1. One additional pledged delegate from Pennsylvania has been allocated to Hillary Clinton. bringing her net in the state to 11. Also, Texas DNC member Jaime A. Gonzalez Jr. announced his support for Hillary Clinton today.
2. Obama adviser Lee Hamilton says talk of Rev. Wright is legitimate
Well, it makes it a legitimate issue because it calls into question Senator Obama's relationship with someone -- his pastor. And his pastor, obviously, has said a lot of things that are offensive to most Americans, so you can legitimately raise the question of judgment about personal relationships. My own personal view is that that aspect has been hugely magnified by people who benefit from raising it, because every single one of us have relationships with people with whom we disagree. It's a very normal thing in human conversations and relationships. So I think it's a legitimate issue. It bothers some people so it should be fully vetted and explored, but I don't put it in the level of the big issues..
3. Ron Brownstein has new data to back up his contention that Barack Obama is doing poorly with white, working class voters.
To win this year, Democrats don't need a majority of those voters, but they probably need to reach the higher end of that recent range, calculates Teixeira, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively on the white working class. Teixeira rejects the idea that Obama's weak performance with those voters in the primary season means he couldn't hit that target in a general election against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain. "These downscale whites prefer Hillary," Teixeira says. "Does that mean they are all going to vote for McCain in the fall? I doubt it."Other Democratic-leaning analysts are more concerned that Obama's coalition may depend too heavily on affluent liberals and lower-income minorities, with a dangerous hole in the middle-income center. "If you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s," veteran liberal journalist John Judis wrote in a much-discussed New Republic article last week.
Indeed, some polling has found Obama losing more working-class white Democrats to McCain than does Clinton: A Pew Research Center survey released on May 1, for instance, found McCain winning nearly one-fourth of noncollege white Democrats against Obama. In the survey, Clinton loses about one-sixth of those voters to McCain--roughly the same share that John Kerry lost to President Bush in 2004. Fully one-third of noncollege white Democrats expressed an unfavorable opinion of Obama in the Pew poll.
Obama supporters argue that if he's nominated, he has plenty of time to repair that damage. Even if noncollege whites' hostility persists, they say, he could overcome it with a strong performance among independents, especially those with an advanced education. If anything, Clinton's struggles with black Democratic voters might foreshadow greater risks in November, Obama partisans insist.
4. Is Evan Bayh losing his juice?
Many state Democrats have privately complained about feeling pressure from the Bayh camp to support Clinton, or at least to not endorse Obama. Others believe Bayh has lost touch with up-and-coming Indiana Democratic politicians during his time in Washington.
5. A plurality of the 500 or so Washington insiders (plus Morgan Fairchild) who had brunch with Tammy Haddad before the White House Correspondent's Association Dinner believe that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. (And the party was heavy with Clintonites...)
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