Premise 1: Hillary Clinton is willing to do what she says she is going to do--take her campaign to a convention fight.

Premise 2: To win at the convention she has to effectively destroy Barack Obama's perceived electability among superdelegates.

Premise 3: Clinton is still in it to win it.

Conclusion A: The Democratic race is about to get real nasty.

Conclusion B: Worse things have happened to John McCain.

Hillary's new ad, which The Page reports will get a "significant buy" in Pennsylvania, follows below.

Another Note: Penn. is an expected swing state in November.

UPDATE: As the Page notes this morning, there is already significant tension showing in the Democratic electorate in Pennsylvania. According to a new Quinnipiac Poll, "26 percent of Clinton supporters would back McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee; 19 percent of Obama supporters would back McCain if Clinton is the nominee."

• "I mean, he's young and I think people would take us more seriously with Iraq and everything...Personally, I think we're either going to have a woman president or we're going to have a black president, which are both amazing. Right now it's time for change, and I think both of them are great. But [Obama] is cool. I just think he's cool.” [E !Online]

• "[A]s we get deeper into the primary calendar, increasingly so, this ‘what the Republicans will do' line has become more of a simulacrum, or a license, if you will, to do what Republicans actually do do. That is to say, to grab for political advantage by peddling stereotypes about Democrats and liberals that are really no less offensive than the ones we're talking about about Americans from small town and rural America." [Josh]

• "This use of 'misspeak' is of American origin." [The NYer]

• "The trend over the past 50 years is clear: those voters with incomes in the lower third of the distribution have been trending Democratic. Among working class voters overall, the trend from 1952 to now is positive for Democrats." [Ambers]

• "It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess." [Weber] (Thanks, BG.)

The advent of the Internet and reported blogs has brought a raft of “fact-checking” journalism, the sort where reporters like me try to explain exactly why Surrogate X or Party Leader Y is misrepresenting the record of Candidate Z. And this is all well and good. As I have often argued on this blog, it is important for democracies to be basically honest in their discourse. And the candidate or campaign that departs from this maxim should be punished.

But they all do it, anyway, and there is a good reason. It works. Lots of voters, unlike, say, the readers of this blog, are not paying very close attention. And a small or medium-sized exaggeration that (however deceptively) hints at a larger truth often pays big dividends. I bring this up because I was caught by a line in John Heilemann's big new take out on John McCain in New York magazine. He quotes a Republican “party official” as saying the following about the way Republicans will attack Obama:

Our strategy will look a fair amount like the one that Hillary is running against him now. . . . It'll build on two things: first, that he's way too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief, which not only polls incredibly well but has the virtue of being true; and, second, that he's way too liberal.

The key phrase there is “has the virtue of being true.” Never mind that it is a statement of opinion as much as fact, like saying that Led Zeppelin was the greatest rock band of all time. What's important is that truth is accurately described here as unexpected icing on the distorted cake of a political discourse that polls well.

This came up last week as well. On Thursday, Howard Dean had a bunch of us reporters over to the DNC to reveal selective parts of a poll that showed (surprise!) that John McCain has lots of weaknesses. Among the questions that the DNC polled was whether people liked McCain less once they knew he had changed his position on closing the gun show loophole. Problem is, McCain has not flip-flopped on the gun show loophole. He still wants to close it. (UPDATE: But he has not always been vocal in his support of closing the loophole either. As noted in the comments below, McCain spoke out against any additional gun control in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders last year.)

When alerted that McCain still wants to close the loophole, Dean got defensive. “It's not to our advantage to push stories that aren't true,” he said, a statement that is probably not true. It would be accurate to say that it is not to the DNC's advantage to push stories that are called out as being untrue.

Then Dean changed the topic and began talking about the use of McCain's “100 years” comment, which the DNC had also focus grouped. (McCain said he would be open to having troops in Iraq for 100 years, not a war in Iraq for 100 years, as both Democratic candidates have suggested.) Dean said the distinctions didn't matter.

The fact is that when you show swing voters “100 years” and “Iraq” in the same breath it doesn't matter what John McCain's qualifying statements were. It just killed him. It just killed him. So we are going to continue to say what John McCain said, that the troops should be in there as long as 100 years.

The fact-checkers be damned. Truthiness prevails again.

John McCain is basing his next "tour" on nostalgia for the Great Depression?

During the Great Depression, with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world from despotism and mass murder, and came home to build the wealthiest, strongest and most generous nation on earth. .... In my other profession and the war I served in, the country relied overwhelmingly on Americans from these same communities to defend us. ..."Next week, I'll begin a tour of places in America that do not frequently see a candidate for President. They are places far removed from the prosperity that is enjoyed elsewhere in America. I want to tell people living there that there must not be any forgotten parts of America; any forgotten Americans.

Someone is totally going to ask if he remembers the Depression itself.

Not horserace so much as spaghetti, really. Check out the chart here. In less than a thousand words, there's this version: "[T]he margins reported by the four pollsters are scattered from well below to well above the trend line, making their effect on the overall estimate less powerful than it would be if they all agreed on the level of support for each candidate." They are cautious about putting too much faith in that new ARG poll.

I've just spent the day watching McCain and Obama at the Associated Press festivities in Washington, DC--and it was not nearly as much fun as watching them perform out in the bitterlands, although a room filled with hundreds and hundreds of journalists would probably have a deadening effect on anyone (except, perhaps, McCain--about whom more in my print column this week).

Obama was surprisingly flat. He had the look of a candidate who had gotten bad overnight poll numbers (though not from the dire, 20-points behind, ARG Pennsylvania poll blowing through the blogosphere this afternoon--it was taken before Obama's deeply depraved and blood-curdling statements about small-town America were loosed upon an outraged world). (Oh, you didn't think of them as all that awful? Me neither. A little awkward, perhaps. But we're the middle of a media tornado now. Dorothy you're not in What's the Matter with Kansas, anymore.)

Or maybe, Obama just had the look of a candidate faced with an opponent who doesn't disagree substantively with him on any major issue, but has spent the last month throwing the "kitchen sink strategy" at him. In fact, there was a dangerous little edge of pissed-offedness, uh, bitterness in his speech and his responses to written questions from the crowd. In a response to a--should I say, very journalistic--process question about whether the long primary had damaged the Democratic Party, Obama said he didn't think so, but admitted some frustration in trying to figure out "how to show restraint" in the primary battle, even though, "Senator Clinton may not feel she can be as restrained" since she's trailing in the race. He added, with mild snark, that he was grateful to Clinton toughening him up by "deploying most of the arguments the Republicans will use against me in November."

Well, you'd be...embittered, too. But he's also right: the God and guns aspect of this dust-breeze is a distraction that the G.O.P. will trot out again in the fall. In fact, Hugh Hewitt trotted it out against me a few weeks ago on his radio show when I said the usual wedges weren't going to work this time, since we were in the midst of two wars, an economic crisis and a desperate need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Hewitt responded that he thought those were issues the "elites" cared about. People in Ohio sure didn't. He has a cousin in Ohio, apparently. And so, here we go again: 81% of the public says things are moving in the wrong direction, the President's approval ratings are below freezing, but we're still going to have the same old campaign as 2000 and 2004. I'd guess the public is in a much different place but, unlike Hewitt, I don't have a cousin in Ohio--just six months of interviewing disgusted Americans in the hinterlands. (My Ohio cousin moved to Los Angeles, not far from where Hewitt lives.)

Again, the San Francisco utterances were not a high point of Obama's campaign--not least because they were uttered in the favorite debauched city of right-wing talk show hustlers, a sure target for God's next natural wrath. Obama got the bitterness right, but he blew the back end of the equation. He included some of the righteous things Americans "cling to" in good times and bad, like God and weaponry, with anti-trade and anti-immigrant resentments, which usually swell only when times grow hard.
Again, this hasn't helped Obama's problems connecting with some white voters--a serious political deficit, though more a matter of style than substance. But he has not unleashed the plague here. And as Hillary Clinton--who was booed when she brought this up in Pittsburgh this morning--may have learned, it is very easy to overbluff such a flimsy hand.

In separate appearances this morning, John McCain and Hillary Clinton both came hard after their colleague from Illinois, making it clear they both intend to wring as much political advantage as they can out of Barack Obama's poorly-chosen words about small-town Americans at a recent San Francisco fundraiser. Each came at the task in a different way. As the candidate with little left to lose (in this election) and only a slender chance at prevailing, Clinton attacked Obama directly, and mercilessly. The key section, ending with the obviously crafted soundbite:

He said that they cling to religion and guns and dislike people who are different from them. Well, I don't believe that. I believe that people don't cling to religion, they value their faith. You don't cling to guns, you enjoy hunting or collecting or sport shooting.

I don't think he really gets it that people are looking for a president who stands up for you and not looks down on you.

The Page has the full text and the Clinton video.

McCain, at an Associated Press forum in Washington, had the luxury of letting the issue come to him. He made a passing reference to it in his speech, but saved the knifework for a Q&A with Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti. McCain's frame: that the small-town people Obama was condescending to are the very heart and soul of America. Something tells me that's a construct we'll be seeing a lot of in a McCain-Obama match-up. Here's the video:

UPDATE: In case there were any doubts that the Republicans hope to turn Barack Obama into Michael Dukakis, here's a nod to arugula as 2008's version of Belgian endive, from the McCain campaign:

“It's hard to keep a straight face when you're accused of being out of touch by a guy who thinks the whole country is worried about the high price of arugula or that you hunt ducks with a six shooter.” -- McCain senior advisor Mark Salter

As Ambinder and others have pointed out, Obama's San Francisco "gaffe" echoed some of the ideas laid out by Tom Frank in "What's the Matter with Kansas." An important difference: those ideas sound a lot less condescending at book-length, packed with reporting and supported by historical research. I'm not sure if it should matter or not that Tom is actually from Kansas, and grew up with and has demonstrable affection for the people he wrote about. He is, in some ways, one of the people he wrote about.

Obama, clearly, is not one of those "bitter" Midwesterners he referred to -- while marginally Midwestern, his whole brand is the opposite of bitter. And, of course, as far as we know, he has not "clung" to God or to guns. None of this means that there isn't a kernel of truth to Obama's point about why working class people sometimes vote against their economic self-interest, it just means that it is much, much harder for Obama to say it so bluntly without being attacked -- as he is now -- as being elitist.

(more...)

First poll of Pennsylvania voters post-"bitter" comments shows Obama taking a hit. The American Research Group had him and Clinton neck-and-neck with 45% each in its April 5-6 survey. The group's April 11-13 poll has Obama at 37% to Clinton's 57%.

Of course, this is just one poll. It'll be interesting to see others as they come later this week, particularly after Wednesday's debate.

Here's my analysis for time.com. And, Obama this morning in a speech before the Alliance for American Manufacturing questioned how in touch McCain and Clinton are. An excerpt:

You know, there's been a lot of talk in this campaign lately about who's “in touch” with the workers of Pennsylvania. Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are singing from the same hymn book, saying that I'm “out of touch” – an “elitist” – because I said a lot of folks are bitter about their economic circumstances.

Now it may be that I chose my words badly. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last. But when I hear my opponents, both of whom have spent decades in Washington, saying I'm out of touch, it's time to cut through their rhetoric and look at the reality.

After all, you've heard this kind of rhetoric before. Around election time, the candidates can't do enough for you. They'll “promise you anything, give you a long list of proposals and even come around, with TV crews in tow, to throw back a shot and a beer.

But if those same candidates are taking millions of dollars in contributions from the PACs and lobbyists, ask yourself, who are they going to be toasting once the election is over?

I'm the only candidate who doesn't take money from corporate PACs and lobbyists, and I'm here to tell you that you can count on me to stand up for you after this election, just as I've been standing up for workers all my life. That's why I'm running for President of the United States.

Senator Clinton and Senator McCain question my respect for the workers of Pennsylvania. Well, let me tell you how I believe you demonstrate your respect. You do it by telling the truth and keeping your word, so folks can know that where you stand today is where you'll stand tomorrow.

One of Obama's greatest strengths is his facility with words. But it's also a weakness as he can sound out of touch. But, as commentators Paul Dirks and Cincinnatus pointed out over the weekend, should voters punish a candidate for sounding too smart?

And just as I was about to post, the Clinton campaign e-mail around their response to Obama's remarks. Hillary's spokesman Phil Singer: “With all due respect, this is the same politician who spent six days posing for clichéd camera shots that included bowling gutterballs, walking around a sports bar, feeding a baby cow, and buying a ham at the Philly market (albeit one that cost $99.99 a pound). Sen. Obama's speeches won't hide his condescending views of Americans living in small towns.”