As we have known for a while, May 20th is the day Obama will officially win the primary.  With 1599.5 pledged delegates after yesterday's primary in West Virginia, Obama is 27.5 away from the 1627 he needs to have a majority of the 3253 pledged delegates.  

Even if he performs even worse in KY than he did in WV (only 20% of the vote, for example), that should net him about 10 of KY's 50 delegates.  Even if he barely wins OR and Obama and Clinton split the delegates (he'll do much better than that), that would be 26 of OR's 52 delegates, which will put him well over the hump (with PR, MT, and SD yet to come).

OK, so this is decidedly not BREAKING!

But on a Friday at the end of a long week you can probably use a positive image.  Come with me now to late March, 2009, and opening day at Washington Nationals Stadium.  You've never been one for opening day games -- tickets are impossible to get, the security is a hassle, the pomp and ceremony take hours, distracts from the game.  But you weren't going to miss this one, and you've scored some great tickets.  You settle in with a beer and a dog that cost a half hour wait and an outrageous $15.  The warm spring sun on your face feels great.  And finally, the moment you have been waiting for comes...

Sean Wilentz (of the New Repulic, writing in Salon) has a real headspinner of an article that comes to the brilliant conclusion that if the rules of the democratic primary "made sense" then Clinton "would be winning."  His argument:

Why Hillary Clinton should be winning:

Under a winner-take-all primary system, Hillary Clinton would have a wide lead over Barack Obama -- and enough delegates to clinch the nomination by June.

Why does this matter?  You could click through and read the article itself, but I think a simple thought experiment resolves the question nicely.  Just put your logical thinking hat on and ask yourself, given the Wilentz theorem

If the Rules Made Sense, Clinton Would be Winning

does the converse

If Clinton Were Winning, The Rules Would Make Sense

also hold true?  You know it does! Let's all email Professor Wilentz and see if he agrees.  

TPM has McCain's first general election ad.

I know that McCain is not much for subtlety, but this is absurd:

The announcer ends the ad with this new, ultra-patriotic slogan: "John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for."

Any doubt whom he thinks he's running against at this point?

Robert Novak recently graced the editorial pages of the Post with this steaming pile of political "analysis":

Barack Obama's speech last week, hastily prepared to extinguish the firestorm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, won critical praise for style and substance but failed politically. By elevating the question of race in America, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate has deepened the dilemma created by his campaign's success against the party establishment's anointed choice, Hillary Clinton. ...

Read on to understand that this "political failure" is caused by the fact that Obama is black, and admits it...

In light of the failure of the phantom block of 50 superdelegates for Obama to materialize, I thought I would look at the actual recent superdelegates trend.  I was surprised to see how strong Obama's momentum has been on the superdelegate contest.  If the listing provided by this 2008 Democratic Convention Watch blog is accurate, Obama has picked up 35 superdelegates to Clinton's net 7 since February 22.  That's a net gain of 28 delegates, including one switch from Clinton to Obama.

Bob Herbert has a great column in yesterday's Times that absolutely nails the key argument for the Democrats for this election:  the unbelievable cost of the Iraq war and its effect on our economy.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

I don't think anyone has picked up on this.  This theme is one the Democrats must hit hard, now.  We do not want to wait until the summer before rolling this argument out.

Let's talk Iraq for a moment.  

As you know and I know and everyone knows, the Bush administration is building permanent bases in Iraq.  Funny how it wasn't that long ago we were hearing about "standing down when the Iraqis stand up" and "staying long enough to complete the mission and not any longer."  Depending on who you talk to (not Mr. Hundred Years War McBush, of course), that is still the plan (even if we are going to have to pause those troop "drawdowns" for a while).  But what about those bases?  Apparently, the time has come for the Bush administration to admit to reality, and to what they know we know they know we know.  Just don't call them permanent, please.

How did we get there?  And why doesn't anyone care anymore?  Well, we have seen this dance before...

So, I am down in Florida on vacation, sitting on the beach in Siesta Key, watching the little guy play in the sand.  The sun is great, the pelicans are fishing, and I've just heard from the guy next to me that the Sox beat up on the Yanks again last night, so I am feeling pretty good when one of those advertising planes fly by...  

The press is off and running with mockery of Gonzales's "mistakes were made" speech.  They're making the obvious Nixon connection.  That is never a good sign.

Unfortunately, the New York Times cannot resist the "Clinton did it too" argument:

It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.

But Dana Milbank in the Washington post gets it exactly right.  Follow the link for concise, unforgiving and devastating analysis of Gonzales's "accountability moment."  He feels no need to soften the article by even nodding at the "everybody does it" approach:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the cameras for all of nine minutes yesterday, but he managed to contradict himself at least four times as he fought off calls to resign over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

More below...