I’m here at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, waiting for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to talk at a Democratic dinner. A few minutes ago, I talked to Caroline Valand, the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party: She got a sense that something important might be happening here in the state [...]

They’re apparently now broadcasting (date-sensitive link, couldn’t figure out how to link directly) campaign conference calls. Share the tedium, share the love!

I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: We’ve already made clear who won, why do you little people persist in voting? More seriously (though not quite): I’m shocked that Hillary could even pull in 17 percent in a crowd of DC insiders. McAuliffe and Penn must have voted at least twice.

At the NYT’s Campaign Stops blog, Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker lucidly explains the distinctions between the Clinton and Obama health care plans, and why they really don’t amount to much of a difference. (Which is a point I made earlier this week, but not nearly as well.)

I have long been fascinated by the complex gender politics at play in the Democratic primary, where a woman for the first time has the chance to win the historically macho job of president. But I have not looked closely at the topic since last summer, when surrogates used to introduce Hillary Clinton as the [...]

Kudos to John McCain for saying–in Iowa!–that he would veto the nauseating, mega-porkified Farm Bill, which–as usual–dumps all sorts of subsidies into the laps of the unworthy, corporate farms and gentleman farmers, at a time when farm profits are soaring. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton–who has apparently reached the point in her campaign where she’s willing to [...]

A fun and mildly poignant piece on the undecided superdelegates in Salon today, which makes it sound as though they aren’t politically calculating so much as politically terrified: For superdelegates, most of whom are active politicians, to choose is to lose the support of either the Obamaniacs or the Hillary-ites in their state or district. [...]

Yesterday, as we all know, was the fifth anniversary of President George W. Bush’s unforgettable and unforgivable “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of a stage set (er, aircraft carrier) off the coast of San Diego. Now that we’re in the sixth year of an Iraq mission that has yet, and may never, be accomplished, [...]

Few people in American politics have more stories — or more scars — than Harold M. Ickes, the flamboyant and foul-mouthed son and namesake of FDR’s great cabinet secretary and the man in whose hands rest Hillary Clinton’s slim-but-still-real chances of wresting the Democratic presidential nomination away from Barack Obama. Ickes’ job is convincing uncommitted [...]