With today’s news that John Edwards is going public on Nightline to admit he’s been lying for a couple of years about an affair he had with a woman who was on his campaign’s payroll, many Democrats are in a state of shock and anger. Aside from sympathy for Edwards’ family (especially his brave wife, Elizabeth) and astonishment at Edwards’ chutzpah at running a presidential campaign knowing the National Enquirer was onto this story, the main reaction has been relief that Edwards didn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination and wasn’t under serious consideration for a second Veep bid. Can you imagine if the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was the object of this story? Talk about a brokered convention!
Jane Hamsher probably spoke for most Democrats today:

I don’t really care what people do in their private lives and nobody can know what the relationship is between two people, so unless their personal lives are at odds with their voting records — demanding that people do one thing while they do another (like being, you know, not gay or something) — I figure that’s their business.
But Edwards did play the family card quite heavily during his campaign, and if he’d gotten the nomination, the Democrats would be sunk right now and we’d be looking at four years of John McCain. So on that count, I’m profoundly grateful that he didn’t get it. He was risking a lot for all of us by doing this stuff and running at the same time. It was incredibly stupid.

And it’s all incredibly sad.

Today Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics conducts another of his impressive county-level analyses of a swing state, in this case Pennsylvania.
His bottom line is that the Keystone State has maintained a very consistent Democratic advantage (compared to the national vote) of about 4 percentage points over the last four decades, despite internal shifts. Basically, growth of the Democratic vote percentage in Philadelphia and its closer suburbs has been offset by a Republican trend in western PA, and the Philly exurbs. Cost identifies northeast PA (where Obama did very poorly in the primary) as an opportunity area for McCain, and the Philly exurbs as one for Obama.
Cost does not get into another X-factor: the astonishing pro-Democratic trend in voter registration in PA since 2004, a net shift of 486,000 votes, according to a recent study by Rhodes Cook. Ds now enjoy a party-registration plurality in the state of more than a million votes.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine Obama losing PA if he’s running even nationally.

At FiveThirtyEight today, Nate Silver unveils the mysteries of the Gallup Tracking poll cross-tabs, and provides a fascinating comparison of Barack Obama’s recent standing in various demographic categories to John Kerry’s 2004 performance (as measured by exit polls).
Turns out Obama’s doing better than Kerry in every category other than one: self-identified Democrats, where he trails Kerry by nine percentage points. Obama, on the other hand, beats Kerry among self-identified Republicans by fourteen percentage points.
Aside from issues related to the changing partisan composition of the electorate since 2004 (a sizable drop in GOP identification, with modest gains for Democrats and a big increase in indies), this particular finding should be regarded as transitional, since the dynamics of a general election campaign will almost certainly boost Obama among Democrats and McCain among Republicans. But it’s still interesting.
The most impressive Kerry-to-Obama gains are among Hispanics (up 28%, though exit poll underestimation of Kerry’s Hispanic percentages is a factor there), and voters under 30 (up 21%).

A post from Ed yesterday noted that the recent complaining about Barack Obama’s “presumptuous” transition planning would be better directed to the signs of disorganization and infighting being exhibited by John McCain’s staff and advisors. In the Politico today, Kenneth P. Vogel runs down the list of policy issues on which McCain and his advisors have been at odds, though the story gets a little confusing thanks to McCain’s various flip-flops. Here’s the nut graph:

McCain has staked out an eclectic and occasionally politically inconvenient hodgepodge of policy positions that has bucked the Republican line on some issues, backed it on others and — on still others — gone from bucking it to backing it. Keeping him on message would be a challenge for the most unified chorus of advisers — and Team McCain is hardly that.

Vogel tries to do the “on the other hand” thing by searching for similar divisions in the Obama ranks, without a whole lot of success.
The most intriguing set of conflicts within Team McCain involves “senior advisor” Carly Fiorina, the very former HP exec who has occasionally made lists of potential running-mates for the GOP candidate:

Fiorina also has found herself at ideological odds with McCain on key issues.
McCain stumbled when asked about her suggestion this month that insurance companies should cover birth control prescriptions. In recent years, McCain has voted against requiring such coverage. The campaign subsequently clarified that McCain opposes all insurance mandates and contended that Fiorina’s comments were consistent with that stance.
And Fiorina this month suggested that McCain might be open to new taxes on the wealthy, which conflicts with McCain’s own pledges not to consider any new taxes.
This week, though, McCain signaled he might be willing to consider raising payroll taxes for Social Security. Then on Tuesday, he sternly said, “No,” when asked at a Nevada event if he would raise taxes as president.

All in all, it looks like McCain has definitively distinguished himself from George W. Bush in one respect: the famous discipline of W.’s retinue is nowhere to be found in Team McCain.

At HuffPo this morning, Sam Stein has a thorough account of the Obama campaign’s impressive deployment of field resources to Florida, putting it “months ahead” of the organizing efforts in the Sunshine State by the Gore and Kerry campaigns.

Already with fully staffed offices in three major cities, the Illinois Democrat is formally opening additional headquarters in five other cities this week and eight others next week, bringing the total amount of Obama for America offices in the state to 16.

And Florida’s not even a state that most observers consider critical to Obama’s chances of winning.
As Stein notes, Obama’s got 15 field office up and running in Wisconsin, and an astonishing 24 in Virginia.
Whatever the Obama campaign ultimately accomplishes, it’s certainly making its mark as representing a much greater commitment to grassroots organizing than we’ve seen in a long, long time.

Here, from Politico’s David Paul Kuhn, is an interesting nugget based on the recent Pew Hispanic Center survey of the presidential race:

McCain’s problem looks to be most pronounced among Protestant Latinos, who had seemed to be the GOP’s doorway into the Hispanic population. From 2000 to 2004, Protestant Latinos increased their share of the total Hispanic electorate from 25 percent to 32 percent, in large part because of Bush’s evangelical outreach and strategic microtargeting of the community. Even as turnout increased, support for Bush among the group rose from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004.
The Pew poll, however, shows that only a third of Protestant or Evangelical Hispanics intend to vote for McCain, while 59 percent support Obama — who also enjoys a 50-percentage-point lead among Catholic Latinos, long a solid bloc of the Democratic coalition.

You have to wonder if this poor showing by McCain among one of the truly critical swing voter groups will have an effect on the remainder of his general election campaign, including his veep choice. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight notes today that Mitt Romney appears terribly weak among Hispanic voters, probably thanks to his efforts to pose as a tough guy on immigration during the nominating contest.

If you enjoy the journalistic genre of unintentional self-parody, there’s a true classic available in today’s Wall Street Journal: an op-ed by right-wing thriller author Andrew Klavan arguing that the new box office smash Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” is actually “at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” Why?

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Klavan goes on at considerable, turgid length in this vein. Read Michael Cohen’s account if your heart can’t stand the belly-laughs associated with ploughing through the original. But I’m sure the Batman movie’s producers are happy they’ve raked in so much money before moviegoers realized they were participating in a referendum on the Bush administration with every popcorn purchase.

Well, Barack Obama’s delivered his much-awaited speech in Berlin, to a crowd of about 200,000, many of whom were waving, not burning, American flags.
You can see the video and read the transcript, here.
Reactions are slow to trickle in, but outside Republican ranks, look to be very positive. It appears (as Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post seems to suggest at length) that Obama took a complicated and inherently risky situation and navigated it well. It was a huge crowd, but Obama did little to whip it into a frenzy. He alluded frequently to big changes in U.S. policy, but did that lightly, and coupled it with direct challenges to Europeans on issues ranging from Iran to Darfur to Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, and to anti-Americanism itself. The whole speech echoed his basic campaign thematics, but sounded relevant to the site and the occasion. And by tying the whole speech to the Berlin Airlift of sixty years ago, Obama kept the audience focused on the absolute high point in post-World War II U.S.-German relations.
It didn’t hurt, either, that Obama worked in very explicit references to his love for America.
We’ll see as it plays out, but early indications are quite good.

John McCain and his campaign staff aren’t exactly dealing with the enormous publicity surrounding Barack Obama’s overseas tour with good grace. As Elisabeth Bumiller notes in The New York Times, in a dispatch from McCain’s Maine appearance with George H.W. Bush, Team McCain can do little but whine from the sidelines:

“It is what it is,” Mr. McCain said with a hint of exasperation at the side of the first President Bush, who acknowledged that he, for one, was “a little jealous” of all the commotion over Mr. Obama’s trip this week to Europe and the Middle East.
Mr. McCain’s comments were mild compared with the bleak mood and frustration on the part of his advisers, who have taken to referring to Mr. Obama sarcastically as “The One” and railing against the large amount of coverage Mr. Obama is receiving compared with Mr. McCain.
“There is nothing you can do about it,” said an acerbic Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, while standing at the back of a modest crowd assembled to hear Mr. McCain speak at a picnic in South Portland, Me. “ ‘The One’ went to Europe and homage must be paid.”

There’s a rumor going around in conservative circles that McCain will try to regain media attention near the end or immediately after Obama’s trip by announcing his vice presidential choice. Maybe it’s a coincidence or even a diversionary tactic, but he’s also interrupting a battleground-states tour to go to New Orleans for a meeting with LA Gov. Bobby Jindal, the preferred veep choice of a lot of “movement conservative” types.

If the subject weren’t so serious, it would be pretty funny. Reports this weekend that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had more or less endorsed Barack Obama’s redeployment plan for U.S. combat troops in his country produced all sorts of hysteria in the White House, which is now trying to claim Maliki and Bush are in synch on what’s being called a “time horizon” for withdrawal. Under God knows what kind of pressure from Washington, Maliki’s staff is also trying to suggest that his remarks in an interview with Der Spiegel were mistranslated or misinterpreted. But as The New York Times reports today, Maliki’s redemployment of his own words isn’t going too well:

Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications. After that, the government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview.
The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics.
“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”
But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.
The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”
He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

Kinda hard to walk that one back.