by Don Frederick

As 11-year-old Dalton Hatfield set about selling his earthly possessions, his parents thought he was doing his part to help pay for a family vacation.

Instead, he was doing his part to help his favored presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. And on Friday, the young fellow made news when he presented a stunned Bill Clinton with a check for $440.

The former president, according an Associated Press story on the occasion, "seemed to nearly come to tears" as he accepted the donation at a fire station in Williamson, W.Va. (one of the many off-the-beaten-path locales where he has been rallying support for his wife).

The Hillary Clinton campaign, understandably, was so taken with the boy's gesture that today it posted the AP story on its website. Every little bit helps, after all, when it comes to erasing the $20-million debt that the campaign acknowledged on Sunday.

Killjoys that we are, we checked federal regulations just to make sure everything was on the up-and-up with Hatfield's contribution. And we are relieved to report ...

that it passes muster.

by John Riley

Chuck Schumer, at a Crain's Breakfast in New York City, sounds a note of optimism about the viability of an Obama/Clinton ticket:

"At first I thought it wasn't but I do think it could be."

About voters: "They're worried, and they want somebody to come in and say I can help a little bit you with healthcare, and paying for college, and all these things, and a Democratic candidate is more likely to do it. Hillary and Barack have both run very strong and great races, and I think they'd be a strong ticket together."

It's possible that's what he really thinks. But a lot of things -- the difficulty of selling the first black and the first woman in the same year; the lack of national security credentials; the idea that Hillary would spend eight years with less power than she had as First Lady or Senator; the fundamental disagreement on health care; the risks of Bill floating on the outskirts of a ticket and an administration -- counsel against the idea.

So what else could Schumer be up to?

Maybe the idea that a little flattery, and the ability to turn down the v-p slot, is part of what it'll take to ease Clinton out of the race....

John Riley writes the Spin Cycle blog for Newsday

by Frank James

Here's some news that may help the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama get through what's expected to be a difficult couple of primaries tomorrow and next Tuesday in West Virginia and Kentucky, respectively. Gallup says he's pulling ahead of Sen. Hillary Clinton in its national polling for the first time in three weeks.

Among Democratic voters, Obama has a seven-point lead, 50 percent versus 43 percent, in its polling over Clinton, Gallup said. Here's a snippet.

Although Obama did not achieve an immediate bounce in national Democratic support after last week's primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it could be that the subsequent political punditry, proclaiming the Clinton campaign is effectively over, is affecting voters.

Not good for Clinton, certainly. But there was still a nugget of good news for Clinton which was bad news for Sen. John McCain, the all but official Republican nominee.

by Frank James

In case you missed Saturday Night Live's latest (and we hope not the last) skit featuring "Sen. Hillary Clinton," here it is. SNL cast member Amy Poehler, as Clinton, gives three reasons why she should be the Democratic nominee. I won't spoil the jokes by giving them away.

by John Riley

New polls out today suggest Obama is in for a rough couple of weeks in West Virginia and Kentucky, which he'll have to weather by shaping perceptions in the media that the race is over.

In West Virginia, which votes tomorrow, he trails Clinton 60-24 in a Suffolk University poll. That's 36 points. Poll director David Paleologos: "Barack Obama may have to write off West Virginia come November." A plurality of Democrats there still think Hillary will be the next president.

Obama is visiting the state today and will be introduced at a Charleston rally by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, but ... good luck. The state is stacked against him demographically, and will put an exclamation point on Clinton's argument that he can't get white blue-collar votes.

Then, ">another new poll shows that he trails Clinton 58-31 in Kentucky, which votes next Tuesday. Little wonder why he's been campaigning since Friday in Oregon, which he hopes to win on the same day he loses Kentucky. If Oregon pushes him into a majority of pledged (elected) delegates, he will hope for a superdelegate surge that will give him the nomination and relegate Kentucky to the back pages.

Still, a couple of blowout losses on the eve of winning the nomination will be a sobering reminder of how much work Obama has to do.

John Riley writes the Spin Cycle blog for Newsday

by Michael Tackett

On the outside, there is no quit in the Clinton campaign. They keep talking about finding a way to count the votes and seat the delegates for her from the Florida and Michigan primaries that were ruled rogue operations by the Democratic National Committee.

They keep churning out charts that (selectively) show that she would be the far superior candidate in the fall. "Hillary is the candidate who will win in the tough districts," they proclaim. They boast of raising $1 million after losing North Carolina in a landslide and eking out a victory in Indiana.

Sen. Hillary Clinton soldiers on in West Virginia, where she expects to win by double digits on Tuesday. She traveled to Oregon and will campaign in Kentucky. Chances are she will drop by South Dakota and Montana, and almost certainly Puerto Rico if she has the time and money to get there.

But as Clinton said of herself in a recent debate, of the many things she is, "dumb" is not one of them.

by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar

Although Democrats are tangled in a fractious primary contest, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama probably would win the White House against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain if the election were held now, according to a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.

Arizona Sen. McCain remains competitive, but the poll identified one important vulnerability: Voters ranked him lowest among the three candidates on who could best handle the nation's economy -- by far the most pressing concern for the public irrespective of party, gender or income. Of the three main candidates, New York Sen. Clinton inspired the most confidence on the economy.

In a hypothetical matchup, the poll gave Illinois Sen. Obama 46% to McCain's 40%, with 9% undecided.

Clinton led McCain 47% to 38%, with 11% undecided. The nationwide poll, conducted May 1 through Thursday and released Friday, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The results represent a shift from a Times/Bloomberg poll in February, when McCain led Clinton by 6 percentage points and Obama by 2, within the poll's margin of error.

"Although there is such infighting now between the two Democratic candidates, we are finding that both Democrats are beating McCain, and this could be attributed to the weakening of the economy," said Times Polling Director Susan Pinkus, who supervised the survey.

by Jim Tankersley

PORTLAND, Ore. - A subdued but resolute Sen. Hillary Clinton returned to her signature issue and a long-debated contrast with Democratic rival Barack Obama in a brief Oregon campaign stop today.

Clinton used a trip to Doernbecher Children's Hospital, in the hills on the west bank of the Willamette River, to re-stake her campaign as a crusade for health care for all Americans - and to reframe the Democratic race as a choice between a candidate who will achieve universal coverage and one who won't even try.

"If you don't start in favor of universal health care, you're never going to get there," Clinton said at the outdoor hospital courtyard event. "How can anybody run to be the Democratic nominee for president and not have a universal health care plan? This is a huge difference."

The New York senator called universal coverage a moral and economic imperative for both children and adults, emphasizing a distinction between her plan and Obama's that she has highlighted for months with mixed results.

Clinton's plan would require all Americans to have health insurance. Obama's plan would mandate coverage for all children but not for all adults. The campaigns have clashed over how many people Obama would leave uninsured, and whether Clinton's mandate would truly result in universal coverage.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

by Frank James

Richard Prince, who writes the always readable "Journal-isms" column for the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education website, must've been reading my mind.

He has a column today on something I noticed too, the mainstream media's relatively tame treatment of Sen. Hillary Clinton's comment to USA Today that she has stronger appeal than Sen. Barack Obama to "hard-working Americans, white Americans."

As Prince writes:

To many, it was a shocking statement -- equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans" and a naked attempt to cast herself as "the white candidate" in the race.

Even USA Today, to whom Clinton uttered the comment as a response to a general question about her campaign, broke the story under a bland Web site headline, "Clinton makes case for wide appeal."

It did seem like a better headline would have been "Clinton makes case for white appeal."

I agree; it was surprising that more wasn't made of this comment by the MSM. As soon as I read it, I was struck by how she seemed to be linking whites with hard work. Although she probably didn't mean to imply that non-whites aren't hard-working, that's the implication and it's not going to make any more friends for her among non-whites.

by Frank James

Tom Edsall of the Huffington Post writes about the Obama campaign's efforts to cut a deal with the Clinton camp that would allow the former to help pay off the latter's campaign debt as a way of buying peace in the party i.e. getting her to end her campaign.

But there are problems. As Edsall reports:

The first is obvious: the deep and growing animosity of Obama supporters towards Clinton, whom they see as raising issues of race and 'elitism' that will hurt the Illinois Senator in November.

For many Obama backers, Penn, the former chief strategist for Clinton
and head of one of the biggest PR-lobbying conglomerates in the nation's
capital, is the quintessential Washington insider, capitalizing on political
connections to become a multi-millionaire.

If you run a presidential campaign that skewers Washington lobbyists, as Obama has, it would send a contradictory message to turn around and indirectly drop a cool $10 million or more into the lap of one of Washington's wealthiest lobbyists.

Then there's one more problem for Obama, as Edsall reports: a lot of his supporters viscerally hate the Clinton campaign and might revolt if he helps her pay down her debt.

by Frank James

Rep. Rahm Emanuel has been delivering a message in recent weeks to whomever eventually loses the Democratic presidential primary (most likely Sen. Hillary Clinton) and he made it again this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" program during an interview with Steve Inskeep.

The message: The loser has to be a sport, bury the hatchet and work arm-in-arm with the winner (read Sen. Barack Obama) for the good of the party if Democrats are beat Sen. John McCain and retake the White House.

Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat credited with helping his party retake the House the 2006, cited earlier presidential campaigns in which the animosity between the party's nominee and runner-up help to weaken the party's standard bearer in November.

Emanuel: If you look at history whether it was Ted Kennedy in 1980 versus Jimmy Carter in that primary or Ronald Reagan in '76 with Gerald Ford, both of those candidates, how they lost their spirited primaries affected the winner's ability to move on and have an effective general election.

And if you look at history, if you stop the primary when the primary stops, that is a good thing to have it happen in enough time so we can get on to telling the differences, that are fundamental, between our desire for change and John McCain's desire to be George Bush's third term.

by Frank James

Here's an interesting finding from Gallup's pollsters -- almost as many Jewish voters say they would vote for Sen. Barack Obama for president against Sen. John McCain, the all-but-official Republican presidential nominee, as say they would vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton against McCain.

According to Gallup, 61 percent of Jewish voters surveyed said they'd vote for Obama in the general election versus 32 percent who say they'd vote for McCain.

That compares with 66 percent of Jewish voters who said they'd vote for Clinton to the 27 percent who said they'd vote for McCain

Gallup suggested the poll indicated that Obama hasn't been noticeably hurt by his past relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who has spoken positively of Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and has rebuked Israel for the plight of Palestinians.

Evidence of Obama's concern about Jewish support for his candidacy stretches back to at least January, when he first publicly refuted Web-fueled rumors that he is or has been a Muslim -- the implication of the rumors being that he would be sympathetic to Muslim political concerns and anti-Israel in his worldview. At the same time, he also disassociated himself from the anti-Semitic remarks of black activist Louis Farrakhan, and has recently disassociated himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Thus, any damage to Jews' perceptions of Obama as someone who would be sympathetic and fair to their interests could have occurred much earlier in the campaign. However, in terms of recent events -- particularly the ongoing controversy about why Obama would have belonged to a church led by someone with Wright's anti-Israel views (among other criticisms of Wright) -- Gallup trends suggest Obama's Jewish support is holding up.

Why is this important? Here's one reason. Think Florida, which has a significant Jewish population.

by Matthew Hay Brown

Perhaps it was a coincidence. Or, perhaps, the Obama campaign wanted to remind anyone who might have been paying attention Saturday that they've got Kennedys, too.

Two e-mails relating to the Democratic dynasty landed in our inbox Saturday afternoon. First came the news from the Clinton campaign that the Maryland State Democratic Committee had elected former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and a Hillary supporter, an automatic delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Just 96 minutes later, and another Kennedy heard from: Townsend's cousin Caroline, daughter of John F. Kennedy, writing on behalf of Obama.

"My father called on Americans to ask what they could do for their country," she said.

"Those who answered his call built a movement that transformed our country and brought out the best in our national character.

"Barack Obama has followed in that tradition - dedicating himself to public service as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and then as a state and U.S. Senator."

What follows is a pitch for the Obama Organizing Fellowship, for which the campaign is seeking students and recent graduates who "will be trained on the basics of organizing & campaign fundamentals and then placed in a community to carry out grassroots activities."

In Democratic circles, Caroline Kennedy, the sole surviving heir to Camelot, might be the more influential of the two cousins. As of Saturday, however, Kennedy Townsend is the one who gets to vote at the convention.

By Rick Pearson

Sen. Hillary Clinton told voters in North Carolina today that her dispute with Sen. Barack Obama on the issue of suspending the federal gas tax for the summer was emblematic of a larger difference over the leadership styles of the two Democratic candidates for president.

"I think if you are a leader, you have got to look at both the headlines and the trendlines," said Clinton, who contends Obama is an elitist for opposing a gas tax cut to help the middle class Obama calls it a gimmick that will not provide any substantial relief for motorists or curb the nation's reliance on foreign oil.

"Now, it's important to me that we come up with solutions, and in a campaign, sometimes that's hard, because of the back and forth in the campaign," Clinton told voters. "But it is important, too, for you to see clearly what it is I propose and what I would do. There is no contradiction between trying to provide immediate relief and having a long-term vision and a plan for what we must do to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, and to be moving towards more home-grown fuels."

As she pushes the gas-tax cut proposal despite opposition from Obama and many economic experts, the Obama campaign was quick to point out that a top Clinton supporter also has voiced criticism of such a plan. North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley called a gas tax cut "a subsidy for the oil companies," according to the Charlotte Observer in May of 2006. More recently, Easley told the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., last month that a state tax suspension wasn't on his agenda.

"There's really no alternative but to just get off of oil and we're going to have to do that with alternatives," Easley told the newspaper. "The country--America--has to be far more aggressive."

Clinton has proposed a tax on oil company profits to fund the tax suspension. Likely Republican nominee John McCain also has proposed a summertime lifting of the 18.4 cent per gallon federal tax, with the lost revenues to the highway construction trust fund coming from general federal revenues.

"This issue that we are facing today over gas prices, and the debate that my opponent and I are having over it, is really part of a larger difference between us," Clinton said. "It's something I hope you will think about when you go to vote - either voting early today or voting next Tuesday."

With the next round of presidential balloting only a few days away, the Clinton campaign gave its version of the TV advertising dollars both candidates are pouring into Indiana and North Carolina. The Clinton campaign says in Indiana, Obama has spent $5.6 million compared to her $3.2 million with the Illinois senator also pumping some ad dollars into the expensive Chicago media market to attract the attention of Northwest Indiana voters.

As for North Carolina, where Obama has long been favored, the dollar gap on TV spending is narrower, according to the Clinton camp. They say Obama has spent $4.9 million to Clinton's $3.5 million.

By Michael Tackett

That ever-red Indiana is playing such an important role in the Democratic nomination process is its own wonderful irony.

One of the keys to who will win Indiana will be the turnout of the vote in Marion County, the largest in the state and one of few with a substantial African-American population.

So we turn to Brendan O'Shaughnessy of the Indianapolis Star for this take this morning:

"With nearly twice as many Hoosiers voting early as did four years ago, officials say voters in Marion County are requesting Democratic ballots 3-to-1 over Republican ones so far.

Spurred by intense interest in the Democratic presidential race, more than 10,000 people per day have been casting early ballots this week across the state. The more than 113,000 votes counted through noon on Thursday easily surpassed the 57,000 absentee votes from the previous presidential primary, in 2004.

Marion County Clerk Beth White said the nearly 9,000 people who have voted early already outpace recent elections, and she expects it to pick up even more this weekend.

A group of local pastors is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote effort that aims to bring thousands of people to the City-County Building for early voting Sunday. White said the office will be open and ready for a big turnout.

The Rev. Charles Harrison, pastor of Barnes United Methodist Church on the Westside, said he and other pastors plan to bus people from five locations and from up to 100 churches to Downtown after Sunday services. He said the nonpartisan effort aims to get people involved in what he called a historic primary election.

"This is putting our faith into action," Harrison said. "It's the biggest mobilization effort I've ever seen, and I've been here 15 years."

by Frank James

Back in 1992, Bill Clinton's presidential campaign must've burned through incredible numbers of Fleetwood Mac compact discs as the song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was an anthem in constant rotation at his campaign events.

Based on her campaign theme that the '90s were so much better than the 2000s and that she wants to take the nation back there, Sen. Hillary Clinton could set her iPod to play a never-ending loop of the Beatles' "Yesterday" with the lyrics: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. I believe in yesterday."

At least, that's what struck me after reading The Wall Street Journal's story today about the delicate dance the senator from New York is doing as she tries to win over voters who remember the "peace and prosperity" of that era without reminding those same voters of the Clinton Scandals.

The Journal story has this delicious anecdote from the campaign trail, for instance:

"Sometimes during this campaign I hear criticism of the 1990s. That's fair. It's an election and we've got to expect to be criticized," Sen. Clinton told an audience last week in Fayetteville, N.C. She continued with a line she has repeated often: "But I always wonder what part of the 1990s they didn't like: the peace or the prosperity?"

Just then, an Obama supporter in the audience yelled, "Yeah, but your husband also got impeached for infidelity," referring to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

by Frank James

Despite all the pleas by Democratic Party officials, including Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, that his party's superdelegates make up their minds and soon, about whom they'll support for their party's presidential nomination, there are apparently