Steve Kornacki

We're going to get a head start on celebrating the 4th, so there'll be no Politicker updates -- barring some major, unforeseen news development -- for the next few days. The rest of the crew will be back next Wednesday, but I'll be here bright and early Monday morning (and I have a feeling Azi will make a guest appearance or two on Monday as well). Enjoy the 4th, and be careful with the fireworks and sparklers.

Marc Ambinder fully explains the nuances of John McCains’ sort-of-but-not-really shake-up today.

Meanwhile, whoever’s calling the shots in McCain’s campaign clearly believes they can get more mileage out of the Wesley Clark flap.

Polls, polls, polls: Gallup national: Obama +2; Florida: McCain +8; Georgia: McCain +8

Father Andrew Greeley has something to say – and you will read it (if you click this link).

There could be a very innocent explanation to the Washington Post’s story about Obama’s discounted mortgage.

Turns out that six-year-old kid wasn’t trying to get Obama to do the Terrorist Fist Bump after all.

A poll finds that there has been extensive damage to Michelle Obama’s image, particularly among white voters.  read more »

Rep. Nydia Velazquez was hardly the only Hillary Clinton supporter to do something like this, but she was certainly the most vocal among New York’s congressional delegation: As the primary season was winding down, Velazquez – in an effort to prop up Clinton’s vice-presidential prospects – went before the press and declared that Barack Obama and his campaign had "a problem of connecting with Latino voters."

Clinton would solve this problem for Obama, Velazquez said, because “the Latino community sees her as a Hispanic leader.  read more »

The decision of Congressional Quarterly, one of several insider publications that tracks the competitiveness of House and Senate races, to change its designation of the contest for Vito Fossella’s 13th District seat from toss-up to "Democrat favored" is causing some discussion today.

The move is understandable given the awful predicament in which the district’s Republicans find themselves. But it’s a potentially significant milestone in light of the district’s long loyalty to the G.O.P. and its status as the last New York City-based district in which Republicans can even compete at the congressional level.

It raises the question: What other districts in this area might change partisan hands this fall?

CQ lists nine other House races in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as either toss-ups or leaning toward one party or the other.  read more »

This morning, The Politico ran an innocuous-seeming story in which a series of unnamed Republican consultants and strategists – with the exception of Ed Rollins, who went on the record – took turn taking shots at various aspects of the McCain campaign’s strategy.

The story didn’t seem particularly surprising, given (a) McCain’s underdog status in the presidential race, which automatically makes many Republicans uneasy; and (b) the general willingness of unnamed consultants and “strategists” to use the cloak of anonymity to tell the world how much better Campaign X would be if they were running the show.  read more »

It’s Wednesday, which means a brand new Observer has hit the streets. Here’s some of what you’ll find inside:

Jason Horowitz has all of the juicy details on the “wholesale absorption” of Hillary Clinton’s braintrust into Barack Obama’s campaign.

Azi Paybarah spends some time with Congressional candidate and friend-of-Chuck-D Kevin Powell.

Joe Conason sticks up for Wesley Clark – and reminds us about the example of James Stockdale.

The editorial page has a fondness for Joe Bruno…

…while Eliot Brown explores whether Bruno’s departure might mean that the state Senate will no longer be the graveyard for tenant-friendly legislation.

And I write about how Barack Obama’s hands will be tied as President when it comes to Middle East issues.

As Azi mentioned yesterday, the folks who usually run this here Politicker are off for the next few days (although the inexhaustible Azi has already sent me an item that I will be posting momentarily), and I'll be sitting in until they return. By all means, please email me with any tips, news links, or general announcements that you think are Politicker-worthy, or even just to say hi. You can get me at skornacki [at] observer.com.

“Stunning G.O.P. setbacks” have prompted Congressional Quarterly to move the race for Vito Fossella’s seat, long held by Republicans, two whole categories – from toss-up to “Democrat favored”

John McCain will have about $85 million to spend against Barack Obama this fall. The NRA will pony up about that much to do the same thing.

It sort of looks like Obama has been taking home mortgage advice from Chris Dodd.

Also, Obama is promising to spend $500 million on faith-based charities because there are some problems that “are simply too big for government to solve alone" -- not because he's trying to win Evangelical voters.  read more »

The economy

It may ultimately be a good thing for Barack Obama that Wesley Clark stepped into such a mess when he discussed John McCain’s military service this week.

The background of the Clark flap is by now familiar: On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, the retired general said that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” a comment that has been portrayed by the right – and by much of the media – as an effort to disparage McCain’s service.

While Obama quickly rebuked Clark, much of the left has rushed to the Clark’s defense, noting that he was merely responding to a question that was almost identically phrased and that he was only drawing a reasonable distinction between McCain’s military service and the experience needed to set U.  read more »

Barack Obama is like any candidate for president in that he’s opted for the politically expedient at the expense of a higher principle – most notably when he thumbed his nose at the same public financing system that he’d long championed. Not surprisingly, his supporters shrugged that one off and echoed their candidate’s rationalizations. Better to implement real reform as president than to stand on principle and lose an election, he and they both reasoned.

That logic also explains why so many of his supporters on the left have remained silent, save for some grumbling among themselves that occasionally spills into the blogosphere, while Mr.  read more »

Glance at practically any public analysis of John McCain’s vice presidential options and you’ll find the name of Tim Pawlenty mentioned prominently. The 47-year-old second-term Minnesota governor is, supposedly, at or near the top of McCain’s shortlist.

There is certainly some logic to this. First, Pawlenty is loyal – he sided with McCain early and unflinchingly stuck with him last summer, when everyone else in the world seemed to give up on him – and McCain likes loyalty. Second, Pawlenty would balance McCain’s advanced age and maverick streak with (relative) youthfulness and more appeal to the Republican base.

Plus, he’d offer the chance to pick up Minnesota, a state that the G.  read more »

The latest wave of polling has been an almost uninterrupted parade of good news for Barack Obama – widening leads in national surveys, solid advantages in most swing states, and startling strength in numerous Republican bastions.

It could all mean nothing, of course. Michael Dukakis led George H. W. Bush by 13 points at this moment in 1988, a margin that would swell to 17 points after the July Democratic convention only to evaporate by Labor Day, never to reappear.

But Obama seems a far more durable candidate than Dukakis, while John McCain leads a Republican Party that is in a state of disrepair unimaginable 20 years ago.  read more »

Howard Dean was supposed to be finished back in January 2004, when his once-overpowering presidential campaign collapsed in the cornfields of Iowa – and when he let out a scream that made him as much laughingstock as loser.

Sure, the conventional wisdom went, he’d still have a loud voice in the national political dialogue. Even in defeat, Dean retained the passionate loyalty of much of the Democratic grass roots, the activists who’d grown irate with the timidity the acquiescence of their party’s Washington establishment to so much of the Bush agenda. But, as the ’04 primary results showed, the grass roots alone wasn’t enough to beat the establishment.  read more »

Barack Obama will not be able to win in the fall because he hasn't been able to win the most important states in the spring.

We heard this argument over and over again, for months on end, from Hillary Clinton and her supporters during the Democratic primary season. And many prominent members of the media bought into it, too, devoting endless space and countless hours to discussions of the supposedly dire general-election problems that Obama faced.

"I've won the states that we have to win—Ohio and now Pennsylvania," Clinton declared after her April 22 victory in the Keystone State. "If you can't win the states we have to win in the fall, maybe that says something about your general-election appeal.  read more »

If Barack Obama does defeat John McCain this fall, Democrats – who are all but certain to bolster their narrow House and Senate majorities no matter who wins the presidential race – will experience a type of euphoria they haven’t felt in 16 years, when Bill Clinton’s election last gave their party simultaneous control of the White House and Congress.

And surely you remember how that worked out for them. Yes, Mr. Clinton won broad popularity and a second term in 1996, but his presidency brought his party to its weakest point in decades. Democrats were swept out of power in the Senate and House in 1994 and by the time Mr.  read more »

Barack Obama the naïve sapling is out, replaced – for the time being at least – by a different caricature: the cunning opportunist, wrapping himself in the mantle of reform in ruthless and amoral pursuit of the White House.

The image began taking hold in the media last week, when Obama rationalized his way out of a previous commitment to make a good-faith effort at participating in the public financing system for the general election.

Given his earlier cutesiness on Nafta, his now infamous 130 “present” votes in the Illinois legislature and his penchant for blaming his staff for his own mistakes, the campaign funding flap could serve as a tipping point in the media’s portrayal of Obama.  read more »

Consider, if only for fun, the theoretical possibility that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman – allies and running mates eight short years ago – end up running against each other this fall.

Gore, of course, is back in the news again this week after delivering a high-profile endorsement of Barack Obama in Michigan. The sight of the two of them together was enough to stir wishful thoughts of an Obama-Gore ticket among the Democratic grass roots. Some pundits had fun with the idea, too.

Lieberman, for his part, has taken an increasingly active and visible role in John McCain’s campaign. He clearly has McCain’s trust and friendship – the two have traveled together extensively this campaign season – and is a highly valued surrogate because of the authority with swing voters that his perceived independence supposedly gives him.  read more »

Barack Obama has drawn some criticism from left-of-center blogs today for cutting a radio ad in support of Representative John Barrow of Georgia, a conservative Democrat who is facing a primary challenge from a more liberal candidate next month.

"One of the most enthusiastic enablers of the radical and lawless policies of the Bush administration," writes Glenn Greenwald, citing Barrow's positions on Iraq and the FISA debate.

There are two things worth noting about this.

One is that Obama's endorsement of Barrow probably shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of Barrow's politics.  read more »

Now that Barack Obama has officially opted out of the public financing system for the fall campaign, the Obama-McCain race is almost certain to feature a gaping bankroll disparity between the candidates.

If McCain opts into the public system anyway, his post-convention campaign spending will be capped at about $85 million, which would be supplemented by money raised by the Republican National Committee. If he were to opt out, he'd be faced with the prospect of an endless parade of fund-raising events, since he lacks Obama's ability to raise $10 million online at the snap of a finger. And given McCain's fund-raising performance to date, $85 million might be a stretch for him anyway.  read more »

Suddenly, after running well ahead of him for months, John McCain has fallen four points behind Barack Obama in Florida, at least according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. This should be cause for alarm among Republicans, even if it is sharply at odds with other recent surveys in the state that have given McCain double-digit leads over Obama.  read more »

But one big-name McCain supporter was probably (secretly) thrilled with the poll, because as far as Charlie Crist's vice presidential prospects are concerned, bad news for McCain in Florida only makes the state's popular Republican governor more attractive as a potential ticket-mate.

Yet another world championship was in the bag and the Boston Celtics were running out the final few minutes of garbage time in Game 6 of the 1986 NBA Finals when Tommy Heinsohn, then CBS' top NBA analyst despite the Celtic green tint of his bloodstream, turned his thoughts to the next major event on the league's calendar.

"This draft," he announced, "is a very important draft for the Celtics."

He had no idea how right he was.

That overheated June afternoon marked the 16th time in 29 years that an NBA season had climaxed with a Boston championship. Since Red Auerbach's arrival in 1950, the team's longest drought between titles had been just five years, a near-seamless parade of glory that owed itself to the franchise patriarch's knack for crafty trades and inventive draft maneuvers, not to mention a few timely doses of the luck of the Irish.  read more »

Many of the candidates most frequently linked to Barack Obama’s running-mate search are presumably interested in the vice presidency for the leg up it provides for a future White House campaign. But some of the other names making the rounds suggest something quite different: the Dick Cheney model.

Mr. Cheney is only the second elected vice president since the end of World War II to pass on waging a campaign of his own for the top spot. And he’s the first to do so voluntarily: Spiro T. Agnew fully intended to run in 1976, but a no-contest plea in late 1973 to tax evasion and money laundering charges – related to bribes he took while serving as Maryland’s governor in the late '60s – took him out of the picture.  read more »

The debate over debates – or more precisely, the debate over joint appearances – has begun this year earlier than ever.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama are months away from formally cementing their respective parties’ nominations, but that didn’t stop McCain from proposing a series of 10 town hall-style forums featuring both candidates over the summer months. Not surprisingly, Obama’s campaign didn’t exactly embrace the challenge, and now McCain seems to believe he has an issue with which to score political points.

He’s been highlighting Obama’s reluctance at campaign stops and showed up in New York last week at the site he’d proposed for the first forum.

“This would have been a little more interesting tonight if Senator Obama had accepted my request,” McCain told the crowd.  read more »

Obviously, Democrats want voters to be thinking about John McCain’s age and fretting over whether it might be eating away at his mental faculties. There’s no other reason why party’s anti-McCain talking points would call for surrogates to so prominently slip forms of the word “confused” into attacks on the soon-to-be 72-year-old Republican candidate.

In a Wednesday conference call that received much attention, Susan Rice, one of Obama’s national security advisors, talked about McCain’s “disturbing, even disconcerting, pattern of confusing the basic facts and reality that pertain to Iraq,” while John Kerry called his Senate colleague “confused” – a word he repeated several times in an MSNBC interview later in the day. It’s not the first time Democrats have played this card this year, and it surely won’t be the last.  read more »

Ordinarily, the “most endangered incumbent” label applies to an office holder who is standing for reelection. In 2008, however, the most endangered member of the U.S. Senate’s Democratic Caucus won’t be on any ballots. It’s Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman just won his fourth six-year term in 2006, but no member of the Senate majority – with the possible exception of Mary Landrieu, the lone Democratic senator facing a tricky reelection fight this year – stands to lose more this November than Connecticut’s junior senator.

Since the ’06 elections, Lieberman’s supposed role as the Senate’s ultimate power broker has been touted endlessly. Rejected by the party that once nominated him for vice president in the August ’06 primary, he nonetheless won reelection in the fall as a self-described “independent Democrat,” promising to caucus with Democrats and to side with them for organizing purposes in the Senate.  read more »

Had Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee, she almost certainly would have been favored heavily over John McCain to win Florida—something that the party’s past two nominees famously failed to do and which only three Democrats since Harry Truman have managed. Barack Obama, on the other hand, enters the general-election campaign as the clear, if early, underdog in the nation’s fourth most populous state.

A poll conducted last month found Mrs. Clinton leading Mr.  read more »

On a Sunday afternoon 21 Junes ago, James Worthy dove for an impossible loose ball and somehow swatted it to a streaking Magic Johnson, whose early third quarter lay-up ignited the crowd and signaled a decisive shift in momentum. From there, the home-standing Lakers, who had trailed the Celtics by five at halftime, breezed to a 106-93 victory that sealed their 10th N.B.A. championship.

In Los Angeles, there was celebration, and three thousand miles east in Boston, where “Beat L.A.!” served in the 1980’s as the unofficial motto that “Yankees suck!” became earlier this decade, there was dejection.

But not in all of Boston. In the city’s black neighborhoods, whose children had been pelted by rocks just 12 years earlier when court-ordered busing had transported them to white South Boston, the Lakers tended to be treated like the home team. Boston, after all, was the town that Bill Russell once labeled “a flea market of racism.”  read more »

The McCain campaign has posted an on-line "strategy briefing," in which campaign manager Rick Davis uses a series of charts and maps to paint a rosy picture of the G.O.P. candidate's fall prospects.

About five minutes into the slideshow, Davis turns to the electoral map and highlights what are matter-of-factly labeled the "solidly Republican states."  read more »

As Hillary Clinton formally conceded the Democratic nominating contest over the weekend, rough drafts of the history of her campaign against Barack Obama began appearing newspapers across the country, most of which noted that this had been the closest primary campaign in history.

But this is only a partially accurate legacy for the 2008 Democratic race.  read more »

Theories abound about what qualities Barack Obama and John McCain should be looking for in a running mate. Does Obama need someone who'd bring instant credibility on national security and foreign policy to off-set McCain's charges of inexperience and naïveté? How important is it for McCain, 24 years Obama's senior, to fill out his ticket with someone considerably younger?  read more »

With Hillary Clinton’s decision to concede the Democratic race, Saturday now looms as a truly historic day, when Barack Obama will assume a place in political immortality beside John Paul Hammerschmidt and Frank D. White, the only other politicians in the world to whom the Clintons have been forced to say: You win, we lose.

Of course, Bill Clinton’s loss to Hammerschmidt in a 1974 Congressional race and his defeat at the hands of White in a 1980 gubernatorial race barely made a ripple outside Arkansas.  read more »

Tuesday was supposed to be Barack Obama’s big day, and in many ways it was. Media outlets all over the world trumpeted his push past the magic number of 2,118 delegates and at long last he was able to declare – in the jam-packed St.  read more »

How fitting that Barack Obama made his final appearance of this primary season in St. Paul, Minn.—not so much because that’s where Republicans will nominate Mr. Obama’s opponent this summer, but rather because it’s where the last Democrat to survive such a grueling and protracted intra-party war also camped out when the final votes were tallied.

Sequestered in his room at the Radisson hotel in St.  read more »

“In many ways,” the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney wrote over the weekend, “Mr. Obama is wheezing across the finish line after making a strong start: He has won only 6 of the 13 Democratic contests held since March 4, drawing 6.1 million votes, compared with 6.6 million for Mrs. Clinton.”

Actually, it’s now worse than that: Mr. Obama’s late-in-the-campaign numbers took an additional hit on the final weekend of primary season, when Puerto Rico handed him his eighth loss since March. It is now indisputable that Mr.  read more »

On the eve of the final pair of Democratic primaries, a new poll of South Dakota Democrats gives Hillary Clinton a 26-point lead over Barack Obama – a surprise, at least to me, in a state that had the early makings of an Obama stronghold.

The survey, from the independent New Hampshire-based American Research Group, shows Clinton pounding Obama by a 60-34 percent spread. The only previous poll in the state, from about a month ago, had Obama up by 12. Because every other state around South Dakota previously went overwhelmingly for Obama, there had been little expectation in the national press that Clinton would win there.

Not surprisingly, the ARG poll is being greeted with some skepticism. But in a phone conversation a few minutes ago, Dick Bennett, ARG's president, told me that the assumption that South Dakota is Obama country has been flawed from the start.

"The numbers we got are consistent with what we've seen in other states," Bennett said. "The groups that are usually supporting her are supporting her. The people who live there look more like Clinton voters than Obama voters."  read more »

After she scored a lopsided victory in Sunday’s Puerto Rico primary, Hillary Clinton attempted to frame her campaign against Barack Obama, which will conclude with primaries in Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday, as a draw.

“I will lead the popular vote,” she said. “He will maintain a slight lead in the delegate count.”

It’s hard to imagine, at this point, that she believes what she’s saying.  read more »

It was quite some show that Harold Ickes put on in Washington on Saturday.  read more »

A compromise on the status of the Florida and Michigan delegations now seems imminent, one that will net Hillary Clinton nowhere near the delegate windfall she'd need to threaten Barack Obama's stranglehold on the Democratic nomination.

And so, in a way, Obama's strategy of sidestepping and delaying the Michigan and Florida matter for the past four months has succeeded. The issue has finally been forced by a long-scheduled meeting of the D.N.C.'s Rules and Bylaws Committee, but Clinton has little leverage with the panel's uncommitted – read: pragmatic – members.  read more »

In South Dakota last weekend, Bill Clinton performed a lengthy monologue on the supposed injustices that his wife has suffered in her presidential campaign, bemoaning the “frantic effort to push her out” of the race.

"I can’t believe it,” the former president said. “It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out.”

He ain’t seen nothing yet.  read more »

A new poll confirms that Hillary Clinton is the clear favorite in this weekend's Puerto Rico primary, but perhaps not by the runaway margin that her supporters have been hoping for. Published in the San Juan daily El Vocero, the survey gives Clinton a 51-38 percent edge over Obama.  read more »

Now is the season for idle vice presidential speculation, and this year the field of potential nominees in both parties is unusually large.

Among Democrats, much of the chatter is understandably focused on Hillary Clinton, who, to judge from some revealing public comments from key supporters, wouldn’t mind being offered a spot on Barack Obama’s ticket.  read more »

Three months ago, I picked up some chatter from supporters and associates of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner about the possibility that he might end up as Barack Obama's running-mate. Apparently, Robert Novak is hearing the same thing.  read more »

Jim Baker was so tickled by his portrayal in the new HBO film Recount that he actually scheduled an advanced screening of the fictionalized Florida recount retrospective at the Houston public policy institute that bears his name.

In some ways, he should be. While the movie makes clear that the facts at the heart of the disputed election mostly favored Al Gore, it can’t suppress its respect for Baker’s shrewd and cutthroat pragmatism.  read more »

So maybe history isn’t always written by the winners.

In the fall of 2001, after George W. Bush mounted a pile of debris at ground zero and came up with one brilliant rejoinder to a skeptic’s taunt, the prevailing public attitude toward the previous year’s disputed election was: So what? The guy who was supposed to win won, and there was probably more than enough malfeasance to go around anyway.  read more »

It was the calendar that killed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Yes, the obituary will (correctly) list several causes of fatality, particularly the decision of her campaign strategists to essentially ignore a string of ten contests between Feb. 9 and 19 to Barack Obama.  read more »

With Hillary Clinton renewing her declaration of a popular-vote lead in the Democratic nomination contest, it’s worth checking in on the actual math. Deriving an exact popular-vote count is tricky, since there are several ways of computing it. Here’s a step-by-step look at how the various tallies are reached.

The Baseline

If you count all of the states and U.S. possessions that have held officially sanctioned primaries or caucuses in which exact popular-vote tallies were maintained, the current tally (with a scattering of votes in Oregon yet to be added) is:  read more »

Think Barack Obama can get away with an ad like this in the fall? 

It was probably inevitable that the first national campaign featuring a black man and a white woman as its main combatants would produce this kind of fault line.

From one side come the impassioned contentions of Hillary Clinton’s supporters that their candidate has been thwarted by sexism, their ardor only intensifying as Mrs. Clinton’s hopes flicker out. On the other side, Barack Obama’s partisans sniff at this: The real scandal of this campaign, they insist, has been the Clinton forces’ sinister insinuation of race into the public discourse.  read more »

Obviously, the political world is focused on the health of Ted Kennedy, and not the potential political implications of his diagnosis with a malignant brain tumor. And despite the grim prognosis, it’s worth noting that there is a precedent in the Senate for overcoming similar odds: In 1993, Pennsylvania’s Arl