In case you made an early night of it, Barack Obama won MT, wrapped up a majority of delegates, and claimed the nomination at a festive, SRO event in MN. Hillary Clinton won SD, claimed a total-popular-vote victory, did not acknowledge Obama’s delegate count, and said she’d decide next steps later, at what can only be described as a defiant event in NY. The TV networks spent a lot of time debating the meaning of HRC’s actions, with interpretations ranging from a short-term facing-saving measure to a power play to compel Obama to ask her onto the ticket.
We’ll have a lot more later today.

If you are a hard-core fan of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, or of the Detroit Pistons, you might want to stop reading right now. But for purely aesthetic reasons, we’re passing along a link to a savagely funny piece by TNR’s Christopher Orr, speaking in the voice of Pistons’ GM Joe Dumars, demanding a seventh game against the Boston Celtics for the NBA Eastern Conference championship. You don’t have to accept the accuracy of this “sports parable” to appreciate the craftmanship.

In his latest National Journal column, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent brief summary of what we can learn and what we can’t learn from early general election polls, both of the national and the state-by-state variety, in terms of the electability arguments being made on behalf of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He concludes that both Obama and Clinton have entirely plausible “paths to victory” in a general election, though Clinton at present has a somewhat larger group of “reachable” states from which to cull 270 electoral votes. He also warns readers that polling evidence from some key states is sparse, of uneven quality, and most obviously, very early.

At the Politico today, Ben Adler has an article assessing the three women (all governors) most frequently mentioned as possible running-mates for Barack Obama: Janet Napolitano of AZ, Kathleen Sebelius of KS, and Claire McCaskill of MO. As the headline and lede suggest, Adler’s hypothesis is that these three women differ from Hillary Clinton in that they are not “polarizing,” as though this is somehow a typical gender problem. That annoying detail aside, the piece is interesting in that Adler chooses to assess the governors through the eyes of Republicans in their states. And while it’s obvious from the tone of their comments that there’s not a lot of genuine bipartisan affection in play in any of the three states, the governors do get high marks from their opponents for having world-class political skills. It’s worth a read.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

It’s safe to say that no subject has preoccupied political analysts over the last month or so than the relative support levels of Barack Obama among white working-class voters in the late Democratic primaries.
But in yesterday’s New York Times, John Harwood reports on a discussion with TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira that places this issue in a broader and calmer perspective.

Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic analyst of voting trends, wrote the book on the core issue in the endgame of the party’s nomination fight. Its title is “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.”
One might conclude that Mr. Teixeira is troubled by Senator Barack Obama’s performance in recent primaries against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton among the voters known by nicknames like Joe Sixpack or Nascar Dad or Waitress Mom.
Actually, he is not.
Mr. Obama, who leads the delegate count, “is clocking in where he needs to be” with white, working-class voters to win the White House in November, Mr. Teixeira said.

What about the argument, emanating from both the Clinton campaign and from many Republicans, that her solid advantage over Obama among non-college educated white voters spells disaster for Obama in a general election?

Mr. Teixeira, who is not backing either candidate, does not buy that argument. He dismisses intraparty contests as “pretty poor evidence” of whether Mr. Obama, as the Democratic nominee, could attract the blue-collar support he would need against Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.
And how much blue-collar support would Mr. Obama need? Not a majority, said Mr. Teixeira. Though blue-collar Democrats once represented a centerpiece of the New Deal coalition, they have shrunk as a proportion of the information age-economy and as a proportion of the Democratic base.
Al Gore lost working-class white voters by 17 percentage points in 2000, even while winning the national popular vote. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost them by 23 points in 2004, while running within three points of President Bush over all. Mr. Teixeira suggests that Mr. Obama can win the presidency if he comes within 10 to 12 percentage points of Mr. McCain with these voters, as Democratic candidates for the House did in the 2006 midterm election.
In recent national polls, that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing.

And that’s actually a bit comforting, given the relatively early stage of the electoral cycle, and the proximity of a big media frenzy over remarks made by Jeremiah Wright.

Mr. Teixeira argues that Mr. Obama’s standing with working-class whites may be artificially low in the wake of his skirmishing with Mrs. Clinton and the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
“Yes, he has a problem,” Mr. Teixeira said. “But it’s a solvable problem.”

So going by “the book”–Ruy Teixeira’s cutting-edge analysis of demographic trends in the electorate–it’s no time for panic about Obama and the White Working Class, and there’s plenty of time for the likely Democratic nominee to build a winning coalition.

This morning’s most important read is Sen. Joe Biden’s rejoinder to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday claming that Democrats have abandoned their own foreign policy legacy.
Biden gets off to a roaring start with this line:

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.

But much of his column focuses on the Bush-McCain-Lieberman attack on Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with countries like Iran. This no-talk posture, says Biden, is inconsistent not only with the Democratic foreign policy tradition, but with that of Republican presidents:

Sen. Obama is right that the U.S. should be willing to engage Iran on its nuclear program without “preconditions” – i.e. without insisting that Iran first freeze the program, which is the very subject of any negotiations. He has been clear that he would not become personally involved until the necessary preparations had been made and unless he was convinced his engagement would advance our interests.
President Nixon didn’t demand that China end military support to the Vietnamese killing Americans before meeting with Mao. President Reagan didn’t insist that the Soviets freeze their nuclear arsenal before sitting down with Mikhail Gorbachev. Even George W. Bush – whose initial disengagement allowed dangers to proliferate – didn’t demand that Libya relinquish its nuclear program, that North Korea give up its plutonium, or even that Iran stop aiding those attacking our soldiers in Iraq before authorizing talks.
The net effect of demanding preconditions that Iran rejects is this: We get no results and Iran gets closer to the bomb.

Biden clearly isn’t inclined to concede national security issues to the GOP in this election, and change the subject to the economy or other “Democratic issues.” Let’s hope this is an attitude that all Democrats share.

For any of you who may be hard-core HRC fans dismayed by all the “it’s over” talk in the news media and the blogosphere, RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost offers a ray of hope: a self-consciously “contrarian” analysis of how blowout wins in WV, KY and PR could still give Clinton a plausible argument that she’s won the cumulative popular vote.
The only problem with Cost’s scenario is that it requires superdelegates to stay on the fence until after Puerto Rico votes. It’s true that the stampede of superdelegates to Obama that many observers predicted after his NC win hasn’t occurred just yet, and some have made it clear they’ll hold off announcing their intentions until the voting’s over. But still, a Clinton victory remains the political equivalent of a full-court shot at the buzzer.

In his National Journal column today, Ron Brownstein conducts a definitive slicing-and-dicing of the claims of the Clinton and Obama campaigns about the implications of Barack Obama’s relative weakness among white working class voters in the Democratic primaries.
While he takes sides on several of these disputes, he identifies the big question, particularly in terms of Barack Obama’s prospects in a general election, as exactly how many white working-class voters a Democrat has to have, particularly since Al Gore won the popular vote and John Kerry came close with historically low levels of support from white voters without a college education.
Brownstein ultimately agrees with TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira that any successful Democratic presidential candidate probably needs to get without shouting range of Bill Clinton’s 1996 performance of 44% among white non-college voters.

A new Census Bureau Report on demographic trends in the U.S. population came out yesterday, and the buzz is about its estimates and projections of a rapidly growing Hispanic population, fed by relatively high birth rates more than by immigration.
Hispanics now make up 15% of the U.S. population, up from 12.6% in 2000. More strikingly, one in five children now born in the U.S. are Hispanic.
62% of the increase in the Hispanic population since 2000 is atttributable to births in this country.
This is no longer the surprise it used to be, but the states with the highest percentage increases in Hispanic populations during the last seven years are mostly in the South.
By 2050, the Census Report predicts, Hispanics are expected to make up nearly a third of the working-age population. Indeed, Hispanic immigration and birth rates will immeasurably help cushion the impact of the retirement of the baby boom generation.
The political impact of the growth in the Hispanic population will obviously occur in stages, given that population’s youth, variable citizenship status, and relatively low levels of voting. And anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant sentiment will likely continue to be concentrated in areas with visibly large Hispanic public school participation but low citizenship and/or voting rates.
But over time, Hispanic political clout is likely to grow at a rate that will marginalize anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant appeals in most parts of the country.

For your Monday morning edifiction, four published pieces stand out. Paul Krugman reminds us that George W. Bush once convinced some people that he was a “maverick” (remember “reformer with results” and “compassionate conservative?”).
Robert Novak spits fire at two archbishops who enabled pro-choice politicians to receive communion at papal masses in Washington and New York (lest anyone credit Pope Benedict with tolerance or diplomacy, Novak insists these invitations to Pelosi, Kennedy, Kerry and Giuliani were acts of “disobedience” to the Vatican’s own wishes).
Christopher of Bloomberg.com does a sober assessment of the value of Barack Obama’s “gigantic” database of donor and volunteer information.
And most striking of all, Karl Rove uses his Newsweek column to raise concern-trolling (the disingenuous expression of advice to political enemies) to hitherto unknown levels of hypocrisy, offering Obama tips on how to deal with his “elitism” problem.