SENATORS BOB CASEY AND JOHN W. McCAIN THINK OBAMA'S THE ONE-- PAUL KRUGMAN KNOWS McBUSH IS CERTAINLY NOT

McCain's slick (and deceptive) new Madison Avenue advert-- desperately trying to reassert the dubious proposition that he is heroic and honest-- clearly targets the Democrat he feels he will be facing in November: Barack Obama:



The last line-- "The American president Americans have been waiting for"--  appropriates Obama's populist and widely resonating "We are the change we've been waiting for."  The Chicago Tribune takes that as an example about how the lobbyists who run McCain's campaign have written off Hillary and are putting their anti-Obama game plan into action, a game plan so vicious, mean-spirited, divisive and racist that one of McCain's key advisors left the campaign in disgust when he saw it. With the Bush-McCain "surge" falling apart and Iraq descending into civil war again, McCain finds himself with no choice but to divert attention away from the catastrophe he helped author.

Meanwhile Obama still has to face the reality of a Clinton Machine that may not be able to win, but also will not admit defeat. Her husband blames it on caucuses, implying that only nuts bother going to them. They seem far more comfortable with easily-rigged voting machines-- like the ones in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant precincts where Clinton won 100% of the vote and Obama won nothing at all. Both campaigns are working delegate-rich Pennsylvania now. Hillary was expecting to romp to victory on the shoulders of Governor Ed Rendell and reactionary congressman John Murtha (right on the war and wrong on every other important issue of the day from women's choice to corruption). But today Pennsylvania's Democratic U.S. Senator, Bob Casey, the man who banished the hated Rick Santorum from national politics in 2006, endorsed Obama.

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey plans to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president today in Pittsburgh, sending a message both to the state's primary voters and to undecided superdelegates who might decide the close race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Dan Pfeiffer, deputy communications director for the Obama campaign, confirmed that Casey would announce his support during a rally at the Soldiers and Sailors Military Museum and Memorial and that he would then set out with the Illinois senator on part of a six-day bus trip across the state.

The endorsement comes as something of a surprise. Casey, a deliberative and cautious politician, had been adamant about remaining neutral until after the April 22 primary. He had said he wanted to help unify the party after the intensifying fight between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton is so widely viewed as having Pennsylvania locked up and put away that if she stumbles there, the primary season would end on the spot and Obama could get to work fighting off McCain full time.

Meanwhile, sensing that the prolonged and increasingly bitter attacks inside the Democratic Party could cause lasting damage, DNC Chair Howard Dean is now advocating that uncommitted superdelegates make their decisions by the end of June. On CBS today Dean replied to another of the endless process questions newsmen are so enamored of, that most superdelegates have already expressed their choice. "I think that there's 800 of them and 450 of them have already said who they're for. I'd like the other 350 to say who they're at some point between now and the first of July so we don't have to take this into the convention.”

Al Gore also thinks the nomination battle will resolve itself before the late August convention. One of my friends, a moderate Democrat who has been known to vote for Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger, said yesterday that he's sick and tired of the entire process and threatened to just tune it out. He was startled when I suggested that that was exactly what he and most Americans should do. The process is way too long and divisive, mostly because of the way the media has chosen to cover it. We get 90% process and gossip and 10% policies and issues. Were it the other way round, it would be worth watching. But corporate media has so dumbed down the voters that attention spans are far too short to focus on real issues. Hysteria and ginned up scandals are far easier for our Infotainment world. That's how we wound up with Bush, as Paul Krugman explains in his Times column today.

When George W. Bush first ran for the White House, political reporters assured us that he came across as a reasonable, moderate guy.

Yet those of us who looked at his policy proposals-- big tax cuts for the rich and Social Security privatization-- had a very different impression. And we were right.

The moral is that it’s important to take a hard look at what candidates say about policy. It’s true that past promises are no guarantee of future performance. But policy proposals offer a window into candidates’ political souls-- a much better window, if you ask me, than a bunch of supposedly revealing anecdotes and out-of-context quotes.

Which brings me to the latest big debate: how should we respond to the mortgage crisis? In the last few days John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all weighed in. And their proposals arguably say a lot about the kind of president each would be.

Mr. McCain is often referred to as a “maverick” and a “moderate,” assessments based mainly on his engaging manner. But his speech on the economy was that of an orthodox, hard-line right-winger.