McCain's convention chair gets tossed after Newsweek reported that he'd lobbied for the Burmese dictatorship.

McCain's pretty tight with a lot of lobbyists, isn't he?

TPM Reader EW sent in this little snippet from that DOD document dump about the Times military analysts story ...

(ed.note: This would appear to be the post in question. And this is Dan Senor's WaPo Oped. Senor, you'll remember, originally didn't exist but (living out the old adage) was later created by critics of the administration's Iraq policy because of the felt need for a living caricature of the Bush White House political operatives and hacks sent to mismanage the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.)

McCain taps former lobbyist for Burmese dictatorship to run GOP convention.

(ed.note: For longtime TPMers, also note that Doug Goodyear is CEO of the DCI Group, the pioneering GOP astro-turf organizing outfit.)

LA Times/Bloomberg poll, conducted May 1-8:

Clinton 47, McCain 38, Undecided 11.

Obama 46, McCain 40, Undecided 9.

Margin of error: +/-3%.

WNBC reports:

Several top New York Republicans said that Congressman Vito Fossella's resignation will come within the next 72 hours -- if not late Friday then certainly by Monday.

There was political concern about how best to preserve the seat for the Republicans -- questions about immediate resignation versus finishing out his term and retiring -- but the calculation is there's nothing to be gained from Fossella sticking around. While Staten Island Republicans believe Fossella could at least serve out his term (the rest of the year) national Republicans want him gone. Now.

One of Hillary's most prominent independent backers -- the American Leadership Project -- is not spending any money on Tuesday's West Virginia primary. There's an ostensible reason for it: Hillary has a commanding lead in the polls, and Obama has all but conceded the state. But it will be interesting to see whether the indy groups who have been supporting Hillary continue to plow money into her race. We'll keep an eye out.

A little bit of on-the-ground blogging from Beirut, where things today are still very much in flux.

Late Update: A reader points me to another Beirut blog.

Add Joe Conason to the list of those dismayed by the direction of Hillary's campaign.

The Vice President today, in a Mississippi radio interview with an obviously friendly host:

INTERVIEWER: . . . You know, I look at this, and every once in a while, we'll see a story, Mr. Vice President, things like an amusement park opens in Iraq or in Baghdad, which is totally counter to what we're hearing over here, as far as the marketplaces being open, the schools, and things such as that. But I saw a story several weeks ago about an amusement center maybe over there, and I'm thinking this is not what you get in today's media.

VICE PRESIDENT: No, that's true. It's -- what gets covered obviously is bad news. That's -- you know, if everything is going swimmingly, then that's not news, so it doesn't get the kind of attention.

TPM Election Central has posted the power point presentation distributed to House Democrats by the Clinton campaign making her case for why she is the better nominee to help Dems hold on to the toughest swing district seats in November.

A second land swap deal takes a little more luster off the McCain myth.

How far off track is Hillary's campaign? It's so bad even Peggy Noonan is making sense, painful as that is to say.

TPM Reader AB is having a hard time reconciling Hillary's remarks on Obama's support among working class whites:

It seems to me that every progressive voice in this country should be outraged - jumping up and down - shouting in print and word - to repudiate Hillary Clinton's remarks that Obama is having trouble winning over blue collar "white" voters... "white Americans"...

It is a disgraceful, shameful tactic to justify her own non-candidacy. This is a remark I would expect from a politician from Mississippi or Louisiana - not from our New York State senator... I am outraged, I am deeply embarrassed that my children have heard this reported on the news...and I regret that have I ever gave her one hard earned nickel.

All the while she touts the glass ceiling as a woman but when her chips are down, the racism springs forth fully formed.

AB is right. Maybe it's general campaign fatigue, or the sense that the race is all but over now, but a month ago her remarks would have been a huge story, the dominant political story of the day.

The political press spent weeks trying to divine whether the Clinton camp was really attempting to cast Obama as the black candidate, a favorite son candidate of the African American community. The Clinton camp vehemently denied it then and even as recently as a few days ago Bill Clinton claimed it was the Obama camp playing the race card against him.

Race has been the subtext of much of Hillary's argument for her own electability. But now she's thrown it right out there in the open: Obama can't win because he's black. Vote for me instead.

You don't have to believe that Hillary's a racist (I don't) to conclude that a combination of the rigors of the campaign trail and her own powerful ambitions have clouded her judgment and curdled her spirit. It has certainly soured what had been a historic relationship between the Clintons and the black community.

Hers is not an appeal we'd tolerate from a Republican candidate, nor should we from a Democrat, no matter how sterling her progressive credentials might otherwise be.

There's been a lot of talk about the damage Hillary will do to the party by staying in the race this long. Perhaps she should consider the damage she's doing to herself.

Our Election Central team has been tracking developments all day in the superdelegate primary. Obama has been working them especially hard, trying to use the momentum from his Tuesday showing to peel off a few more undecideds -- with mixed success. We've got the rundown here.

Late Update: Greg Sargent interviews Obama's chief superdelegate whip, Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL), about the state of play, and she makes a surprising assertion: Not only has Rev. Wright not posed a problem for superdelegates, but it's actually encouraged them to come out for Obama sooner. Surprising and counterintuitive. Count me as skeptical.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) hanging tight with Hillary for now.

The Senate Ethics Committee takes a pass on Sen. David Vitter's acknowledged use of the late DC Madam's services.

The Pentagon has now made public all the documents it turned over to the New York Times for the paper's blockbuster story a few weeks ago on the cozy relationship between the Pentagon and the ostensibly independent military analysts retained by the networks and cable news channels to provide on-air expertise.

Among the documents were audio files of some of the regular meetings between the analysts and then-Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, where egos were massaged and favor curried. We've pulled some of the highlights from those tapes and have then posted at TPMmuckraker.

Meanwhile, as the Politico reports, there has been deafening silence from the networks about their complicity in Rummy's domestic psy-ops campaign.

Things not going so well for the prosecution in one of the Gitmo trials:

A military judge in the trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr threatened Thursday to suspend the terror trial unless the prison camp releases a detailed log of Khadr's treatment in more than five years of detention as an alleged al Qaeda terrorist. ...

His attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, wants the log in a pretrial effort to limit the scope of evidence given to a jury of U.S. military officers at his upcoming trial, expected in late summer. He argues the circumstances of some interrogations would exclude some of his statements from the trial.

Thursday morning, the military judge, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III, agreed with the defense that it should get copies of the log entries from the prison camp's Detainee Information Management System, or DIMS.

Brownback is believed to be the first war court judge to threaten to ''abate'' the proceedings if the prison camp's command staff does not turn over the evidence.

Just goes to show how much difference an independent tribunal -- even one as flawed as this one -- can make.

Cindy McCain was asked about releasing her tax returns, this morning on the Today show, and reiterated that she would never release them -- ever -- even if she becomes First Lady:

She's managed to get away with it so far (just like the spouse of any other candidate not named McCain would, right?), but never is an awfully long time.

Top Democratic senators want the inspectors general for the Pentagon and CIA to investigate reports that enemy combatant detainees were drugged by U.S. interrogators.

In the course of scanning the news to populate our news section to the right there, I occasionally come across items that are unrelated to our focus on politics and muck but are so cool they're worth sharing. So indulge me for a moment my fascination with geology and check out these amazing photos from the eruption of Chaitén in Chile.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is running primarily on the sheer defiant enthusiasm of her supporters and staff, and perhaps no one embodies that doggedness more than former Special Counsel to President Clinton, Lanny Davis. In today's episode of TPMtv we present Lanny's pièce de résistance, his stint on CNN's Tuesday night North Carolina and Indiana primary coverage ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) has just issued a statement confirming what the New York tabloids have been in a tizzy about since Fossella's DUI arrest in suburban DC last week: He fathered a child with the woman -- not his wife, the mother of his three other children -- who picked him up from jail that night.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

"I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three year old daughter," Fossella said in a statement.

"My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry.

"While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind.

"Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused."

The buzz is that this episode will force Fossella, the only Republican congressman representing NYC, not to seek re-election this year.

The ACLU continues its undefeated streak in challenging FBI National Security Letters.

Time recounts the top 5 mistakes made by Hillary's campaign. This one jumps out:

Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game.

That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates.

It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all.

Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified -- and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"

And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don't get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she'd be the nominee.

Late Update: Greg Sargent unearths a 2007 memo from Penn that seems to suggest the same winner-take-all analysis.

I'm going to be stepping aside from my normal duties at TPM for the rest of the week for some family time. I'll be leaving you in the able hands of the rest of the TPM staff. Next week or the week following we'll have some announcements about new projects and personnel at TPM.

A couple points and then a question.

There's a good argument that Democratic losses in the 90s and the early part of this decade were due to poor showings among non-college educated white voters. And as I've noted several times before, the idea that the constituencies you don't win in a Democratic primary are not winnable for you in the general, is literally nonsense.

But what about the general question of the 'problem' of Democrats consistently losing the white vote in national elections. Think about it this way. Since Democrats usually win upwards of 90% of the African-American vote in general elections, and African-Americans constitute something like 13% of the population, if Democrats consistently won the white vote they'd win every election by a crushing margin.

I'm sure Democrats wouldn't mind that. But it brings one point into sharp relief: though America's racial make-up is much more complex than just black and white, in the context of blacks and whites, the Democrats are the bi-racial coalition. They win elections by winning overwhelming margins of African-American votes and keeping the margin close among whites. (Obviously this is different in individual states with larger or smaller African-American populations.) Indeed, if Democrats continue to run strong, though not overwhelmly so, among Hispanics (something that seems probable in the short term with all the recent immigrant bashing on the right) this pattern could well become more pronounced.

There's nothing wrong with studying these percentages in terms of demography. Nor is there anything wrong with Democratic strategists recognizing that their candidates need to win this or that percentage of white voters to win. But creeping in the shadows of these conversations about how Democrats can no longer manage to win the white vote and are only saved from political oblivion by running up big margins among African-Americans is a little disguised assumption that African-American votes are somehow second-rate.

I don't think there's any getting around that.

Noted without comment, because what can you say ...

From USAToday's new interview with Sen. Clinton ...

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

(See the ed.note below for a correction on what campaigns can and cannot legally do to settle an opposing campaign's debt.)

According to the Huffington Post's Tom Edsall and a number of others, one of the possibilities in the offing if Hillary Clinton quickly ends her presidential campaign is that the Obama campaign will not only retire the $10 to $15 million in unpaid campaign related expenses the Clinton campaign owes but will also help the Clinton campaign pay back to the Clintons personally the $11.4 million they have loaned to the campaign during the last three months.

Helping to retire an opponent's campaign is not unprecedented and can sometimes be justified in the interests of party unity. (Remember, this isn't just money in the abstract. A lot of it is payment to people who provided services or goods of various sorts to the campaign and need to be paid or paid back.) But using more than $10 million raised in large part by small individual donations to pay back the Clintons who appear to be worth many tens of millions of dollars simply seems wrong.

This isn't meant to sound ungracious. I don't begrudge the Clintons their very substantial wealth. And even for really, really rich people, $11 million isn't nothing. But that is simply too much money raised from small givers to give to people who loaned it with full knowledge of the odds and have more than enough money to really know what to do with.

Frankly, I'm surprised that it's even being suggested. It would be a mistake for the Clintons to ask (and just because people are chattering about it -- don't assume they have or will), a mistake for Obama to offer and one that would risk a severe backlash.

That's not what people gave their money for.

(ed.note: I fear I was led a bit astray by Edsall's article in Huffpo on this issue of repaying Clinton's sizable campaign debt. Edsall wrote that "One of the most inviting [rewards to be reaped from withdrawal from the race] is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses." However, as DHinMI points out at DailyKos, Obama is not allowed to take millions of dollars from his own campaign and give them to Clinton's campaign. The most his campaign could legally give would be $2,000. Any deal to help Clinton with her debt would have to be in the form of Obama helping to raise additional money on Clinton's behalf. So anyone whose money was going to the Clinton campaign would have to know just where it was going. I don't see any way to interpret what Edsall wrote other than as saying that Obama would actually use his cash to pay the money back. But that's wrong. And I should have checked this out more thoroughly before passing on the error.)

Does Hillary Clinton really want the vice presidential nomination? Let's set aside whether she's owed it or deserves it or whether her place on the ticket might provide the Democrats with a crucial edge in November. Does she really want it?

Let me start by saying this is speculation. And my record is not good. Not long after Hillary won her senate seat (actually before she was even sworn in) I wrote an article in Slate in which I explained that while I thought she'd be a great senator I found the idea of her running for president ridiculous. So clearly I didn't get that one right. And re-reading the article almost eight years on reminds me of how difficult it is to see even clearly a handful of years into the future.

But past mis-prognostications aside.

Does Hillary Clinton really want the vice presidency? It seems to me that the senate offers her a better venue for achieving her ambitions and goals personally, politically and in public policy -- and a future in public life with much greater longevity -- than anything she'll find as Barack Obama's number two.

Let's run through a few of the scenarios. And let's start with what I believe is the unassailable assumption that if and when Hillary relinquishes her senate seat to become vice president she won't get it back and there will no other office she can run again for beside presidency.

So the scenarios.

If Obama wins the presidency, Hillary would not be able to run in her own right until 2016, when she will turn 69. As John McCain is showing, that's certainly not too old to run for president. But she will be nearing the age when 'age' becomes an issue in her candidacy.

Most people who accept the vice presidency do so either because they believe it will line them up to succeed to the presidency or because it brings them to a level of power and honor their careers held little prospect of bringing them otherwise. But neither applies to Hillary Clinton. She's already of the stature and standing to run for president. She's a genuinely historic figure. And she's already been heavily involved in a successful two term administration.

Remember too that the recent trend for greater vice presidential involvement in key administration decision-making has brought with it a flat requirement that vice presidents be strictly loyal and politically subservient to the president. Quite simply, the vice presidency is beneath Hillary's stature. It's not clear to me why Hillary would want to spend four or eight years in a position that I think would actually diminish her stature for the possibility of running for president again almost a decade from now.

On the other hand, Hillary has and can probably hold her seat in the senate for the rest of her life. One never knows, but the prospects look good for the Democrats to hold a majority in the senate -- perhaps even a substantial one -- for a number of years into the future. And some key leadership role would probably eventually be in her grasp, perhaps even hers for the taking. So whether you think Hillary's ambitions are political, ideological or personal -- altruistic or selfish -- her range of action for achieving is better as a lion in the senate than a second banana in the West Wing.

I actually believe that Hillary would really only come into her own in the senate after she set her presidential ambitions aside precisely because they have so tightly constrained the range of actions she's allowed herself and made others so closely scrutinize those actions in light of her ambitions for higher office.

Now, I grant there are some other scenarios. You might speculate that if she ran hard with him and lost she'd line herself up for another try in 2012. But I'm not cynical enough to believe she'd run a race she hopes to lose. Alternatively perhaps she's so committed to her agenda of public policy goals that she'd go for the reduced stature and constraints of the vice presidency for a chance to have great influence on the executive branch from the inside.

Put it all together and whether or not Obama would offer it to her, and even though she might want to be asked, I just don't see where she'd really want it. She should stay in the senate.

This statement from Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is the kind of statement that signals that Sen. Clinton's colleagues are telling her to wind this up. That doesn't mean they are saying she needs to drop out of the race. I'm not even sure at this immediate juncture that it's in Obama's or the Democratic party's interest for her to drop out of the race.

One concrete reason is that among the three contests to come over the next two weeks -- West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon -- two are among the best for Hillary in the country. So having him become presumptive nominee just before losing the West Virginia primary doesn't necessarily allow him to hit the ground running. And as Obama's speech last night signaled, his campaign seems intent on giving Clinton the space to make the decision on her own. The eventual nomination he has in hand; what he's got to work on is deescalating the tension between himself and Clinton's supporters. That's the necessary prelude to building the party unity he needs to win in November.

Both the Obama campaign and the supporters who are now telling her privately that it's over are probably content with her staying in through this month. But it will have to be a different campaign, one focused on each of the Democratic contenders virtues and the crying folly of electing John McCain President of the United States. I don't think Sen. Clinton will be hearing from many people who won't be telling her that it's time to start working this epic toward an honorable and unifying exit.

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann's official nomination for a Golden Duke in both the sex scandal and local muck categories.

McCain pushes for "League of Nations".

To meet tomorrow with Haile Selassie.

From The Hill:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y.) most prominent Senate supporters, said Wednesday that she will ask the former first lady to detail her plans for the rest of the Democratic primary.

"I, as you know, have great fondness and great respect for Sen. Clinton and I'm very loyal to her," Feinstein said. "Having said that, I'd like to talk with her and [get] her view on the rest of the race and what the strategy is." ...

"I think the race is reaching the point now where there are negative dividends from it, in terms of strife within the party," Feinstein said. "I think we need to prevent that as much as we can."

A reminder that there is still a drumbeat in some circles for military action against Iran. But it's not the suspected nuke sites that has former (recess-appointed) U.N. Ambassador John Bolton exercised, it's the alleged training sites in Iran for Iraqi insurgents. He hits the nukes, too, of course.

Just another example of Bolton's keen strategic thinking.

Clinton camp asserts that having won the white vote in North Carolina she's further demonstrated her electability in the general election.

It was the latest night of the primary season. And after outperforming expectations on big nights in March and April, Hillary Clinton finally came up short. In today's episode of TPMtv, we look at the results and game out where the campaign goes from here ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

On a conference call with reporters this morning, the Clinton campaign says there have been "no discussions" of ending the campaign.

But Clinton backer George McGovern says it's time for her to withdraw.

Start with some guilt by association, add a dollop of innuendo, mix in a little provocation and a pinch of smears and you've got the recipe for Fox's coverage of Obama, ably demonstrated this morning by Steve Doocy:

[Thanks to TPM Reader LB.]

As you may know, there's been a nominations standoff which has left the FEC essentially shuttered through this election cycle. Most of the controversy has centered around voter suppression guru (he's for it) Hans Von Spakovsky, a medium level player in the US Attorneys firing scandal. Now President Bush has submitted a new slate of nominees, purportedly to resolve the conflict.

But as you can see in today's Must Read, Spakovsky actually remains on the list. And the big change is the removal of David Mason.

Who's that? Mason is the Republican Chair of the FEC who has refused to allow John McCain to break the rules by pulling out of the public financing system after using it to leverage enough money to win the Republican nomination.

TPM Election Central has confirmed that Hillary Clinton has personally loaned her campaign $6.4 million in the past month.

After initially canceling public appearances today, Hillary has added a public event to her schedule.

NBC calls Indiana for Hillary.

The latest from Gary:

Lake County Republican Chairman John Curley stood by his Democratic counterpart Rudy Clay as the nation waited for vote totals from Lake County. "There's no hanky panky going on," Curley said after members of the national media wondered why Lake County's votes were taking so much longer to count than the rest of the state. "We have more than 11,000 absentee ballots, far more than we've ever had before," Curley said, insisting it simply takes time to get through that many tallies.

The two party chairmen planned to meet at the government center at about 11 p.m., and Curley promised the vote totals would soon be released.

NBC just reported that Hillary Clinton is holding no public events tomorrow. We'd earlier reported that she'd cancelled her morning show appearances. But that's not that surprising. There's not a lot good to talk about. But canceling all public appearances, if that's what they're saying, is a different story.

Hillary's speech tonight in Indiana was written as a victory speech, but at this hour the outcome in Indiana remains in doubt:

First results reported in Lake County, 75%-25% for Obama with 28% reporting. If he maintains that margin in Lake County he wins the state. But it all depends where in the county those results are from.

The margin is now about 20,000 votes separating the two statewide.

For an hour or two now it's seemed clear that the result in Indiana is going to come down to the results in Lake County and the city of Gary. Now this from the Post ...

As the fate of a nailbiter Indiana primary -- and possibly the course of the Democratic race -- hung on his city, Gary Mayor Rudy Clay said just now that it might take a while yet to finish counting the vote in Lake County, which includes Gary, and said that his city had turned out so overwhelmingly for Barack Obama that it might just be enough to close the gap with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Let me tell you, when all the votes are counted, when Gary comes in, I think you're looking at something for the word to see," Clay, an Obama supporter, said in a telephone interview from Obama's Gary headquarters. "I don't know what the numbers are yet, but Gary has absolutely produced in large numbers for Obama here."

Clay said the results were late coming in from Lake County because of the large numbers of absentee ballots that had to be counted -- about 11,000. Under local practice, all of the cartridges from voting machines in Gary and nearby East Chicago are first collected at the local airport before being driven to the county headquarters to be tallied with the results from the rest of the county, he said. He said there were no major technical problems holding up the count.

Here's some more from the blog of one of the local papers ...

With Hillary Clinton's statewide lead under 40,000, the pending results from Lake County loom large.

While Clinton reportedly led voting in cities like Hammond, Whiting and East Chicago, Gary Mayor Rudy Clay is indicating a huge margin in favor of Obama in his city.
It's very lopsided," Clay said, pointing to a hand-written list of precinct results.

According to his numbers, in most districts Clinton's turnout in the city of Gary was near non-existent. One district saw 126 voters turn out for Obama, while only four voted for Clinton.

Clay said the election is seeing a record turnout in the city.

"We're used to having maybe a 22, 23 percent turnout for a primary. We're seeing numbers as high as 85 to 95 percent," Clay said. "The Gary people took care of business."

A hand-written list of precinct results?

The candidate's victory speech in Raleigh, N.C.:

Lake County, Indiana, which includes Gary, has still not reported any precincts tonight, apparently because they're still counting absentee ballots there, the Gary newspaper reports on its website:

Rudy Clay, the chairman of the Lake County Democratic Party, said the counting of 11,000 absentee ballots is delaying the announcement of vote totals here. Although U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton holds a slim lead over U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in Indiana, most networks are waiting for Lake County's vote to call the state.

Is Zogby dodging the egg?

Tonight's North Carolina results have the Obama campaign shooting to wrap up a majority of the pledged delegates on May 20.

If you're enough a political junkie that you can't just wait a couple hours until all the Indiana returns are in. Here are a couple pages to play with.

Here's CNN's breakdown of which counties are still reporting votes -- and which haven't reported any. And here are population counties of each Indiana county.

So you can do some quick calculations and see how close this might get.

Remember, Gary, Indiana is in Lake County. And Lake has yet to report any votes tonight.

Watch as the Fox News political team dissects class in America during tonight's election coverage:

I watch Fox so you don't have to -- but I lose a little piece of my soul every time.

Late Update: They just can't let it go! The Fox News crew refines its class stereotypes:

CBS calls it.

But the other networks are holding back.

Harold Ickes warns of "October surprise" with Obama.

Nets call North Carolina for Obama right out of the gate.

I really never imagined that Hillary Clinton would become Pat Buchanan's heartthrob. But maybe it was a failure of imagination.

Nets say Indiana too close to call.

Late Update: Fox is reporting that the preliminary exit polls give Hillary a 52-48 win in Indiana. But Fox is not yet calling the race, and as we've seen, Obama seems to do better in the early round of exits than he ultimately does in the final returns.

It would appear that the prolonged Democratic race is taking at least a short-term toll on party unity, as measured by the percentages of Hillary and Obama backers who wouldn't support the opposing candidate in the general election. I believe the numbers are as high as they have ever been. For example, among Hillary backers in North Carolina, less than 50% say they would vote for Obama in the general.

New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez's office has sent over a statement from the senator, a key Hillary surrogate, clarifying his remarks about Clinton's gas tax holiday this morning on MSNBC:

"I should have elaborated more in my on-air response -- the point I was making was that the everyday pains that average Americans are feeling aren't always taken into account by an economist sitting behind a desk looking at numbers. Of course economists are important to public policy, but I was trying to point out that they aren't the only voices that matter. Cold macroeconomic calculus can glaze over the realities of human suffering, so there needs to be a balance between crunching numbers and understanding the everyday experiences of Americans in order to make good public policy."

Here's the video of his remarks.

The polls start closing in two hours. Find out what the final polls say, what to expect tonight and even the little noticed trend that could determine the outcome of the race ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

The epidemic of faux populism continues. Here's RNC Chairman Mike Duncan this afternoon defending the McCain gas tax holiday:

As you know, Staten Island Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) was arrested last Wednesday night for drunk driving with a blood alcohol level over twice the legal limit.

But now it seems that the arrest is landing him in an even bigger scandal.

Some color commentary from the NYDN ...

A hammered Vito Fossella and a stumbling drinking buddy were asked to leave a Washington bar hours before the Staten Island congressman was busted for drunken driving, witnesses said Monday.

...

Employees at the Logan Tavern said Brian, whose last name they did not know, passed out at the bar after arriving with Fossella.

Fossella roused his pal, who made it to the men's room, where he passed out again in a chair outside the bathroom door. Tavern staff woke Brian, who returned to the main room and promptly belly-flopped onto a table, Hahn said.

"The table's base was broken," Hahn said. "They offered to pay for it, but we said, 'That's all right, just leave.'"

Hahn said he helped the men to the street and flagged down a cab for them. It's unclear if the two men got into the cab or walked off, possibly to Fossella's car.

From the AP ...

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.

"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,'" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."

It's always hard not to be in charge of your headlines.

This is now live on the front page of The Politico ...

In Ben Smith's defense this seems like a very weird headline for the post they appear to be referring to.

(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader SM for the catch.)

I don't have to tell you there are primaries tonight in Indiana and North Carolina. But remember that we'll be bringing you live election results starting tonight at 6 PM Eastern when most of the polls close in Indiana.

Terry McAuliffe is on a roll today, telling MSNBC:

"She loves to sit, throw 'em back. So to me this is nothin' new. We all hear about the story that she and John McCain actually had a shot contest, I think in the Ukraine or somewhere around the world. And she actually beat John McCain in a shot contest. She's a girl from Illinois who likes to throw 'em down with the rest of us."

Watch the video here.

From TPM Reader AB ...

It's interesting that you're batting around this topic today. Because I just got off the phone with my Dad, who's an 80 y.o. died-in-the-wool Democratic and would vote for Hillary in a second (but as a former upstate Scranton, Pa. area first generation Polish immigrant probably won't ever vote for Obama.

I was complaining about what it's costing to fill the gas tank, and he started on about how Hillary and McCain want to do something about it by "getting rid of that tax" while "the black guy" is against that.

I said, simply and in terms he could understand:

"If the government knocks off those 18 cents a gallon, what do you think the oil companies are going do? They're going to raise the price of gas by 18 cents and you'll be paying exactly the same amount. Until September when even McCain and Hillary say they'll put the tax back on, and you'll end up paying even more than before. It's not gas tax relief for you, it's a give-away to the oil companies".

I think that really struck him as something he never actually considered, because he switched to the old "well, we've got to get all of those politicians out of the oil companies' back pockets, . . . "

I really don't understand why the Obama campaign isn't slamming this message hard.

Ask Hillary and McCain how they know the oil companies won't raise their prices, and ask them and the press to try to get the oil companies on record promising not to do so. They can't do it. They have no answer. That's the response.

From TPM Reader JW ...

In response to Kurtz's citation of GP (and as an avid Obama supporter), I have to lay a good deal of the blame for not making the basic, easily understandable, factually accurate assertion that Hillary's plan WON'T SAVE ANYONE ANY MONEY squarely at the feet of the Obama campaign and its surrogates. I flipped around several cable news stations yesterday, and heard at least a half dozen different "Obama supporters" lambaste Hillary's plan on the basis of its disingenuousness (including Clinton's "double dipping" with the windfall profits tax that will never be signed into law by this Administration), it's "gimmickry," its short-term only impact, and its INSUFFICIENT help to the common man (i.e. "only $0.30 a day"). Only AFTER laying out all those (admittedly valid) rationales did I ever hear an Obama surrogate, if they still had time to do so, make the point that a tax reduction would not be passed on to the consumer at the pump. It seems to me like this should have been the FIRST thing the Obama camp hit, from day one, with supportive emphasis on all the rest of the absolutely on-target reasons that this is a shameless, and ineffectual, pander by Clinton. I applaud my candidate for hitting back hard on this ridiculous "idea," but I wish they would have realized earlier how to hammer on it more effectively. Perhaps then the MSM talking heads would have focused on that, rather than the dearth of credible economists who support the plan.

Late Update: TPM Reader DG responds ...

JW is exaggerating. I saw an Obama ad on the TPM Election Central website that made exactly the point JW is hitting on, that the consumer won't benefit from the tax holiday. Maybe Obama surrogates could play that up more on TV, but the point isn't being ignored entirely by the campaign.

I think I'm with JW on this one though. Yes, the point is out there somewhere in the back and forth. But most of what I'm hearing from the Obama campaign is some version of it's not responsible and it's not even very much money. Both are true. But 'it won't save you any money' is much more straightforward and has the added advantage, according to virtually every economist, of being true.

According to Zogby, Obama is expanding his lead (51%-37%) in North Carolina and may even be jumping ahead in Indiana. His number for today in Indiana is Obama leading 45%-43%. But he says that Monday night's single total actually had him beating Clinton 47%-41%, which would suggest possible late movement into an actual lead. But he's really still an outlier, even though a couple late polls yesterday had only a five point margin for Hillary. (SurveyUSA had a 12 point margin for Hillary.)

If Zogby has this one nailed there will be lots of crowing. But given his record this year I'll believe it when I see it.

I fondly remember my own personal Zogby epiphany moment. I don't recall who my interlocutor was. But I told this person that the thing with Zogby was that he relatively frequently nailed final totals right on the nose, even if pretty frequently his numbers were way off. To which my friend very wisely responded, "Josh, that means he sucks." And I thought, "Hmmm, I guess that's right."

Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when a Clinton running for President not only thought economists mattered but touted their support for his economic plan in this TV ad:

TPM Reader YF finds this whole gas tax debate unsettling:

I have to say that I am really very surprised by the oddly rational, and near universal, condemnation of Hillary's gas tax plan by the mainstream media. It's been a long time since the TV talking heads were so focused on reality and for just a moment I actually got my hopes up that they might begin working their seriously atrophied logic and reason muscles and apply this new rigor to, say, the situation in Iraq. Ok- I won't hold my breath . . .

And how pathetic is the Clinton campaign that they cannot come up with the name of just one freakin' economist to throw back at the talking heads when they ask their favorite question of the moment "Just name one economist that agrees with the gas tax holiday." You can't find some hack Econ prof at East Jesus State University that will go on the record in favor? Are you kidding me? And this is the "grown up" campaign that is ready to roll on "day one"? I wouldn't hire these people to wash my car.

Also- please note that no one on television seems to be mentioning that the gas tax plan is also favored by a little known individual by the name of John McCain. You'd think, watching the teevee, that Hillary is the only person favoring this notion . . . .

Late Update: TPM Reader GP takes it one step farther:

Something else that nobody on television seems to be mentioning is that Hillary's plan WON'T CHANGE the price of gas. This is a key point. Now, I don't want to totally pile onto the media because at least they are somewhat challenging her on this which is more than I expect, but when they keep asking "Can you name one economist that supports your plan?", the Clinton campaign keeps firing back with "I don't care about economists, I care about the people and this will save them money, which might not seem like a big deal to you...", etc, etc.

The media is allowing the Clinton campaign to frame the narrative as "Clinton's proposal will save the common man money, and that's all that matters."

But it WON'T save them money. That's the point people should be making. It's not just that economists think it's an overall bad plan. They are saying that it won't even do what you say it's going to do!

If her plan was simply a matter of "saving the common man money" at the expense "ignoring long-term advice from economists", she might even have a point. It might actually be a GOOD idea to help the average American save a few cents even if overall the plan isn't a great idea.

But her plan won't do what she says it will. It won't save the average American money. At all.

Why doesn't the media say THAT?

Looks like Bush Administration plans to time the Gitmo trials for maximum 2008 Election Day impact have gone awry.

Top Hillary surrogate Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was on MSNBC this morning defending her gas tax holiday: "Thank God that we don't have economists making necessarily public policy . . ."

Late Update: Sen. Menendez has issued a clarification of his remarks.

Dana Milbank, on the extended twilight of the Bush Presidency.

What is Hillary talking about? She's going to break up the OPEC oil cartel? Because we have such a strong hand to play now with the OPEC member states? And isn't the main issue here a matter of rising demand, principally for rapidly expanding economies in Asia, not monopoly pricing?

Hillary is certainly not the first candidate to bash the oil producing states or oil companies around election time. And the polls seem to show it's working for her. But I'm concerned about the widening gap between reality and her campaign trail statements. First with the pledge to obliterate Iran if they attack Israel, then the rebellion against economists and now this.

Where are we going here?

New Ipsos poll has HRC up over Obama 47% to 40% nationally. Both beat McCain.

SurveyUSA's final poll of North Carolina: Obama 50%, Clinton 45%.

Terry McAuliffe reiterates the Clinton camp's pushback against economists, who pretty much universally disparage the wisdom of her gas tax holiday:

It seems like the Marc Dann scandal in Ohio is reaching almost Larry Craigian proportions -- at least in terms of the near universal sentiment with his party (he's a Dem) that he needs to leave and never be heard from again. Dann, you'll remember, is the new Attorney General who came in in 2006 and is accused of more or less running the AG's office like the fraternity house in Animal House. Now the state's Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and, from what I can tell, almost every other Democratic officeholder of note have signed a letter calling for Dann to resign or have state Dems introduce a House resolution to have him impeached.

Dann for his part says he's stickin'. "I am in the office, have rolled up my sleeves and am working on behalf of the people of the state of Ohio," he responded.

As a rule, TPM does not endorse candidates. But in this case, as Editor & Publisher of TPM and TPMmuckraker, I'm considering endorsing Dann's decision to stay in office at least for a few weeks so that we have enough time to dig into this story and wrench as much schadenfreude from it as possible.

I'm not so sure it's a positive, but the pattern is there. From TPM Reader SS ...

H- makes an interesting point regarding the lack of variance in the polls--namely that each poll with approximately 43% of the voters who have decided, and "undecideds" break overwhelmingly for Clinton. The same was clearly true in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and I believe in a few other states as well.

Do you attribute this "late break undecided" votes to something other than the voters had not made up their minds? Specifically, given the states (strong blue-collar white vote), do you think that at the end of the day that there is either (a) a Wilder effect at play here, or (b) that the Wright controversy makes Obama a little too "risky" a vote for a generally fairly conservative voting base?

If so, this could be viewed as an overall positive for Obama in the General Election, if one presumes that these "undecideds" are more concerned about policy than they are about race or the "riskiness" of voting for Obama. Clinton is, in some ways, a relatively safe alternative for Democrats (her policies are virtually identical to Obama), making it easy to justify not voting for the "other" Democrat.

TPM Reader RP catches the meta-message ...

I think what H and a lot of people are missing about Hillary Clinton might become head-smackingly obvious after this election is over. I'm an Obama supporter, and I'm offended by Hillary's demagoguery. But I don't think people get what she's doing here.

By being a 'fighter' and playing to the lowest kind of populism (and wow do we hate it), Hillary is showing that if she were somehow to get nominated, she'll run exactly the kind of stay-on-the-offensive campaign that will force mistakes from McCain and make it more likely that she'll win in November. She's also making it clear that Obama will never run that kind of campaign.

McCain is 71. Running for President will be an immense strain on anyone, let alone someone of that age. Even in the best of times, he's prone to shocking outbursts. With Hillary running, for the first time in anyone's memory, a Republican-toned campaign as a Democrat, she's showing that she can force McCain to make a 'macaca'-style gaffe. When Republicans grumble about McCain's temper, they're not worried about how he'll behave as President (since when has actual job performance mattered to them?); they're worried about how he'll campaign. They're frightened of a Phil Mickelson-esque implosion.

Obama, by contrast, will run a high-minded campaign and may well win on merit. And he'll always be on the defensive. As I said, I favor him Obama a wide margin. But I favor a Democrat over a Republican by an even wider margin.

The upshot: I'll happily support Hillary if she 'steals' the nomination. Aside from the benefits of not having a crop of incompetent government-haters running government, one of the benefits of a winning Hillary campaign would be to relieve a blight on our
country: the Atwater/Rove school of Republican campaign mudslinging. It's not about fighting back. It's about taking the first shot. She won't let them get their Swift Boats in the water to start with. If both sides are Atwatering it, yes, it'll be very very ugly, cue the
'Unity12' theme music and hand-wringing by the delicate. But I think we're in for ugly no matter what, because they're not going to stop. We may as well engage or get used to losing.

TPM Reader H- sees what's been a recurrent pattern that makes more sense of the Indiana polls ...

I think if you read the polling results of the various Indiana polls carefully, they are not as variable and contradictory as they might first appear. Nearly every poll in the last week has put Obama's number within one or two points of 43%. On the other hand, Clinton's numbers have varied much more dramatically in the 42-54% range. That variation tends to correlate negatively with the number of undecideds. So it would seem that what's going on is both candidates have solid bases of support in the low 40s, but when you start pushing less firm voters, they go overwhelmingly for Clinton (an indication that Zogby himself has also acknowledged). This still isn't very good news for Obama, but it does mean that pushing his supporters out and changing a few minds gives him a decent shot at keeping Indiana close.

I want to make a totally separate point. I agree with your posts from about a month ago about how irrational it is for a Democratic voter supporting the losing primary candidate to defect to McCain in November, since Clinton and Obama are so close on the issues compared to McCain. But I have to say, as someone who was marching in New Hampshire in 1991 for Bill Clinton, who ran the campus Democrats for his '92 campaign, who interned in his White House, who argued against impeachment at every turn, who even defended the pardons, who has been an enormous and unwavering admirer, and who has been disgusted with his own parents for their seemingly irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton, there is something about the way she has run this campaign. From having people on her campaign raise Obama's drug use, to her jumping on the bandwagon for every right-wing cheap shot, to her new populist, "got no truck with economists" stance, its been craven. More craven than I could possibly imagine.

If somehow against all odds she got nominated, I'd vote for her, but I'd do so utterly unconvinced that the quality of her leadership wouldn't bring about disastrous results no less than the disastrous results that McCain's wrongheaded policies and own cravenness would bring about. Yes, her policy positions would be much better than McCain's. But if she's this divisive, this self-preserving, this craven, I think the results can still be horrible, even with policy positions that are much closer to mine. At this point I feel like it would be the hardest vote for a Democrat I'd ever cast.

Now, I'm a Democratic fundraiser. And as detailed above, a very long time Clinton supporter. If I'm this repulsed, if it seems this craven to me, and I'm this pessimistic about her leadership, can I be alone? That doesn't even factor in the breach with younger voters, netroots activists, and African-American voters a Clinton nomination would bring about at this point.

Had to get that off my chest.

We have an especially good line-up this week at the TPMCafe Book Club. Joining Fareed Zakaria to discuss his new book, The Post-American World, are The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, Ann-Marie Slaughter of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, journalist David Rieff, and Michael Lind of the New America Foundation.

The discussion is underway, so stop by and join in.

Given its historically pro-military leanings, Indiana doesn't seem like fertile ground for the argument that we should never have gotten into Iraq in the first place -- but that's the case a pro-Obama union is making in a new mailer implicitly hitting Hillary for her Iraq War vote.

Seems like we've got another Zogby v. SurveyUSA showdown on our hands. Zogby, improbably and I think unlike everyone else, has had Obama a couple points ahead of Hillary Clinton in Indiana. And SurveyUSA's just-released survey has her a full 12 points out in front -- Clinton 54%, Obama 42%.

The SurveyUSA poll itself is a bit of an outlier on the high end compared to other late polls. But SurveyUSA has been much more reliable than Zogby this cycle.

One way or another, there's an egg on deck for someone's face Wednesday morning.

Late Update: I guess a narrow Clinton victory could result in a seldom-seen co-egging. But I think that, like Bush's theory of the executive, this is going to be a unitary affair.

According to retired Gen. Ric Sanchez, instead of trying to train the Iraq police Bernie Kerik spent most of his time in Baghdad "conducting raids and liberating prostitutes."

More robocall funny business in North Carolina?

Hillary Cinton took to the Sunday show airwaves to defend her gas tax holiday against Senator Obama and all those elitist, out-of-touch economists ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

The long, slow, painful process of accounting for the folly of the Iraq invasion and occupation continues, with a book by the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez.

New Ohio AG doing a bang up job ...

Just 16 months into his four-year-term, Ohio's attorney general admitted he was in over his head as he acknowledged an affair with a subordinate and his failure to stop problems that led to a sexual harassment investigation that brought down three of his aides.

Marc Dann apologized to his wife and supporters but insisted he would not step down. He took responsibility for the scandal, saying he was not prepared for the office or to run such a large agency.

"I did not create an atmosphere in my public and personal life that is consistent with the important mission of the Office of Attorney General," the Democrat said Friday after the three aides were fired or forced out in the harassment investigation. "I am heartbroken by my failure to recognize the problems being created and by my failure to stop them."

Dann had punted the probe to a well-respected lieutenant, state Sen. Ben Espy. The investigation uncovered a seedy underside to the office rife with booze, profanity, inappropriate sexual activity, misuse of state vehicles and on-the-job threats involving the Mafia.

As some mix of manic euphoria, delirium and exhaustion settles over Democrats nationwide, it's worth stepping back from the clamor for a moment to consider just why it is the Democrats have superdelegates (which the Republicans don't) in the first place and whether the whole concept should be abolished.

Obama supporters say that the superdelegates as a group should not overturn the verdict of the primary and caucus election process while Clinton supporters say that it's precisely the point of the super delegates to make their own considered judgment about who the party's nominee should be regardless of the finally tally of pledged delegates. The second accurately portrays why the superdelegates were created.

In fact, even this description puts too gentle a gloss on it. Coming out of the 1970s, the Democratic party establishment created the superdelegates precisely to put a brake on the power of "the groups", which was shorthand for, and not necessarily in this order, the hippies, the blacks, the gays, the feminists, the environmentalists and everyone else suspected of driving the Democratic party to the left of the American mainstream and out of contention in national elections. In this view, there were ordinary Democrats on the one hand and these assorted freaks on the other who came out every four years and out-organized the ordinary Dems to nominate rotten presidential candidates who got slaughtered in national elections.

The more palatable argument was that the superdelegates balanced out the idealism of party activists with the more pragmatic experience of party regulars and elected officials who had experience winning actual elections. But however you argue it, the supers were put there precisely to second-guess the results of the primary and caucus process.

And there the decision stood, fixed almost as though in amber, after 1982 when the system was created. But it never really mattered because all the presidential nomination battles since then either had a clear plurality winner or didn't even go on long enough for the superdelegates to really be an issue. And now we wake up more than twenty years later wondering just why we have these superdelegates in the first place.

Before being too judgmental toward the people who came up with this bright idea, we should note that the Democratic party was a very different thing and in a very different place back then than it is today -- at mid-point in an agonizing process of molting from the dominant but bifurcated party of mid-century America to the very different party it is today. With that said though, this was 1982, not 1782. So I doubt very much that the concept would have withstood actual application -- that is, having the superdelegates overrule the pledged delegate tally -- even back then. Indeed, it's not only that the concept is less palatable today. The sociology of the party is simply different; from the inside I don't think the party's critics any longer see its shortcomings in that way. The superdelegate concept was just a bad idea that got kept on the books because it seemed not to have any practical effect other than to give federal officeholders and sundry party bigwigs credentials to attend the conventions.

So what to do about it now? As you may know, there are almost 800 superdelegates and they're divided roughly equally between elected officials and party officials. While I think the superdelegate system should probably be scrapped in its entirety, the rationale for the elected folks is far, far greater than for the party operatives. The electeds are basically every Democratic member of Congress, Democratic governors and then a few miscellaneous folks like ex-presidents, ex-vice presidents and ex-congressional leaders. These folks are actually elected by Democrats on a fairly regular basis. And if they abuse the power they can be held accountable at the ballot box.

Now, back in February, Susan Estrich wrote a piece about just how the decision to create the superdelegate system was made back in 1982. (She was against the superdelegate concept because she was on the Teddy Kennedy team -- long story -- but was on the Rules Commission that set up the system.) She has a good run-down of just what the politics were at the time. But if I read her correctly, she seems to say that what the Rules Commission decided was basically just to make the elected folks superdelegates. It was only later that the DNC added its own membership to the list of supers -- a terrible and self-serving idea.

Just to recite the catechism, these are the rules this process is being run under. No changing the rules in midstream. But once this race is over and everybody can reconsider this matter without having to think about how it affects one particular candidate or another, Democrats need either to strip the superdelegate list down to members of Congress and governors (and the ex-presidents, speakers, et al.) or get rid of the whole superdelegate idea entirely.

Late Update: Having reread this post over a few times, there's an additional factor I should have noted. We now think of the presidential nomination contest as an ordinary one-person, one-vote election process, with individual elections in each state and territory following their own custom-tailored rules. With that guiding assumption, the unelected super-delegates are an anomaly. But that assumption is relatively new. And in 1982 it was newer still. As recently as the 1960s there were only a smattering of states that had primaries as we understand them today. And even those often elected 'favorite son' candidates, which essentially meant signing the state's delegates over to one of the state's most powerful elected officials. In other states, delegations were chosen by the state party or even just the dominant political boss. What all of that boils down to is that the superdelegate system devised in 1982 was just a more formalized though much more limited version of the system that had existed only a couple decades earlier. I still think it should have been obvious that it was a clock that couldn't be turned back. But in analyzing what happened in 1982, we should keep in mind recently the party boss system had still been in force.

From Bob Reich's blog ...

When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn't heard her remark and said he couldn't believe she'd say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as "politics as usual."

Funny-business in last night's election in Baton Rouge ...

On election day, a number of homes in Baton Rouge's predominantly black neighborhoods were phoned with a tape-recorded message asking black voters to teach white Democrats a lesson by staying home and not casting ballots.

The ad signed off as "Friends of Michael Jackson."

Jackson, a Democratic state representative defeated by Cazayoux in the primary runoff, said he was not involved or connected in any way with the calls. Jackson said he will run for the seat in November.