The Dish

This sentence is carefully parsed:

There was little in Tuesday’s results to suggest that [Obama]’s problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished.

Well there’s this: Obama won only 27 percent of white voters without college degrees in Ohio; he won 29 percent in Pennsylvania, and 34 percent of them in Indiana. Krugman seems to miss the fact that Obama is still relatively unknown, especially among people without college degrees, and that he has been up against the most famous and beloved brand in recent Democratic party politics, playing as crudely and as brutally as she can. When a former Democratic president tells white voters that Obama doesn’t care about "people like you," it’s difficult to make headway. Oh: and he’s, er. bi-racial. To have gone from 27 percent to 34 percent in a few weeks is not transformational, but it is progress. To have done so through a blizzard of racially-tinged guilt-by-association attempts to paint him as a commie alien, is not insignificant. To have made any progress while facing the wood-chipper of the Clinton-Rove axis is remarkable.

He has a long way to go. But it’s May. And the force of his current coalition remains something to behold.

The regime’s impounding of some vital aid and its resistance to allowing foreign nations to save tens and even hundreds of thousands of lives seems to me to alter things. If there were ever a moment when the international community, led as it must be, by the U.S. and the U.N., should use force to prevent what now looks like mass murder, this is it. No dictatorship should prevent thousands of innocents from getting basic food relief, or some medical care in the face of the diseases that now threaten to kill more than the cyclone did. It is also a rare opportunity to open up the beleaguered, isolated repressed population to the outside world, and to show a face for the US and the West that is humane. When aid is being stolen or hoarded in front of our eyes, we have a duty to face down the junta.

Why, one wonders, is McCain afraid of the truth? If Arianna and two other eye-witnesses are correct, it’s the best news for McCain’s campaign in a while. But doesn’t this sound a little, er, elitist:

Now two other guests at the same dinner, given by the actress Candice Bergen, at her home in Beverly Hills, say they heard much the same thing as Ms. Huffington. Both of them, the former “West Wing” actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, were asked by Ms. Huffington to speak to The New York Times. Mr. Whitford said he would be supporting the Democratic nominee and had donated to Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama; Mr. Schiff is supporting Mr. Obama.

The Republican candidate is used to having Beverly Hills fundraisers with Candice Bergen, Arianna Huffington and West Wing actors? Don’t you think if Obama had been hanging with these people quite so often, the Rove machine would make it an issue?

The dirty secret is that McCain is rarely more at home than with the liberal cultural elite. But shhhh. Don’t tell anyone, will you?

Brevard, North Carolina, 11.20 am.

Mitt Romney defends the rights of non-believers:

"Upon reflection, I came to understand that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity … an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty… If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God."

Of course, this isn’t religious freedom as such. It is political freedom – to be free of religion if that is your choice. And it is freedom of speech and thought and association. Still I wonder if this tiny concession is part of a gambit to be McCain’s heir.

So he has the popular vote, the majority of states, the majority of pledged delegates, the majority of super-delegates – and none of this can change to give Clinton the edge in the next month. And still she won’t do the decent thing and concede. At this point, every day is a Clinton insult to the Democratic party nominee. And every day makes her future career more tenuous.

But maybe this is the only way the Clintons can end: in a slow, gruesome, political murder-suicide. And they will use the wounds they inflict on their nominee as a reason to vote for them in 2012 if he loses in the fall.

Samantha Power was right.

The push for a merger of church and party on the right appears to have backfired:

In a recent survey of 19 states that have held a presidential primary this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. One of every four voters in the U.S. is Catholic.

And Obama’s share of the Catholic vote keeps inching upward.

Richard Florida tries to map the country’s psychogeography:

Interestingly, America’s psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first – was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? – the overlay is clear.

Mickey mocked it as an electoral tool. Wrong again.

Another beaut from Peggy:

Some insight from a superdelegate I spoke to Thursday:

It’s not math anymore, it’s psychodrama. If she can’t have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

One request at least: can we retire from the dicourse the notion that there is anything even faintly admirable about the Clintons’ refusal to accept that they have lost the nomination. This isn’t tenacity or pluck or spunk. It’s vindictive, sore-loser narcissism. And someone senior in the party needs to call it like it is.