Marc Ambinder flags this DNC memo (PDF) that touts the impressive gains Democrats have made in turnout this primary season. But this turnout is, in part, simple proof that this primary has taken a different course than previous primaries. First of all, it's not surprising, as the memo notes, that "comparing 2008 Republican turnout to the last contested Republican primary in 2000, Republican turnout either stayed relatively stagnant or decreased." In both years the Republican nominee was decisively determined relatively early on. They were comparable races with comparable results. By contrast the Democrats have been going at this for nearly five months, with neither candidate yielding, which is quite unlike 2004, where Kerry was crowned almost immediately after Iowa. Turns out more people vote when their vote matters.

All of this is to underscore that you simply can't use primary results to make a general election argument. The only meaningful comparison is to use polling data that pits a Democrat against a Republican. After Tuesday's primaries the conventional wisdom coalesced around Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee, which means it's time to take a closer look at the hypothetical match-ups between him and John McCain. According to Gallup, which has been tracking these numbers, Obama's support, broken down demographically, starts to look a lot like John Kerry's performance among Democrats in the 2004 general election (a point I have made here before). The good news is that McCain does worse in every demographic compared to how Bush fared in '04, save church attendance (McCain outperforms Bush in the "occasionally" and ties in the "never" categories). Obama does better than Kerry did among black voters, college graduates and postgraduates (unsurprisingly), but Obama does worse in every other category.

Another way to look at this is by directly comparing performance between Obama-McCain and Kerry-Bush. Obama does better against McCain than Kerry did against Bush in every category except church attendance. Obama does better in weekly attendance (losing by 19 instead of 22 points), but does worse by a 12-point margin in the "occasionally" category and seven points in the "never" category (which he still wins handily, by the way). Adjusting the percentages each of these demographics represent in the general public ought to give us a rough sense of the probable electoral outcome, or at least as good as we're going to get fully six months before Election Day. For now, Gallup has Obama leading John McCain by one point, 46%-45%. That's considerably shakier than the DNC's turnout numbers would have you believe.

--Mori Dinauer

If I may add a point to Robert's post below, this story in The Hill about the obstinate-yet-conflicted House “Blue Dog” coalition is exactly the sort of problem that ought to frustrate liberals. Here you have (some) conservative Democrats who have repeatedly voted to fund a war without worrying about how to pay for it, and now all of sudden they show pangs of fiscal responsibility about not coming up with the monies to fund one program in the new war spending bill. Blue Dogs finally getting with the program: Sounds great, right?

Not so fast, because the part they are raising fiscal responsibility objectives about is…wait for it, because it’s really going to infuriate you…education benefits for veterans. Where was this sort of ethic from Blue Dogs when the Bush administration was asking for billions to be handed over to venal, wasteful, no-bid contract-winning war profiteers?

“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip. The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.”

No! Not billions spent without funds to pay for it -- that just never happens in defense spending!

Two comments: First, thank goodness for Webb. Second, I’m going to keep saying this until it starts to sink in: Since Reconstruction, the Blue Dog element within the Democratic Party has gone from dominant majority, to significant minority to what it is today -- a declining coalition of conflicted complainers. Among the blessings of building a non-southern Democratic majority is that there is greater intraparty ideological cohesion, thus marginalizing Blue Dogs and their hand-wringing interference with emerging liberal project.

--Tom Schaller

Terence Samuel tells you which election you should really be watching on Tuesday:

The Tuesday special election in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District is being held to replace veteran GOP congressman Roger Wicker, who was appointed to the Senate last December by Gov. Haley Barbour to replace the retiring Trent Lott. Wicker had been in the House for five terms and had always won re-election with more than 60 percent of the vote. This is exactly the kind of district that Democrats are routinely forced to write off because it is so difficult to overcome the culturally tainted associations that come with being a Democrat.

The election is producing extraordinary levels of GOP anxiety, because of what it says about Republican prospects in November. While losing any congressional seat these day is distressing for a Republican Party looking for ways to rebuild a majority in the House, to lose this particular seat, in this particular state, is to confront just how much trouble Republicans are in with voters all over the country. Mississippi is the last place Republicans should be in trouble.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Noah highlights the fact that about a third of the new war supplemental bill is for weapons not directly related to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The latest war-funding bill might pay for more than just the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could add billions of dollars' worth of the latest manned and robotic aircraft to American fleets, as well. Nearly a third of the $165.4 billion measure, $51.8 billion, would be "devoted to new weapon systems," Inside Defense reports.

Since 2005, the Defense Department has used these so-called "supplemental," "emergency" funding measures to buy new gear. First, it was equipment worn out by war. Then, upgrades to those depleted items. Finally, a recent Congressional Budget Office report notes, the Pentagon began to use these war-time kitties to "accelerate planned purchases of new systems, address emerging needs, and enhance the military’s capability not only to continue current operations but also to be better prepared for the longer war on terrorism."

Of course, as the war develops new weapon systems will come in to use, so it's not strictly helpful to think only in terms of the replacement of worn or destroyed platforms. Moreover, it's kind of nice to think that part of the war supplemental may be going somewhere other than down the drain; being able to use weapons in a future conflict is, all things equal, a good thing.

The problem is that civilian oversight of the defense budget is growing more and more distant and lax. Thirty years ago the size of the defense budget was the subject of vigorous national debate, as were its various constituent elements. Now there hardly seems to be a peep on Capitol Hill about some of the largest budgets on record. The war supplementals are both more and less controversial than the main budget; they obviously carry a lot of political baggage, but at the same time it appears relatively easy to sneak in whatever the services want. All told, it's not a good way to handle long term military procurement.

--Robert Farley

• As Scott noted earlier, the Clinton campaign continued to utilize the services of Mark Penn, despite his lack of understanding for a fundamental feature of the Democratic primary system.
  
• It looks like Michigan Democratic party leaders have come up with a reasonable plan for seating their delegates -- Clinton gets 69, Obama 59, which won't fundamentally change the arithmetic of the race.
• Tom Edsall looks at the Obama campaign possibly settling Hillary's campaign debts in exchange for her dropping out the race. Josh Marshall asks how Obama's legion small donors would feel about their money being put to this use.
• Bloomberg reports that Nancy Pelosi  has been quietly consolidating her power in the House, laying the structural groundwork for formidable Democratic majority after the 2008 elections.
• Ezra flags a Matt Stoller post about how Obama is remaking the Democratic Party -- with himself at the center.
• Speaking of Obama, he was on the Hill today, where he spent 45 minutes schmoozing with House members.
• Hillary moves the goalposts again, arguing that since 1916 West Virginia has been the key to successful Democratic presidential campaigns.
• In case you missed it this week, check out TAP Senior Correspondent Spencer Ackerman's interview with General David Petraeus in the Washington Independent -- the final entry in a must-read five part series on COIN tactics.

--Mori Dinauer

Mr. Super, an anonymous superdelegate I interviewed last month, has identified himself, according to a release on the DemConWatch blog:

MrSuper.org is a website which was created in March to debunk myths, offer insight and answer questions about the 2008 Democratic nomination process for President. The author, who has been posting under the pseudonym "Mr. Super" will announce his identity today.

The site was created by Edward Espinoza, an undeclared Superdelegate and elected DNC Member from California and a former Field Director to 2008 Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson.

The site gained the immediate attention of several political media outlets covering the web, being included in a story by Abbi Tatton on CNN, as well as serving as the subject of magazine articles published in The Nation and The American Prospect. It was recently mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News article, and the site has also been featured on other blogs including Democratic Convention Watch, TAPPED - the blog of the American Prospect, and has received mentions on DailyKos, Ben Smith's blog at Politico.com and a number of other political blogs. All featured stories are listed on a page within the blog under a link labeled "In The News."

I consider this to be yet another sign that this primary is rapidly approaching its end which, incidentally, Mr. Super predicted would be Memorial Day, right after the May 20 primaries.

--Mori Dinauer

Suppose a food crisis hits in, say, Zambia. Or to be more precise--suppose basic staples have skyrocketed by 129% across the globe, to the point that the UN has predicted shortages may stoke civil wars across the developing world. What do you do? Well, if you're the director of USAID, you'll immediately direct your staff to buy food to help. That is, food grown by American producers. Then you bundle it up and ship it--in primarily American vessels-- to countries across the ocean, where people hungrily await the needed stocks. The whole process will take up to six months. And by the time it's through, particularly with rising fuel costs, fully 65% of so-called "food-aid" expenditures will be absorbed by overhead alone.

Of course, this isn't a defensible form of policy. But under the 1985 farm bill, those are the rules, and that's exactly the system Congress has continued to endorse. And today as members prepare to announce the farm bill, it looks like that's precisely what Congress is preparing to do again. According to the latest reports, despite Bush's call for increased food-aid flexibility, the farm bill will provide just $60 million for a pilot program that would allow the purchase of food from from local producers overseas. That's only a 4% change in overall total giving. [Eds. Note: Corrected from .04%]

So in a time of soaring agricultural profits and food crisis, this is what they've delivered: a shiny, gift-wrapped $300-boondoggle that keeps inflated farmer subsidies and rejects food-aid reform. Oh, and hands out tax breaks on behalf of people like Sen. Mitch McConnell, who got $498-million tax break for his home-state thoroughbred industry.

Still unclear if Bush will go ahead and veto the bill. Either way, it's just another reminder of the stakes--and constituencies--that Congress is willing to go to the mat for.

--Te-Ping Chen

Slate has a pretty interesting article on the finances of Barack and Michele Obama; long story short, there's a pretty vast gulf between the Obamas and either the McCains or the Clintons. In any case, prior to the publication of Barack's two books the Obamas were squarely on the cusp between upper middle and lower upper class; I have to wonder how their financials compared with the rest of the Senate. The books made quite a bit of money, which the Obamas have invested in what the authors suggest is a "too conservative" strategy for a couple of their age and means.

I have to admit that an investigation this detailed leaves me vaguely unsettled, even when the subject is a presidential candidate. Nevertheless, I find it endlessly fascinating that the candidate most vigorously tarred with the "elite" label in this election possesses by far the most modest means ...

--Robert Farley

In a speech Tuesday on his strategy for appointing conservative judges, John McCain failed to mention Roe v. Wade. As you should already know, McCain has said time and time again this election cycle that the ruling should be overturned. And if you still believe he's a centrist moderate on social issues, consider the co-chair of his recently-announced "Justice Advisory Committee": Sen. Sam Brownback. Brownback is the man who believes abortion should be illegal in every single circumstance, even when the woman's life or health is at risk, and even in cases of rape or incest. Here's the full list of committee members. Do you spy a pro-choicer among them?

--Dana Goldstein

There's been a lot of talk about veteran suicides this week, and much of it, unfortunately, has centered on a statistic Bloomberg reported on Monday: The total number of veteran suicides is expected to exceed the number of U.S. casualties in the Iraq-Afghanistan wars.

Once the statistic's initial shock value wears off, it's clear that--as Winds of Change notes in its calculations--the figure is fairly misleading. Taking the national rate of suicide (about 13 per 100,000) and applying it to the 1.6 million U.S. troops that have to date served, the figure comes out to 8,409 -- a little less than twice the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq. More an artifact of the comparatively low casualties the U.S. has suffered in Iraq than anything else.

The more compelling statistic is the one revealed in an independent CBS analysis last November, namely that veterans aged 20-24 (that is, those who've served in current wars) have a suicide rate up to four times higher than civilians the same age. What's more, even among soldiers who seek help--and up until last week, admitting PTSD could cost you your security clearance and career--only half, RAND reports, receive even "minimally adequate" care. That's the kind of statistic the VA's been none too eager to release, and as emerged in hearings this week, has in fact worked to stonewall.

--Te-Ping Chen

This is amazing:

With the Clinton campaign widely viewed as being on its last legs, staffers are now more free than ever to dish out some dirt on the many strategic blunders of Mark Penn.

The latest: At a strategy session last year, Penn reportedly said that a Clinton win in California would effectively wrap up the nomination by awarding her all of the state's 370 delegates.

What's even more amazing, of course, is that Clinton continued to believe that the strategic services of someone who failed to grasp basic elements of the nominating process were worth millions of dollars. It really does seem that the "arbitrarily selected big state" strategy wasn't just lame ex post facto spin, but represented what they actually believed. But given the way the system was structured, it couldn't actually work.

--Scott Lemieux

On Tuesday night, just minutes after networks called North Carolina for Barack Obama, the state of Georgia quietly resumed killing those on death row. The executed was one William Lynd, a 53-year-old convicted of murder. It was the first execution since Baze v. Rees, and one of 50-60 planned before the end of the year. (After a 7-month pause, death rows have a lot of catching-up to do.)

But when it comes to the death penalty, Baze v. Rees' focus--whether a particular cocktail of drugs produces pain severe enough to violate the Eighth Amendment--was patently absurd. The fact remains that so often, as John Holdridge recently told the New York Times, the problem with the death penalty isn't method of execution, but rather "poor people getting lousy lawyers."

Case in point: North Carolina, which in the past six months alone has freed three people from death row, most recently Leaven Jones, who spent 14 years on death row before a federal judge found that his court-appointed attorneys spent "virtually no time or effort" investigating his crime. Or Alabama, where 194 condemned inmates--mostly indigent--are denied state representation for capital post-conviction appeals.

Like any other statistic in the U.S., death penalty sentencing is strongly patterned on race. But the more basic injustice death row inmates face is lack of resources. Last month in Kentucky, for example, where public defenders already represent over 435 cases per year, the state eliminated another $2.5 million in indigent-representation funding.

Last year, the Duke lacrosse players who faced Mike Nifong were lucky enough to have top-caliber representation. After being found innocent, Reade Seligmann put it best when he said, "I can’t imagine what they do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” With 129 death row inmates exonerated since 1973, too often, the death penalty isn't a punishment reserved for the "worst" offenders--just the ones with the worst representation.

--Te-Ping Chen

In my latest Bloggingheads with Michael Goldfarb, I talked a bit about the geographic distribution of recent casualties in Iraq, and we both discussed recent bombings in Anbar province. I had assumed that April's casualty uptick was largely a consequence of up tempo operations against Shia militias. Brandon Friedman tells me that I was wrong:

When a yet-to-be-named U.S. soldier was killed while on patrol in Anbar on Tuesday, he became the ninth American to die there in the past three and a half weeks. This is neither random nor insignificant.

In fact, during the past 30 days, 23 percent of coalition combat fatalities have occurred in al-Anbar Province. Considering that only two U.S. troops had been killed in Anbar in the preceding six months--representing just over one percent of total coalition combat fatalities during that period--this is a huge uptick.

In comparison, combat fatalities have dropped significantly in Baghdad over the same 30-day period.

--Robert Farley

On the question of whether Clinton should drop out, my position continues to be one of indifference. It's her decision, and I doubt that it matters much either way. I suppose I would prefer that she not attack Obama using GOP talking points now that the nomination has been effectively decided, but even there, as Dilan says, the effects of this kind of attack are greatly overstated. (Barring a major change in fundamentals, if the election is close enough something so minor could turn the election, I've seriously overestimated Obama as a candidate.) I also object to assumptions that Clinton is trying to tear the party apart or sabotage Obama or whatever. I have no doubt that she will strongly support Obama as soon as she concedes. And I think one has to have some empathy here; it can't be easy to run a race you reasonably expected to win, assemble a very strong coalition of supporters, and fall just short. I can't really blame her for not quite wanting to concede the inevitable just yet. If staying in is "selfish," it is only in the sense that anyone running for that kind of office is going to be.

On the other hand, claims that she's serving some kind of noble ideal by staying in are no more plausible. I've seen in some quarters claims that it would undermine democracy or some such to state that Clinton should leave. The thing is, candidates drop out of races they can no longer win all the time without anyone claiming that it undermines democracy. Democracy means that Clinton can stay in until the convention if she chooses, and it also means that anybody can suggest that her staying in is bad for the party, decide to stop giving money to a lost cause, come out for Obama as a superdelegate, etc. McGovern is no more doing anything undemocratic than Clinton is. (Obviously, the argument becomes farcical when anyone who suggests that advising Clinton to drop out violates democratic values also sees nothing objectionable about counting the results of "primaries" that wouldn't meet Vladimir Putin's standards of legitimacy.)

In another common move, Ambinder says that it "may well be that Clinton refuses to officially drop out until she is satisfied that the voices of Florida and Michigan are heard." The thing is, though, that the voices of Florida in Michigan will not be heard in any meaningful way no matter what happens. A fair contest is not going to be held for their delegates. Michigan Democrats do not suddenly become enfranchised if you declare ex post facto that a one-major-candidate straw poll was an ordinary primary. If "hearing their voices" just means seating them at the convention after it's clear that they won't be used to try to reverse the outcome of the nomination, then Clinton staying in the race prevents the issue from being resolved.

In essence, this is a trivial issue. Clinton is neither doing significant damage to the party nor acting as some sort of crusader for democracy by staying in although she's drawing dead.

--Scott Lemieux

From the Arizona Republic:

In tight Senate votes, McCain not a maverick

When it matters the most, he seldom bucks his own party

Ronald J. Hansen
The Arizona Republic
May. 7, 2008 12:00 AM

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has publicly condemned Republican Party leaders and occasionally voted against the GOP on selected issues.

But an Arizona Republic analysis of his Senate votes on the most divided issues in the past decade shows that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives.

What do you know? An article that actually takes a feature of the McCain image, and -- hold on to your hats -- attempts to ascertain whether it's true. I'm floored.

It's no accident that this is coming from the Arizona Republic. While the Republic is generally considered a pretty conservative paper, they have tangled with McCain a great deal over the years, mostly because they haven't been particularly inclined to simply repeat over and over that he's a StraightTalkingMaverickReformer. As a consequence, McCain has always acted as though he pretty much hates their guts. (In 2000, he wouldn't even let the Republic's reporter have a seat on the Straight Talk Express. So while the national media were whooping it up on board the party bus, she had to follow along in a rental car. And this is the largest paper in his home state.)

One thing I've noticed lately is that there are a bunch of Chicago reporters (like Lynn Sweet and Jim Warren, for instance) who have become regulars on cable TV, presumably because they know a lot about Barack Obama. But the reporters who have known John McCain the longest and know him the best -- the ones from Arizona -- are nowhere to be seen. Why do you think that is?

-- Paul Waldman

A smart, liberal, female Democratic friend of mine repeatedly points out to me ways in which Barack Obama often comes across to some women as arrogant. She says a lot of women who are backing Hillary Clinton will find it hard to support Obama in the fall because, in her words, “he’s another frat boy” candidate: the cool and charming jock who gets his way and doesn’t appreciate or work hard enough to have gotten where he did.

But, at least as concerns this campaign, who really gave it the old college frat boy try? One candidate claimed to be “in it to win it,” as if it were a mere vanity or popularity contest worth winning for winning’s sake. One candidate casually dismissed the notion that the campaign might go much beyond the February 5 Super Tuesday contests. One candidate prepared, as one television political analyst put it recently to me, “absolutely nothing—zilch, zero” insofar as a delegate-capture strategy. One candidate proved to be a stubborn, bad listener who clung to advisers who were not serving the campaign well out of a sense of loyalty.

Isn't, after all, Clinton who ran a much more presumptuous, just-need-to-show-up “frat boy” candidacy than Obama? Wasn’t she the one who proved unprepared and who underestimated the task facing her? Clinton supporters have every right to complain about the asymmetric national media coverage that was tougher on her and, until recently, more favorable toward him. He certainly benefited, to at least some extent, from his gender. But beyond that, she was the frat boy candidate in 2008.

--Tom Schaller

Sarah Posner on the religious right: Former Bush family confidant and televangelist advocate Doug Wead joins the fight against Sen. Grassley. Kenneth Copeland continues to be chummy with politicians while the public turns a blind eye. Evangelical leaders unveil "An Evangelical Manifesto: The Washington Declaration of Identity and Public Commitment," and McCain's "conservative judges" speech resonates with the Christian right.

Read the rest of the FundamentaList here and subscribe to our RSS feed to receive the List as soon as it's published.

--The Editors

Twenty years ago, citing their unwillingness to serve as an "accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public," the League of Women Voters stopped moderating the U.S. presidential debates. (The move was to protest candidate attempts to turn them into ever-more elaborately staged and controlled events.) And especially after the stultified train-wreck that was last month's ABC debate, we've mourned their departure ever since.

Since the League's departure, the corporate-funded Commission on Presidential Debates, in tandem with candidates and major TV networks, has held a monopoly on deciding who can debate what where. Now, though, it looks like an end-run is being planned around this iron triangle. Last November, in a move that triggered sharp controversy, the Commission spurned New Orleans as a general-election debate site. Today, the New York Observer reports that the city is teaming up with YouTube and Google to try and host its own debate this fall anyway.

So far, YouTube's attempts to insert itself into the game haven't been terribly fruitful--for example, thanks to overbearing producers, the YouTube/CNN debate that was to 'revolutionize' the process turned out merely cringe-worthy (diamonds and pearls, anyone?). But if YouTube and Google can successfully entice general-election candidates to appear at an independent New Orleans debate in the fall, that's a major coup. It's about time the Commission's stranglehold over who can participate in what kind of debate was broken.

And what better place for two candidates to start that long-awaited American conversation on race than in New Orleans?

--Te-Ping Chen

Amid all the debate about what's driven spiraling food prices, one piece of history keeps getting left off the table: the key role institutions like the IMF have played in exacerbating the situation. Which is why William Quigley's work to document the contours of Haiti's food crisis deserves a closer look. Last month, starving Haitians ousted the country's prime minister after riots that left at least six dead. At the heart of this tension and history? Rice.

As a small country of just 8 million, prior to Duvalier's expulsion, Haiti grew almost all of its own rice. That changed after 1986, the year Duvalier fled into exile, and Haiti secured a desperately needed $24.6-million loan from the IMF--a loan given on the condition that Haiti cut its rice tariffs, which the country did. Tariffs shrank from 35% to just 3%.

Soon thereafter, not unexpectedly, the Haitian market was promptly flooded with cheap American rice. Unable to compete with American rice farmers -- who receive an annual $1-billion subsidy -- as Paul Farmer remembers, the local rice market disintegrated, to the point that today, Haiti has become the third-largest importer of U.S. rice. And now, with the cost of rice rising over 140% since January, Haitians can't afford it any longer.

It's a painful irony that these days, Robert Zoellick is the one now making high-minded calls for global food aid and reform from his new perch at the World Bank. After all, it was Zoellick who, during his prior stint as U.S. trade representative, was part of the team that aggressively worked to limit developing countries' ability to shore up protective grain reserves, mount tariffs and subsidize farmers -- all in the name of the free market. And all while simultaneously defending egregious U.S. subsidies, like Bush's decision to expand 2002 farm-bill spending by $80 billion.

Yes, countries like U.S. need to step up food aid. But if crisis is opportunity, right now, it can't be forgotten that what countries like Haiti really need is a better deal on trade policy, too.

--Te-Ping Chen

An Onion-esque headline from the LA Times today: "Federal agents arrest illegal immigrants leaving U.S."

To be fair, I understand there's merit to the strategy as an attempt to intercept contraband, address other illicit activities, et cetera. But draining resources on the effort hardly gets us any closer to that fond political goal, "securing the border." A phrase which itself--particularly given recent border debacles--manages to retain its political salience more in a triumph of symbolism than anything else.

What does illegal immigration track with? Not levels of border enforcement spending. Instead, unlike legal immigration, illegal immigration responds to the economy. In the late 1990s, for example, when the economy grew rapidly and job creation was high, illegal immigrants likewise peaked, even as the number of hours officers spent collectively policing the U.S.-Mexico border increased 300% from 1990-2005. And not workplace enforcement, either: the CBO recently estimated that such efforts would reduce federal revenue by $17.3 billion, as undocumented workers would simply be paid outside the system.

That, however, doesn't stop House Republicans--seemingly undeterred by their failure to make immigration a wedge issue--from continuing to try and force the issue. As Frank Perry notes in his very worthwhile recent interview with Firedoglake, by tacking right, members of the GOP can use the issue to distance themselves from an unpopular president.

But unlike Congressmen who have to run for office every two years, Bush has taken the long-term view. Like Karl Rove, he recognizes that by alienating a part of the electorate that's grown by 3 million in just past three years--particularly in swing states--the GOP is further consigning itself to its status as the minority party. John McCain knows that too, but since pushing the issue will alienate conservatives, he's rejected his past positions and pledged to "secure the border" first--a feeble promise doomed from the get-go.

--Te-Ping Chen

In the wake of Indiana and North Carolina, Tom Schaller argues that the now-conventional wisdom about Barack Obama's inevitability is lost on the only obstacle to his nomination:

Barack Obama coupled a solid, double-digit win in North Carolina with a narrow defeat in Indiana to stall the momentum Hillary Clinton showed in the 11 weeks since Obama's last significant win. "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be," NBC's Tim Russert declared shortly after midnight, as the late numbers trickling in from Gary-based Lake County in the northwestern corner of Indiana reduced Clinton's victory margin in the Hoosier State to around 20,000 votes. It is a testament to how much the complex mix of expectations, performance, and spin figure in this contest that a proclamation by the dean of televised punditry matters more than the potential endorsements of the nearly 300 undeclared Democratic superdelegates.

The crucial question is whether Russert's "we" includes the New York senator and her top campaign advisers. Does Hillary Clinton know who the Democratic nominee is going to be?

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Some of you might have read about the Democrats' success this past weekend in winning Louisiana's formerly Republican 6th Congressional District. And what kind of district is the Fightin' 6th? I just realized I mention it in passing in NIXONLAND because from 1943 to '66 it was represented by a relative liberal named James H. Morrison who backed LBJ's Great Society, until he was defeated by a conservative named John Rarick, who served for eight years.

Rarick won that first election by claiming his opponent was backed by the "Black Power voting bloc," said the election monitors watching over the racially tense Baton Rouge district according to the terms of the 1965 Voting Rights Act were "federal spies," and went on to become congress's spokesman for Americans who believed Communists were secretly poisoning Americans by fluoridating the water supply. I mentioned this particular race as one of the many bellwethers that spelled the beginning of the end for Great Society liberalism in the 1966 cycle. And I believe the very last change I made in the page proofs involved Mr. Rarick, when I learned at the last minute that he was elected to congress while a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Left for the cutting room floor, however, were these Rarick gems. This was from 1969:

"Mr. Speaker, the mothers and dads of schoolchildren can expect a further innovation in sex education. Apparently their children are not to discriminate sexually because of race, creed, or national origin. According to the reported discussions at the recent American Association of Sex Educators and Counselors annual conference, we are to believe that many teenaged white female patients expressed interest in interracial sex to show their concern and atone for white guilt... What next will the anti-morality crowd come up with? Perhaps a 'civil rights' amendment to prevent legal marriage of any two people of the same race, religion, creed, or national origin? In another speech—alas, I'd have to run down to the library to get the full context -- Rarick averred that, "For a red-headed girl with freckles to be told, 'I b et you have freckles on your vagina,' can do lasting damage." That was after Rarick's dear colleague, James Utt of Orange County ("Utt the Nut"), argued, "The Beatles and their mimicking rock-and-rollers use the Pavlovian techniques to produce artificial neuroses in our young people. Extensive experiments in hypnotism and rhythm have shown how rock-and-rock music leads to a destruction of the normal inhibitory mechanism of the cerebral cortex and permits easy acceptance of immorality and disregard for all moral norms." These were in hearings, called by Utt and Rarick, on the horrors of sex education, which both believed one of the most pressing crises facing the nation.

Louisiana's 6th district sent Rarick to Congress four times. Now, they have chosen a Democrat to represent them. --Rick Perlstein

Jerome Armstrong:

• White Democrats moved from Clinton leading by 43% in OH, to Clinton leading by 28% in IN.


• Liberal voters moved from Clinton leading by 7% in OH to Obama leading by 14% in IN.

In short, for Indiana, Clinton's projecting of a more GE favorable image (she's risen nationally in the polls in recent weeks) appears to have cost her among the liberal voters. This also explains why the polls were so wrong, especially SUSA. Clinton didn't gain the 21% of black voters that they polled, and they polled Clinton winning among liberals by a 53-44 margin, off by 23 percent. This is most likely due to the 'gas tax' issue. Though she had a 'divide and conquer' frame of the issue that work well for a GE against a Republican, in a Democratic primary, it allowed Obama to squeeze her from the liberal viewpoint.

We can quibble about the effectiveness of the gas tax pander in the general election, but it surely seems correct that Clinton made a dreadful miscalculation about its impact on the Democratic primary. Whatever modest gains (and they appear quite modest) she may have made with blue collar voters, she lost and more among liberal voters who a) don't view taxes as evil, b) care about the environment, and c) aren't moved by stridently anti-intellectual appeals. The biggest problem, of course, is that the two groups aren't strictly separate; the white blue collar voters Clinton was trying to pander to also care about the environment, and can see through the anti-elitist rhetoric the campaign was trying to sell.

--Robert Farley

By all accounts, turnout was very high in both Indiana and North Carolina last night. In fact, looking at the numbers, something quite amazing emerges. According to the New York Times, 1,254,136 people voted for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in Indiana last night. On election day 2004, John Kerry -- who lost Indiana to George Bush -- only earned 969,011 votes. That means the primary turnout in Indiana exceeded the general election turnout four years ago. That's remarkable. Similarly in North Carolina, Clinton and Obama earned a total of 1,548,615 votes last night while Kerry only received 1,525,849 in 2004 (he lost the state to Bush as well). Based on these figures, it might be worth going back to see if there are other examples of the primary vote exceeding the 2004 vote this season.

--Mori Dinauer

The bottom line coming out of tonight's primaries is, as I wrote last week, that nothing has changed. Each candidate did about as well in each demographic group as he or she always does. If anything, Obama has improved his standing slightly. Wright, Ayers, flag pins and so on... none of it mattered.

Update: The Nation provides a great demographic-by-demographic breakdown of the results in OH, PA, and IN.

--Sam Boyd

• Chris Cillizza has a good summary of what to watch out for tonight (a hint: not the early exit polls).
• Obama is "closing in on Latvia." Well, actually the number of donations he's recieved is closing in on the population of Latvia (he just passed the 1.5 million mark) and has already passed that of 12 states.
• Prospect alum Kate Sheppard turns up an Obama mailer in Kentucky touting his belief in "clean coal" (which is to say extremely dirty coal).
• Tom calls out undeclared superdelegates.
• Clinton's superdelegate lead is down to 15.
• Indiana's voter ID law disenfranchises elderly nuns -- good thing we're keeping their dastardly voter fraud in check.
• As Mori mentioned earlier, John and Elizabeth Edwards will not endorse.

--Sam Boyd

This February at CPAC, I remember watching Newt Gingrich bounce onstage to tell an audience full of the conservative faithful that they faced a looming electoral catastrophe. "There is something big happening in this country," he said. "We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it." And unless the party changed, he said, conservatives should expect defeat.

Now though as the election approaches, it looks like Gingrich is feeling ever-queasier about whether anyone's getting his message. Today, he sent out a mass "plea" to supporters asking them to please, please try and turn around the GOP ship before November. As he put it, the 2006 drubbing of six incumbent GOP Senators and Cazayoux and Foster's recent victories in Louisiana and Illinois are a sign than an "anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign" won't work. And so Gingrich has sallied forth to present a new plan--titled, somewhat limply, "Nine Acts of Real Change That Could Restore the GOP Brand."

But it seems Gingrich scraped the barrel and still came up empty-handed. Overhaul the census? Create a GPS-style air traffic control system? Are these really going to draw votes from the Dems or make for damning political ads? In the middle of two wars, a foreclosure crisis, and a teetering economy, is Gingrich really proposing that the GOP tie up the limited remainder of this Congressional session with English-only initiatives and earmark reform (which both chambers already spent recent weeks rejecting)?

The plan lacks the Contract With America's cohesion or rhetorical clarity (and that's saying something), and not surprisingly, either. When you're trying desperately to pull a collapsing party from the ashes of its own creation, it's pretty hard to come off like you're concocting a revolution. Besides, as Gingrich notes, what issues are out there that the Democrats don't already have better poll numbers on, anyway? Newt's latest plan makes the GOP look more out of touch than ever.

--Te-Ping Chen

Paul Waldman has some choice words about our media's insistence on endlessly revisiting questions of patriotism:

If the primary debates are any measure, what we'll see in the general election may not be much more edifying, so long as the agenda is being set by the collection of bottom-feeders that populate our press corps (to take just one recent example, when Obama appeared on last Sunday's "Meet the Press," Tim Russert spent the first fifteen minutes asking him question after question about Jeremiah Wright, as though there could possibly be anything more to say on the subject). Again and again, the "issue" of flag pins and the location of hands relative to hearts will be solemnly raised, all justified by the fact that the lamest and most dishonest attacks are "out there." None of it will have anything to do with what the next holder of the world's most powerful post will actually do once reaching office.

But of course, that isn't really the point. Republicans don't raise these attacks every four years because they truly believe that their exists some real relationship between a president's degree of patriotic fervor and the good he'll do for America. Instead, it's one more way of arguing that the Democratic candidate isn't “one of us,” that he stands outside the circle of our tribe. He doesn't share our values, he doesn't speak our language, he doesn't love what we love and hate whom we hate.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to get our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Do you remember how last fall, John McCain said that we never arrest dying patients for using medical marijuana? "You'll have to show me a case," he said. "I haven't heard of such a case, nor has anyone I know heard of such a case, so it must be a very well-kept secret."

Well, the AP is now reporting on the story of Timothy Garon, a 56-year-old with Hepatitis C who was not only arrested for his doctor-approved, state-legalized use of medical marijuana, but who was apparently denied an organ transplant for his failing liver as well. When the AP first reported the story on April 26, his doctors were telling him that without that transplant, he wouldn't survive. And last week, after being denied a transplant for the third time, Garon died.

All legal and scientific controversy associated with medical marijuana aside, the fact is, there are plenty of federal laws that go unenforced around the country every day. The federal government, theoretically, could prosecute you for any number of old-fashioned crimes like disrupting a rodeo, making a false weather report (penalty: up to 90 days), and writing a check for less than $1. It's not going to. Why? Because it's got better things to do. It'd be nice if  respecting patients whose use of medical marijuana is legal under state law would also make that list.

Apart from cases like Garon--as if any other evidence of the issue's absurdity was needed--it's little-known fact that even as the federal government continues to arrest patients, for decades, it has simultaneously been dispensing medical marijuana to people like Elvy Musikka, a 68-year-old woman from Oregon who suffers from glaucoma. She's one of the last remaining patients from a 1978 FDA medical-marijuana program that Bush Sr. shut down in 1992, after an surge of applicants with AIDS.

--Te-Ping Chen

Before the early (often inaccurate) exit polls start trickling in from Indiana and North Carolina, let’s just state in advance that if Barack Obama wins both states, that’s it for Hillary Clinton; conversely, if she wins both, whatever his numerical advantages in pledged delegates, and despite the fact that he has shrunk her lead among superdelegates into the teens now, he enters a very dangerous stage.

Of course, most likely she’ll win Indiana and he will win North Carolina. That means things will continue to chug along, with Obama making progress in the literal sense that he moves closer to the 2,025 threshold (equally-sized wins in the two states should provide him more net delegates, given that NC is larger), but appearing to stall in the momentum and narrative senses.

Whi