A STRAINED WRIGHT-OBAMA BOND FINALLY SNAPS (Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor, New York Times) Mr. Obama’s campaign has been striking for its discipline. This is a candidate who prides himself on his coolness and singleness of purpose, not to mention his ability to take on opponents as formidable as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, the former president. But Mr. Obama discovered one figure who has confounded him, his own pastor. In recent months, the candidate has tried to distance himself from Mr. Wright and his often radical views, even as he felt compelled to understand and explain his former pastor to a larger, predominantly white political world. As for Mr. Wright, he saw a cascade of perceived slights coming from the campaign of a bright young follower whose political ambitions were tugging him away from Trinity United Church of Christ. He saw the church he had founded coming under pressure from reporters and critics, forced to hire security guards. And he made no secret of whom he blamed: Mr. Obama’s political adviser, David Axelrod, a white Chicago political operative.
MORE: Loss and Furor Take Toll on Obama, Poll Finds (New York Times) Fifty-one percent of Democratic primary voters say they expect Mr. Obama to win their party’s nomination, down from 69 percent a month ago. Forty-eight percent of Democrats say he is the candidate with the best chance of beating Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, down from 56 percent a month ago.
THE FOLLY OF MCCAIN CARE (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic) More than 30 states already have programs almost exactly like the one McCain just sketched out. They are called “high risk pools,” and the idea is pretty straightforward: Private insurers agree to sell policies directly to individuals, even those with pre-existing medical conditions, as long as the state helps to subsidize the cost. But the whole reason conservatives like McCain prefer this approach to liberal schemes for universal coverage is that it involves minimal government regulation. As a result, private insurers have enormous leeway in dictating the terms of coverage. And one place they use that leeway is by setting high prices. A few years ago, a Commonwealth Fund study found that, on average, state high-risk pools offered coverage that was two-thirds more expensive than regularly priced coverage. In some states, the high-risk coverage was actually twice as high as regular coverage. At those prices, you might think the coverage was spectacular. Not so. While private insurers in high-risk pools are willing to accept people with pre-existing conditions, they’re not generally willing to cover expenses related to those pre-existing conditions–at least not right away. Nearly all the plans surveyed had waiting periods of between six months and a year, during which the insurers would not cover care for prior medical problems.
WHILE CLINTON FOCUSES, OBAMA IS DISTRACTED (Patrick Healy, New York Times) Pumped up and focused, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is putting in 16-hour days in Indiana this week as if she — and not her embattled rival, Senator Barack Obama — needs a campaign-changing moment in Tuesday’s primary here. In fact, Indiana is a must-win state for her. Not only is Mrs. Clinton behind in accumulating presidential delegates, she now also faces a new test: Showing that she can seize the opportunity, created by the public fracas between Mr. Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., to win over a cross-section of Democrats in this broadly representative state. With Mr. Obama politically bruised by his former pastor, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on Tuesday are perhaps the best chance yet for Mrs. Clinton to prove that she is the stronger general-election candidate.
WRIGHT UPROAR BOOSTS CLINTON’S CONFIDENCE (Mike Allen and John F. Harris, Politico) For the past couple of months, Clinton has been resting her hopes — and resisting calls to drop out — on the possibility of a game-changer, some unforeseen event that would change the prism through which the media, superdelegates and average Democrats are viewing her uphill campaign against Barack Obama. It won’t be clear until the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina whether the game really has changed. But recent days have shown that the ground has shifted in important ways for her. Some are concrete: better fundraising, well-timed endorsements and a spate of polls showing how Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has broken skin politically.Others are more intangible: crisp performances by Clinton at a time when the usually poised Obama has appeared more rattled than at any time in this campaign, as well as a Clinton campaign team that is no longer defeatist and morose behind the scenes. By no means are they effusive. Under their best-case scenario, Clinton advisers believe she will be about 100 delegates behind Obama when the primary season ends on June 3. But if the mathematics of the race has not changed, aides believe the psychology has.
GO FOR THE BITTER BLOC (Reihan Salam, Weekly Standard) In a sense, Hillary Clinton’s coalition of white working class and Latino voters represents a better path for the Democratic party’s future than Barack Obama’s coalition of social liberals and black voters, which, as John Judis has noted, resembles nothing so much as George McGovern’s losing coalition of 1972. Granted, there are far more college-educated liberals now than there were a generation ago. But here’s the thing–the McGovern coalition included all minorities, as though minority status were defining and rigid. To the extent Latino voters can be pried loose from neo-McGovernism, the whole enterprise collapses.. In doing so, [McCain] could remove places like Nevada, Florida, and New Mexico from the swing state column and improve his standing in increasingly blue-trending Colorado… It’s a tall order. Still, if McCain manages to pull off a victory, Republicans will owe a debt to the path blazed by the Hillary Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania–not that they would ever thank such an unlikely benefactor, and not that she would ever want to be thanked.
THE PROBLEMATIC POPULAR VOTE COUNT (Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker) I’ve been maintaining for months that the most significant metric in the Democratic race will ultimately be the popular vote, even though the official, by-the-rules determinant is convention delegates, elected and “super.” I maintain this because the popular vote—i.e., the votes of actual human beings—has more democratic (and Democratic) legitimacy than the votes of constructed or mediating entities… Bottom line: the whole damn thing will be roughly a tie. And I do mean roughly. In which case it really will be up to the Supreme Court, I mean the Superdelegate Court. At that point, maybe the best solution would be for the supers to abstain on the first ballot in Denver and then everybody can have a free-for-all. Here’s what would happen next, according to a mystifying non-explanation on the Democrats’ mystifying “Convention 101” Web page: “If neither candidate reaches a majority of delegate votes on the first ballot for president, the nomination and the race for delegates becomes competitive.” Like it isn’t already.
WHEN DEMOCRATS GO POST-AL (James Wolcott, Vanity Fair) What really twists the intestines into a knot is knowing that Democrats will probably be as ineffectual going after McCain as they’ve been for these last seven years of sagebrush theater. Top Democrats and media flunkies have been both idly and actively complicit in McCain’s maverick identity getting a Holy Ghost makeover. Hillary and Bill Clinton have taken turns polishing McCain’s hood while Joe Lieberman pals around with Big John as if they were touring in La Cage aux Folles, two old queens taking in the sunset. As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler blog decried, “The RNC [Republican National Committee] (and the rest of the conservative world) would never have tolerated the sanctification of some Big Major Democrat of McCain’s type. But liberals and Dems have stared into space as McCain has been endlessly vested with sainthood.” Democrats have pulled their punches for so long that they know only how to hit themselves in the face, earning the reputation for masochism that gives Dick Cheney a good chuckle each night at bedtime as he’s being packed in ice.
NO ‘SISTER SOULJAH’ MOMENT (John Heilemann, New York) To start with, whatever admixture of courage and calculation that one ascribes to Clinton’s maneuver, the risk he took in going after Lady Souljah was one that he took voluntarily — it was a risk of choice. The rapper, though every bit as hysterical and inflammatory as the reverend, had not become an issue in the 1992 campaign. Clinton had no relationship to her. Certainly, her comments posed no peril to his nomination. In all of this, Obama’s situation was starkly different. His decision to cut his ties from Parson Wright, which might have been construed as brave if it had come a year or even a month ago, was by no means an act of political fortitude. It was an act of political necessity.
CLINTON GAS-TAX PROPOSAL CRITICIZED (Alec MacGillis and Steven Mufson, Washington Post) A growing chorus – including a top congressional Democrat – labeled Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposal for suspending the federal gasoline tax ineffective and shortsighted yesterday, even as she continued to paint Sen. Barack Obama as insensitive to drivers’ woes for not endorsing the plan. The Democrats’ clash on the issue has emerged as a flash point in the week before the presidential primaries in Indiana and North Carolina and is emblematic of the broader contrast that the candidates have presented: Clinton says she would make immediate bread-and-butter fixes for struggling Americans, while Obama portrays himself as a truth-teller who would bring a new kind of politics to Washington and produce more lasting change.
A COMMITMENT PROBLEM (Norman Ornstein, Los Angeles Times) At a bare minimum, Clinton needs to net another 300,000 votes over her rival in the remaining contests to make a reasonable case that she has equaled or exceeded him in popular votes by including her edge in the non-contest in Florida. (Given the dwindling number of remaining contests, she cannot afford to “lose” many of the 200,000 votes she picked up over Obama in Pennsylvania.) That adds up to Clinton achieving at least a low-single-digit-margin loss in North Carolina and a significant win in Indiana… If Obama wins Indiana, odds are that a pent-up flood of supers finally will endorse him on May 7, signaling an early end to the process. If he holds Clinton’s edge in Indiana to somewhere close to 2% and wins North Carolina by anywhere close to the 15% margin he holds in the polls, odds are that a trickle of superdelegate Obama endorsements will become a steady stream, resulting in a slower May decision. If neither of these scenarios pan out, the supers will try mightily to resolve the issue on or after the last active voting on June 3, to keep their convention from careening out of control. But they need a good reason to end their torture. Ambiguous results, damaging enough to Obama to keep him from closure but not definitive enough to move these reluctant power brokers to the Clinton camp, are their recurring nightmare.
