Steve Kornacki

Travis Childers’ win over Republican Greg Davis in Mississippi’s 1st District confirms that the national political climate favors Democrats in 2008 as much as it did in 2006.  read more »

If anyone ought to be skeptical about the notion that Barack Obama’s fall prospects have been damaged by the primary process, it’s the Clintons.

With Mr. Obama in mathematical control of the Democratic race (despite West Virginia), Hillary Clinton’s supporters have fallen back on the argument that Mr. Obama’s chances have been harmed, especially among those much-discussed “white working-class voters,” for the coming contest against John McCain.

It’s worth noting, though, that Bill Clinton himself had to overcome a very similar assertion—that he had emerged from primary season as damaged goods—on his way to the White House in 1992.  read more »

“It is a fact,” Clinton said in her victory speech, “that no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning West Virginia.”

It’s a line the Clinton campaign has been pressing relentlessly this past week in anticipation of her blowout victory there tonight.

And it’s true that no Democrat since Woodrow Wilson has won the presidency without West Virginia. But the exact same is true about Minnesota – a state where Obama crushed Clinton back on February 5. And Minnesota is every bit the swing state that West Virginia is. (Actually, it’s more of one: In 2004, George W. Bush won West Virginia by 13 points, while John Kerry won Minnesota by three. Plus, Minnesota is worth twice as many electoral votes – 10 – as West Virginia and its five.)

So what does Clinton’s argument really mean? Based on the states-we’ve-needed-since-1916 standard, Democrats would pick up West Virginia with Clinton, but wouldn’t Minnesota then be at risk – meaning a net loss of five electoral votes?  read more »

Hillary Clinton will win the West Virginia primary on Tuesday by an overwhelming margin, perhaps rivaling her campaign-best 43-point pasting of Barack Obama in Arkansas’ Feb. 5 primary.

The state is mostly populated by voters who have formed the backbone of her large and loyal coalition this primary season, and contains scant few of those who have made up Obama’s. Moreover, Obama, in a bow to the inevitable and an effort to downplay its significance, has not exactly gone all out this past week to narrow Clinton’s wide lead.  read more »

Appearing on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” in a pre-taped interview, the latest stop in his reemergence tour, John Edwards explained his rationale for exiting the Democratic race in late January after finishing third in his native South Carolina.

“I had concluded I could stay in the race, keep getting significant numbers of votes, keep accumulating delegates,” he said. “But the overwhelming likelihood was I would not be the nominee.”  read more »

At first glance, the potential (likely?) demise of Vito Fossella's political career makes for a timely boost for Democrats, who are now in prime position to claim the 13th District congressional seat he has held since 1997.

But it may be more trouble than it's worth.

The district certainly is winnable for Democrats, especially if Fossella opts to seek re-election despite the scandals exploding around him. But even if he doesn't – and there is word this afternoon that his resignation is now imminent – either of the Democrats now running, Steve Harrison and Domenic Recchia, would probably have a better-than-even chance against the Republican-to-be-named-later in the fall.

The 13th District is easily the most conservative in New York City and traditionally sends a Republican to Congress, but Democrats actually enjoy a slight partisan advantage. Largely because of 9/11, George W. Bush carried it by 10 points in 2004, but a more accurate expression of the district's leanings can be found in the 2000 election, when Al Gore won it by eight points over Bush. Moreover, the political climate strongly favors Democrats in 2008 (just look at the party's string of special election wins in GOP bastions this year), which figures to boost the Democratic nominee in the 13th by a few potentially pivotal points.  read more »

Two weeks ago, I examined the officially meaningless but symbolically crucial popular-vote tally on the Democratic side.

At the time, Hillary Clinton had just won Pennsylvania by nine points and was claiming to be the popular-vote leader, positioning herself – in theory—to assert a moral claim on the loyalties of uncommitted superdelegates.  read more »

One aspect of the Clinton campaign's post-Indiana/North Carolina spin involves the suggestion that it would be perfectly normal, from a historical perspective, for them to carry on their fight through the remaining primaries in June.

"I will remind everyone that Bill Clinton didn't win the nomination until June in 1992," Terry McAuliffe just said on MSNBC, "and we all came together and had a great Democratic victory then."  read more »

Now that the remaining suspense has been drained from the actual race for the Democratic nomination, we’re on to the next great guessing game: Will Barack Obama be compelled to offer Hillary Clinton the number-two slot?

There’s certainly a strong and highly logical case to be made. Between the two of them, Obama and Clinton will have attracted upward of 36 million votes when all of the primaries are over, with only a few hundred thousand votes separating them. That’s nearly 60 percent of the total number of votes George W. Bush received in the 2004 general election.  read more »

Bob Kerrey, the onetime Clinton family antagonist who now supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, believes that “if things stay the way they are now” his candidate will withdraw from the race sometime between now and June 3, when the primary season concludes in Montana and South Dakota.

He did say that there was no reason for Clinton to yield to pressure to get out of the race before then, even as a famous South Dakotan, George McGovern, renounced his support of Clinton and called on her to quit.  read more »

Tuesday was a decisive night for Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton won Indiana, barely, giving her as many states on the day as Obama got.

But the result made clear one thing: It doesn't matter anymore.

Ever since she fell hopelessly behind Obama in the pledged-delegate and popular-vote counts during a string of February defeats, Clinton has clung to a long-shot nomination strategy. She would not be able to overtake him in delegates or popular votes in the late primaries, but she could use them to shake Democrats’ confidence in Obama as a general-election candidate.

This would mean winning overwhelmingly in the late states where she was favored and picking off some or all of those that he had been expected to win. Only then, with Clinton making a compelling case that Obama’s supporters were abandoning him in droves, would superdelegates—loath to overturn “the will of the people” and to risk the devastating intraparty warfare that would come from thwarting an African-American who won a pledged-delegate majority in the primaries—be receptive to lining up with her en masse.

To Clinton’s credit, she strung this all out longer than many thought she could. She won in Ohio and Texas on March 4, when defeat would have meant the end for her. Then she pulled out Pennsylvania on April 22, and suddenly the wind seemed to be at her back. She began receiving a hearing from some opinion-makers on her specious “big state” argument and her questions about Obama’s seeming inability to connect with white working-class voters (something that made the coverage of Jeremiah Wright’s untimely reemergence all the more devastating for him). For the first time since January, Clinton picked up a new batch of superdelegate endorsements and when she latched onto a gas-tax-holiday plan and began bashing “elitists,” game-changing wins in Indiana and North Carolina suddenly became plausible.  read more »

With John McCain as their candidate, Republicans are making the best of a bad political situation. But even with his considerable personal appeal and maverick image, there are fresh signs that the country’s fatigue with the G.O.P. label will be too much even for Mr.  read more »

A pair of outright wins by Hillary Clinton on Tuesday could prompt immediate chaos, with already-jittery Democrats questioning anew Barack Obama’s general election viability and Clinton potentially moving into position to run the table in the remaining contests and to reverse some of the crucial metrics that have favored Obama and sustained his perceived inevitability for nearly three months.

Conversely, a pair of outright Obama wins would almost instantly end the Democratic fight, with previously uncommitted superdelegates interpreting an Obama victory on Clinton turf as cause to step in  read more »

In her embrace of a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax – an idea that virtually every credible economist agrees is a gimmick – Hillary Clinton is making the same bet that delivered her husband to the Democratic nomination 16 years ago: that voters prefer promises of free candy to the truth.

In 1992, with the country mired in an economic slump, Bill Clinton made a middle-class tax cut the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.  read more »

Because of his status as a former national party chairman, Paul Kirk's endorsement of Barack Obama highlights a mini-trend: he’s the second former chairman in as many days to throw his support behind Obama. (Joe Andrew went yesterday).

Kirk's move is hardly surprising when you consider that his closest ally in politics is Ted Kennedy, one of Obama's top supporters. In fact, although the Obama campaign announced the endorsement today, the Clinton campaign’s tally of superdelegates already had Kirk in the Obama column.

The 70-year-old Kirk is a Massachusetts native (his father was a justice on the state Supreme Judicial Court) and he still has a home in Marstons Mills, not much more than a stone's throw from the Kennedy family estate in Hyannisport. He got his start in politics with Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, then joined Ted Kennedy's Senate staff, working as his special assistant for most of the 1970's. In 1980, Kirk chaired Kennedy's unsuccessful presidential campaign.

In 1985, with crucial support from Kennedy and his organized labor allies, Kirk was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a post he held through the 1988 election. The highlight of his tenure was the 1986 midterm elections, when his party ended the G.O.P.'s six-year hold on the Senate.  read more »

So far, 2008 has been the year of artificial momentum and warped expectations, and Hillary Clinton has been the beneficiary.

In contest after contest this primary season, we have seen the illusion of momentum, created by the spillover effect from recent results and whatever the dominant media narrative of the moment happens to be. So, for instance, when Barack Obama scored a clear win in Iowa and Hillary Clinton finished in third place, the Clinton Collapse instantly became the media’s obsession and Obama overtook Clinton in New Hampshire polls almost overnight.  read more »

Barbara Walters used an appearance on Oprah today to reveal her three-decades-ago affair with a married member of the U.S. Senate: Ed Brooke, the liberal Republican who represented Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979, and the first African-American ever elected to the chamber.

The veteran newswoman and View co-host told Oprah that the affair ended shortly before Brooke's 1978 reelection campaign, after Walters was warned by a male friend that she was playing with fire.  read more »

Independents and Republicans are free to vote in next Tuesday’s Indiana Democratic primary – the latest do-or-die test for Hillary Clinton. And Independents and Republicans – along with a healthy dose of Archie Bunker Democrats and a scattering of masochistic liberals – also constitute the core of Bill O’Reilly audience. So, in a way, her appearance on his show Wednesday night was a logical exercise in voter outreach.

But that’s only if you ignore history.  read more »

There is, obviously, no exact precedent at the presidential level for the nightmare Barack Obama is now living thanks to his former minister’s all-too-eager embrace of the spotlight.

At a basic level, Mr. Obama’s opponents can and will note that the inflammatory rhetoric that has come to define the Rev. Jeremiah Wright—a caricature that the preacher rather willingly reinforced during his smugly defiant National Press Club appearance on Monday—raises questions about Mr. Obama’s judgment and values. Why would he spend 20 years in such a man’s church, presumably listening to variations of what the rest of America heard on Monday?  read more »

The Massachusetts Democratic primary, along with nearly two dozen other primaries and caucuses, was held on Feb. 5. Hillary Clinton won it by 15 points, one of her best showings anywhere this year, and Michael Dukakis voted in it—but he won’t say for whom.

“I voted for a candidate, yeah,” is about all Mr. Dukakis, the state’s former governor and a lifelong resident of Brookline, will say.

Mr. Dukakis has maintained an adamantly neutral public stance throughout the campaign, hoping instead to sell both candidates and their campaigns on the need for assembling a massive grassroots organizing effort—a captain and six block leaders in all 200,000 precincts in the country—for the fall. But he also said that Barack Obama will probably be the nominee and the race decided by early June, and possibly much sooner, with primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on tap next week.  read more »

When 2012 rolls around, Howard Dean’s chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee will be a distant memory. But when that year’s Democratic primary calendar is cobbled together, you’d better believe that states will think long and hard before trying to do what Florida and—especially—Michigan did this year.

Dean has taken more than his share of heat for the still-unresolved status of both of those states this year, a situation that Hillary Clinton could, supposedly, use to justify taking her campaign all the way to the convention floor in August. It could also complicate Democratic efforts to carry both of these large swing states in November.  read more »

The Clinton campaign, which is losing the pledged delegate race, is now talking up a different metric: the cumulative popular vote.

"I'm very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else," Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday, a day after she won the Pennsylvania primary by more than 200,000 votes.

Her characterization is true only in a highly technical way: If you count the votes she received in Michigan (where hers was the only name on the ballot) and Florida (where an outlaw primary was held in January), and if you ignore a series of caucus states where hundreds of thousands of Democrats participated but no official popular vote tally was kept, then yes, she has received more votes than Barack Obama.  read more »

The April 22 Pennsylvania primary breathed new life into an underdog presidential campaign that had been on the ropes, ensuring that the race would continue at least through the Indiana primary in two weeks and raising new concerns within the party about the front-runner’s ability to close the deal.

Yes, this is old news—28 years old, to be exact.  read more »

Forget Pennsylvania—the cruel joke for the last six weeks was that it mattered at all.

Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania is worth a two-week stay of political execution for the former First Lady—and nothing more. In victory, she can justifiably proceed to Indiana, which will vote on May 6, and try to cobble together enough new cash to keep her million-dollar-a-day machine churning until then (a task not made any easier by her 10-point victory tonight).  read more »

Rob Andrews, the South Jersey congressman who is challenging Senator Frank R. Lautenberg in New Jersey's June Democratic primary, just appointed his campaign chairman: Michael Murphy, the stepson of former Governor Richard J. Hughes (who served two terms from 1961 to 1969) and himself a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1997.

Murphy is generally one of the good guys in New Jersey politics, but apparently he's had quite a change of heart when it comes to Andrews.  read more »

It’s apparently a revelation to David Brooks, among other prominent pundits, that the dreaded Republican attack machine plans to reduce Barack Obama to an ugly caricature. It shouldn’t be, of course.

Certainly, Mr. Obama, in the past few weeks, has provided his probable autumn opponents with ample raw material to portray him as only the latest in a long line of culturally out-of-step Democratic presidential nominees. Since this tactic worked so smashingly against John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, Mr.  read more »

Thank God it’s just about over. The 42-day gap between Mississippi’s March 11 primary and today’s contest in Pennsylvania has taxed the patience and energy of even the most dogged political junkies, mostly because, when all is said and done, so little is actually at stake.

Obviously, if Barack Obama were somehow to engineer an outright victory, then something very significant will have been decided in Pennsylvania: the Democratic primary. But that’s not likely.  read more »

This weekend brought two reminders that what happens in politics is often, more than anything, about the past.

On Friday, Robert Reich formally endorsed Barack Obama, a decision that was greeted as noteworthy since Reich was an old Oxford chum of Bill Clinton’s and served as the 42nd president’s first labor secretary. He also scored a date with a young Hillary Rodham back in 1966, when, as the freshman class president at Dartmouth, he asked Hillary, his counterpart at Wellesley, to meet him for “a presidential summit” in Hanover. (There was no second date.)  read more »

Sam Nunn and David Boren, two moderate-to-conservative former senators from the South, both endorsed Barack Obama today, furthering Obama's effort to convince the media and Democratic superdelegates that his grip on the Democratic nomination is only tightening.

The endorsements are significant because Nunn and Boren had both publicly toyed with playing a role – as supporters or candidates – in a potential third party campaign this year.

But the endorsements may be significant in another way: On paper, at least, they are both potential running-mate material. Each hails from a red state, has extensive foreign policy experience, and represents a style and ideology that appeals to right-leaning independents and even some Republicans. Moreover, they both had clear interest in seeking national office back in their Senate days, but neither pulled the trigger.

The 69-year-old Nunn represented Georgia in the Senate for four terms, retiring after the 1996 election. He chaired the Armed Services Committee from 1987 until 1995 and earned bipartisan respect for his expertise on nuclear proliferation. On social issues, his record was mostly conservative; famously, he butted heads with the new Clinton administration in 1993 over its bid to lift the ban on gays in the military.  read more »

Bill Clinton’s crimes against his wife’s presidential bid, generally in the form of deceptive or merely ill-considered comments that have thrown her campaign off-message, have been well documented.

There was the flap back in November when he claimed that he’s opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” even though—like his wife—he was silent while President Bush marched the country to war. And the tirade he directed at a local television reporter before Nevada’s caucuses. And his apparent venture into racial politics, like when he sought to water down the impact of Barack Obama’s South Carolina victory by pointing out that Jesse Jackson had carried the state in his presidential campaigns. And so on.  read more »

There is news today that a "Watergate-era Republican" has climbed aboard Barack Obama's bandwagon. That's probably a fair way to describe 75-year-old William D. Ruckelshaus, who hasn't been in the news regularly for about 30 years: His highest-profile moment came in 1973 when, as a deputy U.S. Attorney General, he and his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than carry out Richard Nixon's order that they fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor.

That makes Ruckelshaus' endorsement a small feather in Obama's cap, a minor headline that might advance, ever so slightly, Obama's bid to portray his candidacy as a unifying venture. That Ruckelshaus' roots are in Indiana (he served in the state Legislature there in the 1960s and narrowly lost a 1968 U.S. Senate race to Birch Bayh) might be of some marginal assistance to Obama in that state's upcoming primary.  read more »

Andrew Rice emails his take on (part of) last night’s debate:

Due to unavoidable conflicts--it was my night to cook dinner, and I had to run to the grocery store--I missed the first 40 minutes of the debate last night. I came away thinking that it was actually a very sober, issues-driven affair.  read more »

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ABC News devoted the first 30 minutes or so of the roughly two-hour Democratic debate on April 17 to trivial and petty gotcha questions, which pretty much set the tone for the evening.

“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” George Stephanopoulos actually asked Barack Obama—twice.  read more »

It feels like we’re counting down to something momentous in Pennsylvania. The candidates have practically moved into the state, each new day brings at least one new poll, and Ed Rendell is on one of the cable news channels every 12 minutes or so.

“I keep being told by the press that you people are going to decide this thing,” Stephen Colbert, broadcasting from the City of Brotherly Love, told Mayor Michael Nutter on Monday night. “Do you think that one state should have that kind of power?”

The mayor, a Clinton backer, smiled and replied, “Yeah.”  read more »

This year, Republicans have chosen to nominate for president a war hero and longtime senator with one losing White House bid under his belt. In 1996, the party put up a 73-year-old war hero and longtime senator who already had two failed White House campaigns to this name.

On this basis, it has become fashionable to compare John McCain to Bob Dole, the septuagenarian whose listless ’96 effort established the low-water mark for Republicans in the post-Goldwater era—159 electoral votes and 41 percent of the national popular vote.

Reflecting on Mr. McCain’s recent biography-themed campaign swing and a new ad, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat wrote that the G.O.P. standard-bearer “pushes all my Dole-redux buttons.”  read more »

It makes perfect sense that Hillary Clinton would jump all over Barack Obama for the supposedly disparaging remarks he made about working-class Pennsylvanians at a fund-raiser last week.  read more »

The news that David Vitter may soon be called to testify at the trial of Deborah Jean Palfrey—more commonly known as “the D.C. madam”—serves as an important reminder: He’s still in office. And, really, in light of the bipartisan frenzy to expel Eliot Spitzer from the governorship when his ties to the Emperor’s Club were revealed, you've got to wonder why.

It was last July that we first learned that Vitter’s name and phone number were part of Palfrey’s client records between 1999 and 2001.  read more »

In politics, what is accurate is not always fair and what is fair is not always accurate.

So it is that a deliberate distortion of a quotation from John McCain about Iraq—his supposed promise of a “100-year” war—may well sink his campaign in a way that the simple facts of his record and position should, but otherwise wouldn’t.  read more »

According to the conventional wisdom that governs the career calculations of most ambitious politicians, there are two ways to get ahead in elected politics.

The simplest way is to run for the office you covet when it comes open and to win it—or, failing that, to wage a noble-but-losing campaign that puts you first in line for the next time around. This approach enjoys a long tradition—renewed this year with John McCain’s nomination—in Republican presidential politics.

And then there’s the other strategy: If there is an unbeatable and immovable force blocking you from the office you desire, yield to that force, embrace it and hope it will favor you with its blessing for the next opening.  read more »

Officially, Hillary Clinton is as “in to win” as ever, ready to take her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination all the way to the party’s August convention in Denver.

“I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started,” she recently declared.  read more »

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.  read more »

Frank Lautenberg is ripe for defeat in New Jersey’s June Democratic primary, and his opponent, Rob Andrews, looks well-positioned to dislodge him.

Lautenberg is 84 years old, while Andrews is a young-looking 50. The challenger will benefit from future-vs.-past themes. And it’s not as if Democrats feel much personal or political pull toward the incumbent.  read more »

For the first time in eight years, it will be up to New Jersey’s Democratic voters to determine their party’s nominee for a statewide office. Here’s a look at one of the major factors that will shape this June’s Senate fight between incumbent Frank Lautenberg and challenger Rob Andrews:

The County Lines

These are uniquely important in New Jersey politics. In most states, every voter’s ballot looks pretty much the same, with candidates grouped together by the office they’re seeking, and with their names arranged in some kind of coherent order.  read more »

Three years ago, Rob Andrews—like every other ambitious New Jersey Democrat—believed that the best way to get ahead was to be a team player, racking up goodwill and IOU's among party insiders with the faith that, when the time came, they'd return the favor and support his for statewide office.

Part of being a team player meant supporting Frank Lautenberg, who returned to the Senate in 2002 after a brief two-year absence. In March of 2005, Lautenberg held his first major fund-raiser for his 2008 reelection campaign, a lavish affair at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Barack Obama was the star attraction. Marvin Hamlisch provided the music. And Rob Andrews was one of the top donors.  read more »

Finally, after years of false starts, Rob Andrews has grasped what so many ambitious and otherwise bright New Jersey Democrats haven’t: If you stand around waiting for someone to hand you a promotion, you’re never going to get anywhere.

Andrews, age 50, is intimately familiar with the particular agony that attends missed opportunities in politics, because he is condemned to live with the knowledge that he might this very moment be a top player in national politics—if only he could have found a way to beat Jim McGreevey.  read more »

So much for that. Just when it looked like Frank Lautenberg had dodged a career-threatening bullet, the dams suddenly appear to be breaking.

Rob Andrews, the South Jersey congressman who jolted the New Jersey political world on Monday when he suddenly began flirting with a primary challenge to Lautenberg, has – according to PolitickerNJ.com – made some stunning inroads into North Jersey's most coveted Democratic turf.  read more »

Frank Raleigh Lautenberg, New Jersey’s 84-year-old senior U.S. senator, is not a beloved public official. He has served off and (mostly) on since 1982, but has never garnered more than 54 percent of the vote in four winning campaigns. His approval ratings are mostly lukewarm, owing more to New Jersey’s partisan tendencies than anything else, and his biggest accomplishment in D.C.  read more »

The conventional wisdom is hardening in a hurry: The real winner of the months-long Democratic nominating contest isn’t Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton—it’s John McCain.

The Wall Street Journal writes that “a fear that the Obama-Clinton contest has grown toxic and threatens the Democratic Party's chances against Republican John McCain in the fall” has taken hold within the party, while CNN ominously notes that McCain has now begun re-introducing himself to general election voters while “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still in a delegate-by-delegate battle to become  read more »

When you’ve got a 42-day gap between primaries, you’ve got to fill it with something. So now we’re talking about whether Hillary Clinton should drop out.

In reality, the Clinton-Obama contest has