Time‘s Amy Sullivan has an important article out that illustrates a very specific challenge for the Obama campaign and its supporters: informing pro-choice women that John McCain’s position on the right to choose is one of lock-step agreement with anti-abortion extremists, up to and including constitutional amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade and then to ban virtually all abortions.
She highlights a new poll from NARAL Pro-Choice America:

The NARAL survey found that when pro-choice women are told that McCain believes the Roe v. Wade decision should be overturned, their support for him drops substantially. Among pro-choice independent women, who are already more inclined to back Obama, information about the two candidates’ abortion positions improves Obama’s edge from 53-35 to 66-26, for a net gain of 22 percentage points. Even pro-choice Republican women shift their support after hearing about McCain’s opposition to Roe: 76% initially say they will vote for McCain in November, but that number drops to 63%.

Sullivan explains that holding hard-core anti-abortion views while encouraging the impression of “moderation” on the subject is an old game for GOP presidential candidates, including George W. Bush. One big factor in this game has been the under-the-radar-screen, dog-whistle manner in which Republicans have reassured their culturally conservative base, in contrast to Democrats:

In essence, while the G.O.P. has largely tried to keep its base quietly comforted, Democrats have seemed compelled to make public shows of allegiance to pro-choice activists. The result is that pro-choice voters hear little from Republican candidates to upset them, even as pro-life voters have their differences with the Democratic Party’s abortion stance highlighted for all to see. Not surprisingly, the two approaches show up at the ballot box: in 2000, 38% of Bush’s voters were pro-choice while only 22% of Gore’s were pro-life. Those percentages closed in 2004, but only slightly.

Amy clearly thinks Democrats would be wise to supplement their pro-choice commitments with policy initiatives aimed at reducing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, a position identified with Hillary Clinton but not so much with Barack Obama. But in any event, McCain should not be allowed to become yet another stealth anti-abortion candidate who succeeds in having it both ways on this most emotional issue.

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson offers the first of what will be many, many previews of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. It concludes with this thought:

Convention speeches are by definition conventional: overproduced, stadium-sized, riddled with ritualized applause, cheese-ball taglines, balloon drops, and coded appeals to key demographics. Under the g-forces of so much demographic and institutional pressure, Obama could easily surrender to the occasion and be a little less impressive. His greatest speech, in this situation, might actually be a bad one. But, for a candidate whose entire reputation is built on freshness and change and inspiration, ordinariness could be a death blow. Obama’s only real option here is to find a third way: to fundamentally reimagine the occasion, as he did with the race speech, and blow the roof off the building without scaring anyone inside, to give the soaring speech of his lifetime that somehow doesn’t leave behind anyone on the ground.

Anderson generally suggests that if anyone can pull this off, it’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, “the first candidate in many cycles for whom speeches were not purely formal, schedule-plugging cliché-orgies but potent and densely written tactical weapons—and even occasionally, minor literary achievements.”

David Paul Kuhn of The Politico has an interesting article out today about three women who could theoretically help John McCain cut into Barack Obama’s big lead among female voters by joining the GOP ticket.
It’s not a very extensive or impressive list.
Kuhn begins by dismissing the early talk about Condi Rice as a potential running-mate, citing her apparent lack of interest in the gig, and her total identification with the Bush administration. In fact, her reported pro-choice views probably disqualify her from the get-go.
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has the paper credentials you’d want from a Veep, but has a stormy history with the cultural conservatives who likely have a veto over the selection, and is also widely considered Big Oil’s closest ally in the Senate.
There’s been some buzz about former HP exec Carly Fiorina, who’s been campaigning with McCain for a while. But as Kuhn points out, this may not be the right year to pick a former corporate CEO who presided over massive layoffs before getting fired and then accepting a $21 million golden parachute.
Then there’s Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, has a lot of movement conservatives fired up about her future if not her present. Palin, a former high school basketball star and beauty queen, got elected in 2006 after beating scandal-plauged Gov. Frank Murkowski in a primary, and is aligned against endangered porkmeister Don Young in this year’s GOP House primary. So she’s highly compatible with McCain’s alleged “reform” persona. But the reason conservatives outside Alaska love her is all about her rigid anti-abortion views, manifested in her personal life when she chose to continue a pregnancy, in her forties, despite knowing the child would have Down’s Syndrome. Still, she’s barely into her first term in office, has zero foreign policy experience, and is from a bright-red state that’s politically and culturally remote from the rest of the country. Maybe she and Jindal could create a formidable hard-right ticket in about 2020.
When it comes to McCain’s female running-mate options, as Porky Pig would say, “That’s all, folks!”

Larry Sabato has a new analysis of this year’s U.S. Senate ratings out, and he reinforces the CW that Democrats are certain to make significant pick-ups for the second straight cycle. With 13 races currenly adjudged as competitive:

The Crystal Ball has Democrats in line for pick-ups in Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, and New Mexico. Surprisingly, Alaska is definitely obtainable for the Democrats, and Mississippi is very much on the radar screen, too. If 2008 turns out to be strongly Democratic at the presidential level, Democrats might be able to grab one or more of the seats up in Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Oregon, though currently we have Republicans leading in all four states. (The GOP leads in Minnesota and North Carolina are already shaky.) To balance the likely Democratic gains, Republicans have a single Democratic seat in Louisiana to target–and we rate that race as currently leaning Democratic.

To put it another way, Republicans have to look forward to 2012, when Democrats must defend 24 of the 33 seats at stake, for any realistic chance of regaining control of the U.S. Senate. Not bad, considering that a lot of folks thought after 2002 that the blue state/red state split probably spelled perpetual GOP dominance of the Senate.

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver points to very favorable trends towards Barack Obama in state- and regional-level general election polling of those Appalachian areas where he did so poorly in the primaries. The most persuasive evidence is in Quinnipiac’s Swing State polling, which shows Obama registering double-digit gains between May and June in SW Ohio, and in SW and central PA. This probably helps explain why Obama has suddenly open up significant leads over McCain in recent polling of both OH and PA.

Yesterday we published a post by James Vega predicting that conservatives are beginning a “stab in the back” propaganda effort aimed at arguing that Democrats threaten to squander an ongoing military victory in Iraq, partly by using lots of action verbs attributing every positive development in the country to the force of arms.
As commenter Joe Corso pointed out, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer abundantly confirmed Vega’s prediction this very morning, with a piece that described a long series of events in Iraq as part of an invincible surge-related campaign.
Interestingly enough, Krauthammer’s heroic spin was ostensibly aimed at convincing John McCain to make the victory-or-disgrace argument on Iraq the very centerpiece of his entire general-election campaign.
Let’s hope McCain is listening.

One of the fascinating aspects of the upcoming presidential general election is that it will offer highly contrasting organizational models. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft nicely describes the Obama campaign’s M.O.:

The Obama campaign is clearly obsessed with maintaining a tight, top-down organizational and message structure. So far, as TPM Election central notes, the Obama campaign has been “famously devoid of (publicly visible) infighting and/or leaking.” Last month, they put the clamps on progressive 527’s, and now they are taking over the DNC. Virtually the entire general election messaging will run through the senior leadership of the Obama campaign, and no one else. This makes the Obama campaign something of a living paradox, as it sports the largest grassroots corps in electoral history, combined with the tightest top-down message structure in recent Democratic presidential election history.

Meanwhile, John McCain’s campaign has yet to show any signs of grassroots energy, and its own organizational structure is regional, not national. Furthermore, McCain will have to rely on the RNC and 527s for a significant portion of its message-delivery function.
It’s part of the CW of the 2004 campaign that Bush’s ability to centrally control his message, and distribute it via a sophisticated grassroots network, gave him a big advantage over John Kerry. This may also represent a largely hidden but important advantage for Obama.

In case you missed it live, here’s the transcript for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s speech in Washington today suspending her campaign and endorsing Barack Obama for president. You couldn’t ask for a more thorouhgoing commitment to support the ticket, and the speech will be well-received in all sectors of the Democratic Party.
It’s been five months since the nominating process formallly began, and the general election is still five months away. We’re halfway home.

Much of the political news over the last few days has involved a tide of endorsements of Barack Obama for president by Democratic superdelegates, and increasingly, by previous supporters of Hillary Clinton. The big endorsement is due on Saturday, by Clinton herself.
But one bit of news concerns a de-endorsement of Obama that will be greeted with considerable joy in the presumptive Democratic nominee’s HQ: by the Palestinian group Hamas, motivated by Obama’s speech yesterday to a gathering of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Breaking no new ground, Obama repeated his support for a Palestinian state but only on condition of maintaing Israel’s character as a Jewish state, within “secure and defensible borders.” His exact language, however, seemed to enrage Hamas:

“Obama’s comments have confirmed that there will be no change in the U.S. administration’s foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters in Gaza.
“The Democratic and Republican parties support totally the Israeli occupation at the expense of the interests and rights of Arabs and Palestinians,” he said.
“Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win,” Zuhri said.

The earlier “endorsement” of Obama in April by Hamas “adviser” Ahmed Yousef has been a staple of Republican attack emails and McCain fundraising missives. It will be interesting to see if these attacks now stop.
Meanwhile, Obama’s nomination victory was greeted with considerable excitement just about everywhere else on the planet. Karl Blumenthal has a good sampling of the global reaction at OpenLeft.

While some Obama supporters thought it should have happened weeks or even months ago–or certainly night before last, when Obama was able to claim victory–Hillary Clinton has now make it abundantly clear she’s suspending her campaign on Saturday and acknowledging her rival as the Democratic nominee.
“Suspension” rather than withdrawal (a fairly common step among losing candidates) means she can keep raising money to retire her substantial debts. It also means, though you won’t hear much about it publicly, that in the unlikely event of some catastrophic blow to Obama’s general election prospects, she could reactivate her candidacy before the convention.
Expect a few days of careful maneuvering by the Obama camp to let Clinton wrap things up, amidst hopes that she will endorse Obama in a manner that will quell most of the pro-McCain talk you hear from some of her core supporters.