Here are two theories about the Obama passport breach situation: 1. It was a witting attempt by an opposing political operative to flesh out the scurrilous Obama as Islamic Manchurian Candidate rumors–i.e. did he travel to rogue states like Libya, make a hajj to Mecca, spend a summer vacation as a mujaheddin in Afghanistan? There [...]

All that wooing by Bill Clinton (not to mention those two cabinet jobs in his Administration) didn’t work. Bill Richardson, the nation’s only Hispanic governor, is endorsing Barack Obama, the AP reports: “I believe he is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime leader that can bring our nation together and restore America’s moral leadership in the world,” [...]

NBC is reporting that two State Department contract employees have been fired, and a third person disciplined, for snooping around in Barack Obama’s passport file. “A monitoring system was tripped when an employee accessed the records of a high-profile individual,” a department official told NBC News. “When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek [...]

Both CNN and AP are reporting big increases in Democratic voter registration in Pennsylvania in advance of the April 22 primary. But there’s an interesting and potentially significant tidbit down in the AP story: _ The nine counties with the biggest percentage increases in Democratic enrollment since last fall — more than 5 percent — [...]

Let’s do the caveats in advance: 1. general election matchup polls are nearly meaningless at this point. 2. the results below may not reflect the reaction to Obama’s race speech. But it does seem that the Jeremiah Wright flap has badly hurt Barack Obama…for the moment. Here’s Ohio. Here’s Missouri, where Obama beat Clinton…and Clinton [...]

A confession: I’d have no problem with either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama answering the crisis phone at 3 am, even though neither of them have any real experience in life-and-death crises. Both have faced stiff tests of judgment and gumption during this campaign, and both have passed. I don’t think either one of them [...]

My notes are brief, but so was the call. It was also incredibly focused on the record of Clinton’s NAFTA involvement. Audio here. Notes after the jump.

The ongoing saga of the McCain Campaign’s effort to keep the political discourse respectful added another chapter today. As reported by Jon Martin, the campaign has suspended a junior staffer, Soren Dayton, a conservative blogger/consultant who worked in McCain’s political department. His crime: Distributing, via Twitter, a smarmy Youtube video that mashes together the words [...]

In less than two days, Barack Obama’s speech on race has been viewed more the 2 million times on YouTube. By comparison, consider that MSNBC’s Hardball averaged about 420,000 in the 7 p.m. hour last November. CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 pulled in 589,000 at 10 p.m. Another comparison: John McCain’s mesmerizing spaceflight video has been [...]