidate. Still, as long as Obama can hold onto his slight lead in the number of pledged delegates, he will be the inevitable candidate. In fact, there is now almost a national political obligation to nominate Obama. A vote by superdelegates against Obama would set off shock waves within American society, with incalculable consequences. Young people would be outraged, intellectuals would be bitter and violence could erupt in predominantly black urban neighborhoods around the country. An apparent rejection of her black rival would also do more to harm Hillary Clinton than help her campaign. A candidacy against the background of angry youth or even burning barricades would be of little value.

MORE: Obama May Win Hill Superdelegate Fight (Politico)
Capitol Hill insiders say the battle for congressional superdelegates is over, and one Senate supporter of Barack Obama is hinting strongly that he has prevailed over Hillary Rodham Clinton. While more than 80 Democrats in the House and Senate have yet to state their preferences in the race for the Democratic nomination, sources said Tuesday that most of them have already made up their minds and have told the campaigns where they stand.

MCCAIN STRENGTHENING HIS POLITICAL MARRIAGE
(Carl Hulse, New York Times)
Many Republicans have now concluded that it is only Mr. McCain’s willingness to challenge recent Republican orthodoxy that has left him in a position to credibly contend for the White House, given public dissatisfaction with Republican leadership... But the potential for disharmony certainly exists, given the likelihood that Democrats will retain control of Congress no matter who wins the presidency, combined with Mr. McCain’s demonstrated capacity for engineering compromises, whether it be campaign finance law, immigration or the environment. “If you are a single-issue person or a really ideological person on a cluster of issues, in John McCain your ship has not come in,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close McCain ally. “He will be conservative, but this hard-edge ideology that is embraced by the hard left and the hard right, John has made a career of not giving in to that.” In fact, some see a potentially divided government, with Mr. McCain on one side and a Democratic Congress on the other, as an opportunity to make major agreements. And that is a prospect that could leave some Republicans now in the McCain campaign camp out of the final picture.

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

DEAR SENATOR OBAMA...
(Karl Rove, Newsweek)
Four months ago, you took the political world by storm in Iowa. The media were agog. They called your words "gorgeous," your victory "a message to the world." You "made history" and Americans could "look at ourselves with pride" in "a moment to marvel." Times change. The six weeks leading into Pennsylvania were difficult. You excelled at raising money and gaining endorsements, but got weaker as big problems emerged. Before you can fix them, you must understand them. In Pennsylvania, you won only 30 percent among Catholics and 29 percent among white working-class voters. Defections like this elect Republicans... You argue the son of a single working mom can't be an elitist. But it's not where you start in life; it's where you end up. After a prestigious prep school, Columbia and Harvard, you've ended up with the values of Cambridge, San Francisco and Hyde Park. So you're doing badly in Scranton, Youngstown and Erie, where ordinary Americans live. HERE ARE SIX SUGGESTIONS FOR WHAT TO DO.

DEMOGRAPHY IS KING
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner. The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics... In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas... The divide has even overshadowed campaigning. Surely the most interesting feature of the Democratic race is how unimportant political events are. The candidates can spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising, but they are not able to sway their opponent’s voters to their side. They can win a stunning victory, but the momentum doesn’t carry over from state to state. They can make horrific gaffes, deliver brilliant speeches, turn in good or bad debate performances, but these things do not alter the race. In Pennsylvania, Obama did everything conceivable to win over Clinton’s working-class voters. The effort was a failure. The great uniter failed to unite. In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.

WHERE WRIGHT GOES WRONG
(Eugene Robinson, Washington Post)
It's understandable, given how Wright has been treated, that he would want to attempt to set the record straight. No one would enjoy seeing his 36-year career reduced to a couple of radioactive sound bites. No preacher would want his entire philosophy to be assessed on the basis of a few rhetorical excesses committed in the heat of a passionate sermon. No former Marine would stomach having his love of country questioned by armchair patriots who have done far less to protect the United States from its enemies. Given Wright's long silence, I thought he had taken to heart Jesus's admonition to turn the other cheek. Obviously, I was wrong. I'm through with Wright not because he responded -- in similar circumstances, I certainly couldn't have kept silent -- but because his response was so egocentric. We get it, Rev. Wright: You're ready for your close-up.

MORE: A Pastor at Center Stage (George Will, Washington Post)
Because John McCain and other legislators worry that they are easily corrupted, there are legal limits to the monetary contributions that anyone can make to political candidates. There are, however, no limits to the rhetorical contributions that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright can make to McCain's campaign.

OBAMA HEADS FOR SUPERDELEGATE EDGE
(Jackie Calmes, Wall Street Journal)
Despite his loss in Pennsylvania and other campaign bumps, Barack Obama is heavily favored to win what will be the final and decisive contest for the Democratic presidential nomination -- the "invisible primary" for the convention votes of party leaders... Many of them see Sen. Obama as more electable than Sen. Clinton. But even those who don't have been impressed by his grass-roots organizing and fund raising and the legions of new voters he has attracted, particularly younger and African-American voters. The politicians -- especially Democrats with significant African-American populations or college campuses in their districts -- see benefit for themselves in these new voters. By contrast, many see Sen. Clinton's alienating some general-election voters. A Democratic strategist to congressional candidates cites Sen. Clinton's high negative ratings in opinion polls. Politicians "all think Obama will stimulate African-American turnout, and they all know there's no way she gets independents or Republicans," says the strategist, who is unaligned in the presidential race.

MCCAIN MOVES TO THE MIDDLE ON HEALTH CARE
(Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is proposing a greater federal commitment to people without health insurance on Tuesday, suggesting that states set up non-profit risk pools to help Americans who are denied coverage or can’t afford it. The federal government would help fund them, with McCain’s health-policy experts providing a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year... Until now, McCain has emphasized such conventional conservative measures as tax deductions and malpractice reform. His new stance puts him closer to where former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was during the primary, an approach McCain had criticized. McCain is taking a step beyond tax incentives and tort reform, but not a leap. He is noncommittal in his remarks, pointing to the non-profit organizations as one effective approach that he would discuss with governors. 

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

CANDIDATES' HEALTH CARE IDEAS MAY NOT OFFER IMMEDIATE CARE
(Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Sen. John McCain kicks off a week of health-care pegged events Monday with a simple message: The fundamental problem facing the health-care system is spiraling costs that must be brought under control. It is an idea that Democrats and Republicans agree on. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing many of the same things that Sen. McCain supports. But health-care experts say it is unclear how many of the candidates' ideas could actually make a dent in the rising cost of care, particularly in the short term.

BILL VS. BARACK
(Ryan Lizza, New Yorker)
Adjusting to the modern, gaffe-centric media environment has been wrenching. At most of [Bill's] Pennsylvania stops, the national press was represented mainly by a pair of young TV-network “embeds,” whom Clinton regards not as reporters but as media jackals who record his every utterance yet broadcast only his outbursts, a phenomenon that has helped transform him into a YouTube curiosity and diminished him—perhaps permanently. “It’s like he’s been plucked out of time and thrown into the middle of this entirely new kind of campaign,” the adviser told me. Jay Carson, a senior Clinton campaign official and Bill’s former spokesman, said, “Because of the way he is covered, the only thing anyone ever sees is fifteen seconds that is deemed by the pundits to be off message.” The focus on Clintonian error has obscured a serious debate that Obama and the former President tried to have. 

CHANGING THE CHANGELING
(John Heilemann, New York)
What the past two months have shown beyond doubt is that Obama’s campaign is in desperate need of a serious midcourse retooling—in particular, a sharper economic message, delivered from a brawler’s stance, in order to give those blue-collar voters who’ve sided with Clinton a bedrock reason to stay in the Democratic column and not flee to McCain, as many now threaten to do. Even more important, though, the time has come for Obama to move beyond his airy mantra of post-partisan transformation. The polarization that plagues our politics is an awful thing, no doubt. But the irony is that before Obama can do anything to change it, he needs to win. And winning will require him to channel the very partisan furies—the anger at Bush, the ire toward the Republicans, the palpable yearning for a fight—that he eventually hopes to tame. 

EYES ON BLUE-COLLAR VOTERS, OBAMA SHIFTS STYLE
(Jeff Zeleny and Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
In interviews with several associates and aides, Mr. Obama was described as bored with the campaign against Mrs. Clinton and eager to move into the general election against Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee. So the Obama campaign is undertaking modifications in his approach intended to inject an air of freshness into his style. In strategy sessions last week, advisers concluded that Mr. Obama, of Illinois, needed to do a better job reminding voters of his biography, including his modest upbringing by a single mother and one of his first jobs as a community organizer helping displaced steel mill workers. He also has to sharpen his economic message, they said, to improve his appeal and connection with voters in hope of capitalizing on the sensibilities that served him well in Midwestern states.

MORE: Obama Tackles Bread and Butter Issues in Indiana (Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal)
Campaigning in central Indiana, which has been hit hard by plant closings this decade and where unemployment is two percentage points above the national average, the presidential candidate spoke about how he would bring changes to help people overcome their economic plight. Sen. Obama's stripped-down stump speech marks a shift from the last primary, in Pennsylvania, where he pressed for change without as direct an economic hook.

HOW MCCAIN LOST PENNSYLVANIA
(Frank Rich, New York Times)
Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama. Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

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

NEWSWEEK.COM: How Obama Can Shed the 'Elitist' Label (Fineman); The Granny Gap (Alter); The Green Phantom (Thomas)

OBAMA HAS A PUNCTUATION PROBLEM
(John F. Harris and David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
Barack Obama’s real opponent now is not Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is a pair of punctuation marks. The first is a question. The second is an asterisk. Both threaten to hover over Obama if he wins the Democratic nomination without confronting and defeating the doubts Clinton has raised about his political strength beyond his electoral base of African-Americans and upscale whites. This is the significance of Indiana. Obama can and probably will win the Democratic nomination no matter what happens in the May 6 primary. But a victory in the Hoosier state is critical to Obama gaining at least some of the political and psychic momentum that ordinarily flow to a nomination winner. A loss—on top of a succession of losses in Pennsylvania, Ohio and other big states—would mean the nominee would enter the general election defined to an unusual degree by his vulnerabilities. Could he run strongly in these states in a general election even after running weakly during the nomination phase? That is the question.

AS DEMOCRATS FIGHT, MCCAIN SEEKS THE MIDDLE
(Matt Bai, New York Times)
Democrats scoff that Mr. McCain is a man running against the moment. He’s pro-war at a time of growing skepticism over Iraq; he’s a free marketeer at a time of heightened worry over the economy; he’s a symbol of America’s past at a time when all anyone can talk about is the technological future. All of this no doubt concerns the McCain team. But he is also a candidate who enjoys, perhaps more than any other Washington politician, a reputation as a reformer who puts country above party, even when his views are unpopular. And while Mr. McCain may have little chance of winning over black voters in Selma or union guys in Youngstown, his stops there are sending a signal to independent voters that he isn’t as doctrinaire as his primary campaign might have suggested and that he intends to run the kind of broad, truly national campaign that Mr. Obama has promised for his party. The truth is that the electorate was never as binary as Karl Rove or MoveOn told us it was. And the bad news for Democrats, as they continue to rip each other on the nightly news, is that, unlike some of his fellow Republicans, John McCain seems to know it.

CHEER UP, DEMOCRATS!
(Alan I. Abramowitz, New Republic)
According to every known leading indicator, 2008 should be a very good year for Democratic candidates at all levels. There are many factors that point to an across-the-board Democratic victory in November, including the extraordinary unpopularity of President Bush, the deteriorating condition of the economy, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and the fact that Americans prefer the Democratic position to the Republican position on almost every major national issue. However, the most important Democratic advantage, and one that has received relatively little attention in the media, is the fact that for the past six years the Democratic electoral base has been expanding while the Republican electoral base has been shrinking.

USING NEW MATH, CLINTON CONTENDS SHE'S AHEAD
(John M. Broder, New York Times) 
The effort is the latest by Mrs. Clinton to capitalize on her nine-point victory in Pennsylvania and convince the 300 uncommitted party leaders that she has a rightful claim to the nomination. Pushing those efforts, she also met privately on Wednesday and Thursday with uncommitted superdelegates at Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, during a rare evening and morning off the campaign trail. In the meetings, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, talked about her victory in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and her political strength among important voter groups, like women and blue-collar workers, whom the Democrats want to hold onto in the general election, her advisers said. She also talked about her fund-raising success over the last few days, after weeks when she was at a disadvantage to her Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

MCCAIN OFFERS TAX POLICIES HE ONCE OPPOSED
(Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post)
Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush's tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked. McCain's concerns -- about budget deficits, unanticipated defense costs, an Iraq war that would be longer and more costly than advertised -- have proved eerily prescient, usually a plus for politicians who are quick to say they were right when others were wrong. Yet McCain appears determined to leave such predictions behind. To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands the power that business tax relief has to spur economic growth and innovation... To critics, it is political pandering.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP... 

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

BARACK ON IRAQ
(Michael Crowley, The New Republic)
Today, Barack Obama's campaign is largely based around a promise to "end the war" in Iraq by withdrawing troops within 16 months. But some Washington foreign policy mandarins insist this isn't possible--that a total U.S. withdrawal isn't achievable and Obama knows it. That Obama, like Nixon, in fact has a secret plan not to end the war... Or, at least, that Obama's speeches overstate the feasibility of a near-term Iraq exit... The truth is Obama has no secret plan for Iraq. Interviews with nearly two dozen foreign policy and military experts, as well as Obama's campaign advisers, and a close review of Obama's own statements on Iraq, suggest something more nuanced. What he is offering is a basic vision of withdrawal with muddy particulars, one his advisers are still formulating and one that, if he is elected, is destined to meet an even muddier reality on the ground. Obama has set a clear direction for U.S. policy in Iraq: He wants us out of Iraq; but he's not willing to do it at any cost--even if it means dashing the hopes of some of his more fervent and naïve supporters. And, when it comes to Iraq, whatever the merits of Obama's withdrawal plan may be, "Yes, We Can" might ultimately yield to "No, we can't."

FOR OBAMA, A STRUGGLE TO WIN OVER KEY BLOCS
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
Mr. Obama remains ahead of Mrs. Clinton in delegates, in the popular vote and in national polls, and Mrs. Clinton certainly has her own problems trying to herd Democrats into her corner. But just when it seemed that the Democratic Party was close to anointing Mr. Obama as its nominee, he lost yet again in a big general election state, dragged down by his weakness among blue-collar voters, older voters and white voters. The composition of Mrs. Clinton’s support — or, looked at another way, the makeup of voters who have proved reluctant to embrace Mr. Obama — has Democrats wondering, if not worrying, about what role race may be playing.

THE INCREDIBLY SHRINKING DEMOCRATS
(Joe Klein, Time)
Obama... entered the primary as a fresh breeze and left it stale, battered and embittered — still the mathematical favorite for the nomination but no longer the darling of his party. In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. All of which deepened the skepticism that Caucasians, especially those without a college degree, had about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language. And worse, it raised questions among the elders of the party about Obama's ability to hold on to crucial Rust Belt bastions like Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey in the general election — and to add long-suffering Ohio to the Democratic column. Yes, yes, the bulk of the sludge was caricature... But there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message.

CANDIDATES ON EQUAL FOOTING IN INDIANA
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Obama and Clinton have traded the lead in Indiana polls, but