Actually, I don’t think unpaid parking tickets will sink the Obama campaign. It will, in fact, probably increase his support among United Nations diplomats, who will now feel they really relate to the man.

Much like his smoking, this is an almost too-perfect flaw. Next we’ll hear he has a soft spot for Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Barack Obama, speaking before AIPAC, March 2:

One of the most profound consequences of the administration’s failed strategy in Iraq has been to strengthen Iran’s strategic position; reduce U.S. credibility and influence in the region; and place Israel and other nations friendly to the United States in greater peril.

Hillary Clinton, speaking in Congress, Feb. 14:

In dealing with the threats posed by the Iranian regime, which has gained its expanding influence in Iraq and the region as a result of the Administration’s policies, President Bush must not be allowed to act without the authority and oversight of Congress.

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran’s ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari’s whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence.

(By the way, Posties, thanks for putting the news of the biggest defector from Iran in years on page A16.)

If Iran’s position in the region is so strengthened, why are their military officials defecting?

By the way, Obama’s speech before AIPAC in Chicago wasn’t bad for a Democrat, but then again, Democratic presidential candidates always sound tough and hawkish about Iran when speaking to AIPAC. It’s when they get in office that they suddenly sound different.

UPDATE: An unidentified “senior U.S. official” is denying the Washington Post’s report, and says the U.S. doesn’t know where the general is.

If Obama really didn’t know about his investments in companies that would benefit from his legislation, it’s a remarkable coincidence, as these weren’t really two widely known or widely held companies. It’s just really bad luck on his part.

It’s playing fairly big – front page of the New York Times, the AP has a version out. Couple this with the real estate mess referred to in these paragraphs…

Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas’ purchase of a home…

His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama’s political donors bought the adjacent lot.

…and you end up with a bit of mud on the shoes of the Obamessiah, The Chosen One Sent To Save Washington From Itself.

It’s almost as if someone wanted his reputation hit, to say “Hey, look, he’s got scandals, too.” But who could possibly have motive to do that? What kind of rival would do such a thing?

John Edwards’s campaign has let the world know that while they will participate in other debates in Nevada, they will not participate in the one broadcast by Fox News.

Kos speaks, Edwards follows.

If Edwards gets the nomination, will Edwards refuse to participate in any general election debates if they’re covered by Fox News?

UPDATE: Greg Pollowitz sends word that a “compromise” has been reached, that the debate will include a questioner from Air America. Which raises two questions:

1) Air America is still around?

2) Can Republican candidates pout and hold their breath until they get representatives from their preferred news agencies to ask questions in a debate?

“Tonight, the MSNBC debate, moderated by Keith Olbermann, with questions from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Eleanor Clift of Newsweek… and Rush Limbaugh of the Excellence In Broadcasting network.”

Shockingly, Kos is still angry, and Matt Stoller is accusing Harry Reid of “opaque arrogance” (which as we all know is much worse than transparent arrogance), because… because… because it seems like these guys are always angry about something.

Obama says he had no idea what was going on with his investments, and that there’s no way he could possibly know about this:

Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.

The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus is offering hints to people looking for dirt on Bill Richardson:

Oddest carefully-crafted sentence of the still-young week:

“So far, rumors of personal pecadilloes are unfounded.”–David Brooks, writing favorably about Dem. presidential candidate Bill Richardson.

The rumors are either founded or not, right? That shouldn’t change over time. But, as a Slate colleague says, a word like “unproved” would have been “more of a challenge than a reassurance.” … Kf ‘s tip for reporters and others hoping to help the pecadilloes make the ontological transition from unfounded to founded: Ask around at Cafe Milano, D.C. … 10:11 P.M.

In other Democratic news, there are rumors that Chuck Hagel is running for president… what do you mean “he’s a Republican”? I see him quoted ripping the administration and the GOP in the New York Times every single day! I thought he was Biden in a wig!

Finally, I’m currently scheduled to talk about all kinds of political things on Jim Vicevich’s program in Hartford, CT., a little after 11 a.m.

My gloom of earlier brought e-mailed requests to look on the bright side. So I checked on the blog of Brian Ross of ABC News, and found surprising headlines that show that outside of Washington, life – and the war on terror – go on:

Israel Puts Embassies on Security Alert Following Reports It Kidnapped Iranian

That’s a reference to the Iranian General in this story, Kidnapped or Defected? Top Iranian General Disappears, an article that has plenty of “holy #@%^&” comments, like:

One respected analyst with sources in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard says Gen. Ali Reza Asgari has defected and is now in a European country with his entire family, where he is cooperating with the U.S.

Other reports have suggested that the general may have been kidnapped by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad. A spokesperson at the CIA declined to comment on the reported defection.

“This is a fatal blow to Iranian intelligence,” said the source, explaining that Asgari knows sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear and military projects. Iran called tens of its Revolutionary Guard agents working at embassies and cultural centers in Arab and European countries back to Tehran out of fear that Asgari might disclose secret information about their identities, according to the analyst.

(By the way, it figures this huge news breaks and this guy disappears from Turkey right after I leave Ankara. Whoops, better not mention those two events together, lest Tehran think there’s a connection.) Whoa. The only thing bigger than that would be word that we’re on the trail of bin Laden. Oh, what’s that?

CIA Rushing Resources to Bin Laden Hunt

Armed with fresh intelligence, the CIA is moving additional man power and equipment into Pakistan in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri, U.S. officials tell ABC News. ”Reports that the trail has gone stone cold are not correct,” said one U.S. official.  “We are very much increasing our efforts there,” the official said. People familiar with the CIA operation say undercover officers with paramilitary training have been ordered into Pakistan and the area across the border with Afghanistan as part of the ramp-up. Although never publicly acknowledged, Pakistan has permitted CIA teams to secretly operate inside Pakistan.

Efforts are now underway to identify the dead following a U.S. and NATO strike in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan over the weekend, according to Afghan officials.

ABC News reported a major strike may have targeted a high-value al Qaeda target in the village of Mano Gai in Kunar province.

The U.S. military on the ground in Afghanistan continues to officially deny there was anything other than “routine military operations” in the eastern province over the past three days.

My guess is that if we had killed one of those “high value targets” we would have probably heard rumors by now.

But the war on those who would harm us continues, and we have more good days than they do…

Let me take the ball from Jonathan Martin and run with it.

Let’s say you’re a Reagan Democrat. Let’s say you pulled the lever for Bush in 2004, even though you had some worries about Iraq, because you just weren’t comfortable with the thought of John Kerry leading the country on a war on terror. Since then you have seen:

• Harriet Miers, a woman who was a perfectly nice White House counsel nominated to the highest court in the land, leapfrogging slews of well-regarded federal judges, each with considerable support in the conservative base.
• Katrina. Yes, the media reporting was wildly inaccurate and sensationalistic, but the overall image of the president and his administration was out-of-touch, disconnected from events, slow to react, etc. We’re seeing massive amounts of money misspent in the reconstruction, as well as endless complaints that the city isn’t being rebuilt fast enough.
• Iraq, and an increasing sense that the only folks who really want a stable, democratic, pluralistic state and who are willing to fight for it in Iraq are the Americans. The Sunni, Shia, and Kurds all seem to be putting their factional interest above any sense of national unity, and don’t seem interested in building anything greater than a tribal spoil system. The Brits and the rest of the coalition are increasingly saying, “okay, we’re done, we’ve done all we can do.” There is a growing sense that with no WMDs and the ties to terrorists hotly disputed, the purpose of the mission is a sort of Wilsonian nation-building that the country clearly didn’t believe it was signing on for in 2003.
• A 2006 election debacle, in which Republicans were largely wiped from office from the entire northeast and slammed in places like Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
• A report of horrific conditions in veterans’ care, one more sledgehammer’s blow to the belief that the Republican Party, with all its ties to business, are natural managers and administrators…
• And now, the Vice President’s chief of staff convicted.

Let me also offer that there’s a housing bubble about to burst (not necessarily the president’s fault, but he certainly hasn’t taken actions to mitigate that inflating bubble, much less talk about it much), and the reverberating economic effects of that…

Even if you like this president, even if you’re pulling for him, even if you think his heart is in the right place… is there any way this presidency doesn’t look pretty disastrous at this moment?

UPDATE: I guess I shouldn’t worry… Bush’s legacy can be saved by comprehensive immigration reform! Bleahhhh…

Sharp-eyed Hillary Spot reader Frank noticed this in Hillary’s statement at the Nevada candidate forum:

The Bush administration has been privatizing government services. In fact, now we have more government contractors and grantees by three times the number than the entire military and Civil Service personnel. We have to stop that. And I have proposed cutting government contractors by 500,000 as soon as I’m sworn in — (cheers, applause) — and saving $8 billion to $10 billion.

Hillary’s statement, translated:

“500,000 people will find themselves out of work on my first day in office.”

Also notice that the audience applauds the firing of contract workers without the slightest bit of information about which workers she is talking about. Down with Rand Corporation and SAIC! Down with Blackwater (or perhaps I should use Kos’ preferred motto for their murdered employees)! Down with private companies providing services for the government to save the taxpayer money! The only good jobs are government jobs!

Let me observe something about government contracting. No-bid contracts are indeed, bothersome, and give off the scent that someone’s getting a deal that they don’t deserve. They ought to be reviewed, and Congress ought to provide oversight.

But one advantage to using a contractor is that if somebody does a bad job, you can easily “fire” them by not renewing the contract and finding someone else who can do the job better. If a government employee does a bad job, it’s much, much more difficult to fire them.

UPDATE: Hillary Spot reader Jeremy notes that somehow these government contractors are going to, presumably, be replaced by regular government workers, and yet somehow the process is going to save $8 billion to $10 billion. Can you really get a full-time government employee to do the job for $16,000 a year or more cheaper?

ANOTHER UPDATE: In related news, today ABC News’ The Note is featuring the entire lyrics to “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar.” I know the Note is often full of obscure in-jokes, but is it time for drug testing over there?

Would you believe 19 states are scheduled or are considering having their primary on Feb. 5? Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Delaware, Michigan, California, New York, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, Utah, North Carolina, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and New Jersey.

If we really wanted a primaries that weren’t front-loaded, we would begin with the smallest and least populous states, that have the fewest delegates to the conventions, and work our way to say, Texas, New York and California. That way, any candidate who started slow would still have a chance to make up ground later in the higher-stakes states.

Actually, the Jim Primary Plan would start in Hawaii in January, go through all the southern coastal states in February (and maybe Nevada for a trip to Las Vegas); coincide with Spring Training in Arizona and Florida in March; and gradually work its way northward in April (New York state’s primary would be the Tuesday after the NFL Draft) and May, so that reporters on the campaign beat could enjoy good weather and lots to do throughout the process. Sure, it may not be good for America, but it would be good for me…

Fox News/Opinion Dynamics, more or less in line with other polls:

According to a poll by Opinion Dynamics released by Fox News. 34 per cent of respondents would vote for the New York senator in a primary, down nine points since January.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 23 per cent, followed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore with 14 per cent, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 12 per cent.

Obama hasn’t quite caught up with Hillary in the polls, but he seems to be catching up fast.

Poor Obama. He makes sure his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., doesn’t attend his announcement ceremony, and the New York Times still writes a lengthy story hitting him over disinviting him, and runs a big picture of him with his arm around that pastor. Some days, you just can’t win:

In Monday’s interview, Mr. Wright expressed disappointment but no surprise that Mr. Obama might try to play down their connection.

“When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, “with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Mr. Wright added that his trip implied no endorsement of either Louis Farrakhan’s views or Qaddafi’s.

Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.”

According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

Traveling with Farrakhan? Controversial? Never.

Sure, talk about Hillary and Obama dominated the weekend talk shows. Sure, John Edwards is so horrified and offended by Ann Coulter’s stupid and vulgar remark that he’s barely able to stay strong enough to use it in fundraising efforts. But while all of us are paying attention to that, down in York, South Carolina they had a straw poll among 100 local Democrats. The big winner?

Christopher Dodd.

Under the radar, folks. He’s gonna surprise us all.

Or, you know, maybe it’s because he visited right before the straw poll.

Barack Obama is reportedly not connected to this parody of Apple’s “1984″ ad, slamming Hillary

That’s too bad, because it kinda kicks tushie.

Senator, Senator… you seem like such a decent guy. Why go all Al Gore on us?

“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born,” Obama said.

Obama was born in 1961, four years before the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole.”

I don’t get it. Obama’s life story, as is, is one of the most varied and interesting biographies of a presidential candidate in several cycles. Why does he succumb to the temptation to make his life story match his rhetorical need at any given moment? It’s like putting Nixon in office on Christmas 1968.

Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe, about an upcoming PBS special on Mormons:

But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange. For instance, founding prophet Joseph Smith’s revelation that the Garden of Eden was in Independence, Mo., and that Jesus Christ visited America shortly after his resurrection. On camera, Yale archeologist Michael Coe calls Smith a “shaman,” which is probably accurate but not a great quote for Mormons. Whitney does not shy away from telling us how the church has treated blacks and gays over the years. A 1978 revelation now allows male African-Americans to enter the LDS’s lay priesthood. Gays are not particularly welcome, just as they are unwelcome in many other mainstream American faiths. “Being gay in that [Mormon] culture is beyond hell,” one man says to Whitney’s camera.

“The Mormons” even tackles the ultimate red herring, “celestial marriage,” Joseph Smith’s term for polygamy. The church has gone to great pains to promulgate prophet Wilford Woodruff’s 1890 declaration condemning polygamy, deemed to have superseded Smith’s earlier, contrary revelation. HBO, which continues to broadcast “Big Love,” a series about a polygamist who lives outside Salt Lake City, apparently didn’t get the memo…

What does it all mean? PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let’s say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches “The Mormons.” That’s almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It’s bad math for the Mittster.

Thank you, Alex Beam, for reinforcing the “Mormons Are Creepy And Weird™” message, which seemed to have slipped from the headlines since that BREAKING NEWS AP story about Romney’s great-great-grandfather being a polygamist. (That seemed a shoe-in for the stupidest campaign story of the year, until we heard about Obama’s white ancestors owning slaves. Great, one idiotic scandalous-ancestor story per party.)

Look, Mormonism isn’t necessarily my theological cup of tea. But I don’t apply a religious litmus test to people in my life, and I don’t think most Americans do, either. (“Bob is great auto mechanic, but I won’t let him fix my car, because he’s a Jehovah’s Witness.” “That’s a shame. I found a great coffee place the other day, but one of the waitresses is Hindu, so I can’t eat there anymore.”) My experience with Mormons is that they don’t drink, swear, and are almost disturbingly polite. They also often have actually lived abroad from missionary work and appreciate the upside of living in the United States as a result.

If Romney persuades people that he’ll make a great president, then they’ll elect him. If he doesn’t, they probably won’t. His candidacy is useful, though, to illustrate that folks in the media who would howl with outrage about snide comments about Islam, Judaism, or other socially acceptable faiths have no problem reinforcing the important public awareness campaign to tell us that “Mormons Are Creepy And Weird™.”

You know when I want to hear newspaper columnists lament the oddities of the Mormon faith? When they start violent riots over cartoons of Joseph Smith.

John Edwards sat down with Beliefnet.com. Among the interview highlights:

“I don’t think separation of church and state means you have to be free from your faith. My faith informs everything I think and do… But freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion. And I think that anything we can do to promote the idea that people should express their faith is a good thing.”

Also:

Do you think that America is a Christian nation?

That’s a good question. I never thought of it quite that way. There’s a lot of America that’s Christian. I would not describe us, though, on the whole, as a Christian nation. I guess the word “Christian” is what bothers me, even though I’m a Christian.

His new house came up:

You’ve received a lot of criticism from people about the size of your house. In your book, “Home,” you quote Rick Warren saying, “What I’ve noticed is that where people live affects how they live.” If that’s true, how does your home impact you? What does it say about you? And does it in any way undercut your discussion of the poor?

I think it’s a fair question, first of all. And here’s how I feel about it. The book that you made reference to that Rick Warren is in, “Home,” I think the overwhelming message from that is, whatever the structure, the physical structure–some of the houses in my book were very small, tiny. Some of them were huge. And what matters in the message from that book is [that] the physical structure’s not important. What matters is what happens inside that physical structure, and what kind of values and beliefs and faith are taught inside that structure. And so, you know, I come from a very modest place and I’ve done well and we have a very nice physical structure. It’s completely unimportant. What matters is what happens inside that structure.

His former bloggers came up in conversation. He’s asked some fairly direct questions, and then says – well, read for yourself:

I want to go to the controversy that you’ve experienced in the last few weeks about bloggers. Lots of different people were surprised, shocked, and offended by by the things that the bloggers wrote. Did you really grasp the depth of that? Do you think that you made a mistake somehow in how the situation was handled?

Yeah. Well, it was a very difficult decision for me about what to do. Because as anybody who was participating [in] it would have heard, people start off yapping about politics and what’s going to happen here and what’s going to happen there.

Huh? 

But every one of these people will tell you what I said to them is, I want to do what’s right. And so, I’m going to tell the truth about what it is they have said before they came to work for me. And then I want to talk to them. And if I believe that they’re being honest with me and they’re asking for forgiveness, which I believe in, then we will keep them on. And I was troubled by some of the things they had said, and I was also troubled by the way it was brought to the forefront, which was from some people who had a clear ideological agenda. And I did not think these women should be made to suffer because they were being attacked by that agenda.

You know, you don’t need a clear ideological agenda to be offended by what they wrote.

 So, I wanted to hear what they had to say. I wanted to find out whether they, in fact, were trying to denigrate a particular religion. And when I had those conversations with both of them–and I had them and my wife Elizabeth did the same–I came away with a feeling that, number one, they did not intend to demean anyone’s faith.

Of course. I’m sure her comments about “Mary taking Plan B after putting her hot sticky Holy Spirit in her” were in no way meant to demean the Christian faith. 

This man thinks we’re stupid, doesn’t he?

And number two, to the extent people read it that way–because they did use a lot of hot rhetoric, as often happens in the blogosphere–that they were sorry for that. Under those circumstances, I decided to forgive them and stand by them, knowing there would be potential political consequences for that.

Translation: “Give me credit, netroots. Give me credit for not firing them.”

In a couple of months, when my former home of Turkey is exploding with rage and anti-Americanism, and every friend of America in that country looks like a sucker after we’ve accused them of genocide in order to make friends with 1.5 million Armenians and made enemies of 80 million Turks, we can all say as one…

“Nice going, Nancy Pelosi. Keep telling us how we’re the unsophisticated unilateralists who don’t know how to get along with foreign cultures.”

More from Jackson Diehl, who I think is too gentle on those pushing the resolution on the Armenian Genocide. (And now that I’m on this side of the Atlantic, I don’t have to use the “so-called” prefix.)

Look, I understand commemorating the genocide and pointing the finger at Turkey is a very high priority to Armenian-Americans. But in terms of vital U.S. interests, fighting the battle over the correct interpretation of events of nearly a century ago is about 10,345th on the list. Our tasks in Iraq, and dealing with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and fighting extremist interpretations of Islam will be much, much easier with Turkey as an ally on these issues instead of an enemy. And the Turks’ sensitivity on this issue is hard for most Americans to imagine. Imagine the passions of the Vietnam war, the Confederate flag, the treatment of Native Americans, and the internment of Japanese-Americans all rolled into one, and you have a sense of the touchiness of this issue in Turkish life.

If this resolution passes the House, the U.S. can expect no cooperation from the Turks for anywhere from three to five years. Are you paying attention, Hillary? Obama? Are you prepared to enter the Oval Office and lead a war on terror without our closest Muslim ally?

By the way, Pelosi, Queen of Diplomatic Sensitivity, refused to meet with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul when he visited Washington recently. Way to go, Nancy. Keep teaching us all how to get along with our allies.

Wow. Wow. I had heard that people were complaining about a hokey, awful fake Southern accent that Hillary put on for yesterday’s events, and figured this was people hearing what they wanted to hear. Nope. That’s awful.

I realize that if you spend enough time in New York, you will sound more like a New Yorker. If you spend enough time in Boston, you drop your r’s. And if you spend enough time in the South, your accent may change. But this is some sort of bizarre, off-key, ham-fisted attempt to connect to a Southern audience, and it’s sounds like an out-take from My Cousin Vinny.

So I caught Chris Matthews’ weekend show yesterday.

(By the way, a thought on The Chris Matthews Show: It featured Elizabeth Busmiller of the New York Times, of the Washington Post Writers Group, David Gregory of NBC News, and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune. You look at Matthew’s usual guest panels, and you’ll see it ranges from inside-the-beltway liberals who are critical of the Iraq war, to inside-the-beltway conservatives who are critical of the Iraq war. Does the guest selection process consist of picking the first four people to get on the elevator in the National Press Building? I realize that political discussion shows can get equally dull when it’s the righty screaming lunatic vs. the lefty screaming lunatic, but doesn’t Matthews’ weekend show usually amount to five moderate lefty Washingtonians all agreeing with each other? Wouldn’t we love to see the buttoned-down Page blow up one day and say, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Gregory, you’re so full of it!”)

Anyway, the first discussion was about Hillary vs. Obama, with a lot of discussion of that Washington Post poll showing a shift to Obama among blacks (and no mention of the question of the sample size and margin of error). Unsurprisingly, the group was unanimous that Obama would or could catch Hillary by Memorial Day. (They were also unanimous that John McCain’s age would not be an issue.)

The most interesting thing I read during the past few days was a month-old Mother Jones in the Munich Airport, in a long story on Hillary and the emotions she stirs:

The flip side to Hillary’s ambition evokes every career woman’s greatest fear. How fragile is marriage? It can come apart as quickly as that girl delivering the pizza can snap her thong. And there is no amount of superachieving or hard work that can prevent this lurking humiliation. Just ask the other Hillary: As Martha Stewart ascended to the heights of fame, her husband, Andy, pulled a Bill and started screwing one of the young office assistants. It’s absurd, sure. It’s clichéd and pathetic. But, for the working wife, trying to build a career off the foundation of her marriage to even the nicest (smartest, richest, handsomest) man, her worst fear is that he’ll stray in this, the most debasing of ways. It’s a complete denial of her womanhood, an essential insult. It’s why the kind of anger liberal women feel toward Hillary always circles back around to the issue of why she stayed in the marriage. Why didn’t she take a stand against male grossness? [Comment by Jim: On behalf of those of us with a Y chromosome, let’s emphasize that that was Bill Clinton’s grossness, not a grossness that deserves to be applied to all men.] Instead, she toughed it out. And she gets no love from any side for it. To the right, she stayed not for any principle or for Chelsea but because she’s a clawing shrew who will suffer any ignominy to attain power. To the left, she had a chance to take a stand for all the women who’ve been humiliated, and she didn’t. (Bill, it should be noted, is largely forgiven, even revered, by left-leaning women.)

I realize one never really knows what goes on behind closed doors and what another person’s marriage is really like. But let’s face it – if your sister married a guy like Bill Clinton, and she suspected him of cheating, and he humiliated her by lying to her, sending her out to lie to other people, and then admitted doing it with an underling, in his office, on the job, while discussing deployments of troops to Bosnia… (Okay, maybe this metaphor can’t be completely extended), you would have taken after your brother-in-law and registered your displeasure across the bridge of his nose, right?

But Hillary didn’t leave him, and didn’t want us, the national older brother, intervening. In fact, she insisted that there be no public retribution for his wrongdoing; that any action on our part (impeachment) would amount to a great injustice. It seemed like Stockholm Syndrome; nevermind leaving him, she seemed incapable of saying to Bill, “okay, wise guy, you’re on your own. Let’s see you get out of this one by yourself.” Instead, she fought, shoulder to shoulder to keep him unscathed. And I think to a great many people across the political spectrum, that just doesn’t make sense. We just can’t understand her thinking.

So how much of the current anxiety among Democrats toward Hillary is this fear of being drawn into all of that again? From Dick Polman’s column in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

And the cable TV shout-fests are thirsting for raw meat; witness this series of questions and comments from Chris Matthews a few weeks ago, as he queried Hillary aide Ann Lewis: “Is Bill Clinton going to be a problem in this campaign?… . Is he going to behave himself?… Is he going to behave himself?… Is he going to behave himself, not cause a publicity that gets her embarrassed?… So he’s going to behave himself… . I think it’d be great for the country if we were not once again distracted… . “

It’s not just the adultery itself; it’s that Bill, with his history, lied to her as if he thought she was stupid. And then he turned around and lied to us like he thought we were stupid. And then he got caught, and then when many people said that’s unacceptable behavior in a president, he convinced himself, and her, and so many people around him, that we were the problem.

It’s a heck of a lot of baggage to bring to the presidency, and with the Geffen statement, it’s out there. Hillary’s insistence that this discussion is/was off-limits is only going to reinforce the tightly-controlled, arrogant persona. Democrats will ask themselves – is she worth all the trouble, or is there a better option out there?

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is “staying neutral” between Hillary and Obama?

And why does it not seem shocking that Team Hillary would “explode” over Spitzer’s refusal to endorse his home state senator? Doesn’t that seem in line with the over-the-top reaction to the Geffen episode?

Yesterday there was some discussion about the significance of Rep. Robert Wexler, a big Clinton defender during impeachment, jumping into the Obama camp. At what point does one of these lawmakers represent a canary in the coal mine?