In our reader blogs, TPM Reader GC has a post up entitled "Where is Barack Obama" which he kicks off by writing "These last few weeks, he seems to be missing. Not literally, but his presence in the national dialogue has receded." As I wrote in the comments section, that's been my sense too. His voice seems silent and has for a few weeks. Of course, he's out in the field campaigning, not focusing on national media and catering to political junkies around the country. But what I really think this is is that he's not controlling the agenda. Hillary's controlling the agenda, defining the race at the moment. And that's made him recede into the background, even as he's a constant topic of conversation.

The Journal today has a dark and curdled portrait of Bill Clinton's growing role in Sen. Clinton's campaign ...

Dubbed the "Billification" of Sen. Clinton's campaign by some insiders, Mr. Clinton has become something of a strategist-in-chief in recent weeks. He has been pushing for harder and sharper attacks on Sen. Obama. While she has jabbed her opponent over his "elitist" tone and controversial statements by his former pastor, Mr. Clinton delivers his own slams on the stump, calling Obama ads misleading.

...

Mr. Clinton has placed several of his own aides at headquarters, including his former lawyer and a bevy of strategists. Known as a bad loser, Mr. Clinton privately buttresses his wife's drive to push on, telling her, according to aides: "We're not quitters."

On his own daily message calls, advisers say, he implores: "We've got to take him on every time." At the Clintons' Washington, D.C., home recently, these people say, he reviewed possible TV spots and told ad makers to be more hard-hitting, faster and harsher.

...

Mr. Clinton's influence is evident in pollster Mark Penn's continuing role in the campaign. Sen. Clinton recently demoted Mr. Penn as her chief strategist after he took part in talks with Colombia's U.S. ambassador over promoting a free-trade pact with the U.S. that she opposes.

However, Mr. Penn has helped in recent debate preparation, and proposed Sen. Clinton's last-minute negative ad in Pennsylvania questioning whether Sen. Obama has "what it takes."

Following up on my question to Joe Klein below, there are plenty of John McCains. And Obama's got to figure out how to respond to this 'my opponent is the terrorist candidate' stuff. But that's his problem. And it'll be a test of him to see how he responds because there will always be McCain types in the political arena and being able to stand up to them and put them in their place is a test of political canniness and stamina. But the key here is McCain himself.

The truth is that the guy doesn't actually have any real convictions -- or to put it more precisely, no real consistent convictions. That's evidenced in part by the kind of campaign the guy's running now. And at least a few of his press admirers are starting to sense that. But where you really see it most clearly is in the policy agenda he embraces.

Genuine political and ideological transformations are pretty rare in contemporary American politics. Two in a row in less than a decade is close to unprecedented. McCain went from conservative Republican, to embracing many core Democratic policy positions and actively discussing a possible party switch, to cycling back and re-embracing the same policies.

What's gotten the most attention is McCain's position on taxes -- the same Bush tax cuts that he said earlier in the decade "offend[ed] his conscience", he now says must be made permanent and added on to by another round of tax cuts on the Bush model. This can be reduced down to cheap charges of 'flip-flopping' or expediency. But it actually goes a lot deeper than that. McCain is absolutely gung-ho and certain that he's right about whatever his position and 'principles' are at the given moment. But they change repeatedly.

A couple weeks ago Joe Klein wrote a column in Time, which provided an overview of the coming campaign wrapped around the question of what kind of campaign John McCain will run -- whether he will he run a Bush-Drudge-style knock and sleaze campaign in which opponents are painted as crypto-terrorists and Hollywood-loving-pansies or embrace a "substantive debate."

Though not without doubts said he believes McCain will run an honorable campaign. "I suspect that he will. It's McCain's way. He sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics -- the spin and hucksterism -- as unworthy." If he doesn't "McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose expediency over honor. That's probably not the way he wants to be remembered."

Well, the last two weeks haven't been kind to that confidence. As we reported yesterday, McCain is now making clear that he plans to run his campaign on the basis of portraying Barack Obama as a dangerous outsider in league with foreign terrorists. The first topic of choice is the bogus 'Obama endorsed by Hamas' story that McCain has embraced with a vengeance.

So this is basically a question to Joe, who has actually been more critical of McCain on Iraq than many realize. How do you think McCain's doing? Is this the kind of campaign you expected him to run? And when you see him pushing the line that Obama is the candidate of the Muslim terrorists and anti-American marxists, how confident do you feel that you actually know the guy?

Late Update: Klein responds here at Swampland. I will follow up in a subsequent post.

Eleanor Clift on how it'll be retribution time a la Corleone if Hillary manages to wrestle the nomination from Barack.

Daniel Levy, on the Syria-Israel-North Korea revelations.

Another great Fox News moment:

Following up on the post from earlier this morning about Sen. McCain's claim that you can't find Americans willing to do hard manual labor for $50 an hour, this from the TPM mailbag ...

My name is Kevin Flynn, I am the legislative/political director for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. Our union is an affiliate of the BCTD. I was at the legislative conference when McCain lost his cool and began this tirade. Your readers are correct, his assertion was that no American would be willing to do this work for $50.00 an hour. There are those who will argue that offering such a wage to American workers would not be adequate incentive, but clearly to an audience of construction workers this is not the case. Our president was behind him on stage when he made this asinine comment in response to the public outcry he received because of his very vocal support of comprehensive immigration reform, Our president(and myself since I worked in the field as well) was struck dumb because our members(not unlike those of the other trades represented in the crowd) work 8-12 hours each day in the heat throughout the country bending over and laying 80 lb concrete blocks, heavy stone & marble, brick, and working in hellish conditions worse than the Arizona summer.

Your original point was correct, John McCain is clueless when it comes to the economy or the experiences of ordinary people who work for a living. His only working experiences were as a pilot in the Navy and as a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. It should be very apparent from this ludicrous offer he made to people doing similar work and in a fair number of states for less. If you have any questions, please feel free to email or call me.

I've gotten a sense of this looking over the exit polls over the last couple months. Now Jonathan Tilove of Newhouse News Service has put it together in an article. The issue of race and whether that is what has prevented Barack Obama from cutting into Hillary Clinton's vote totals in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania has been a dicey and toxic question in this primary campaign -- and one that's not good (though in different ways) for either candidate.

But what Tilove points out is that at least a very substantial part of what's going is not whites voting against Obama because of race but women, particularly white women, voting for Hillary because of gender. This is something that shows up not only in the breakdown of the white female vote but the turnout of female voters in this year's primaries.

Tilove has various data points. But in Pennsylvania, for example, white women went for Clinton 68% - 33%. And they made up 46% of the electorate. Meanwhile, white men went for Clinton 57%-43% and made up only 33% of the electorate.

There are some questions the numbers themselves won't tell you. Is Hillary's still-strong showing among white men nonetheless an example of white resistance on the basis of Obama's race? While I think race is and will continue (if Obama's the nominee) to play a key role in this campaign, there's simply no basis to infer this just on the basis of the number spread.

But I see no reasonable argument that white women are more resistant to voting for a black man than white men. So in this case, I think we can reasonably infer from the poll numbers what common sense would likely tell us is obvious: that a big factor in this contest is women voting for Hillary because of her gender -- whether in the sense of identifying with her and her take on key issues or because of the historic nature of her candidacy.

This doesn't rule out racial voting -- but it does narrow the potential scope of it. And, as I alluded in the title of the post, it's one of these facts that has the virtue, in addition to being true, of casting the whole process in a much less toxic, divisive light.

Greg Anrig, Jr., on McCain's false FEMA promise.

As you know the Weather Underground, the somewhat hapless but definitely violent 60s and 70s radical group, has bubbled up into the 2008 presidential campaign. It's come up against Obama for his association with Bill Ayers and then Obama brought it up in response because Bill Clinton pardoned two former Weathermen in his end of presidency pardons.

Inside Edition of all places asked Hillary about the pardons and her response was that "Well, I didn't know anything about it."

Now, we've gotten a lot of emails from readers asking for us to follow up on this. And we ask for clarification from the Clinton campaign about just what she meant because I found her statement ambiguous. Did she mean she didn't knowing anything about it at the time? Or that she didn't know about it until Barack Obama brought it up in the debate. And Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told Greg Sargent that she was "unaware before it was done," which I take to mean that she wasn't privy to any of the discussions about it before the pardon and basically only heard about it in the newspapers like the rest of us.

But as New York Newsday points out, the murders in question (the crime the two individuals were in prison for) took place in New York. And the campaign to get them pardons and the opposition to it got a lot of publicity in New York in the summer and fall of 2000, when Clinton was initially running for senate. Newsday's blog has a chronology of who was doing what, including Sen. Schumer's lobbying against the pardon. So take a look and let us know what you think. For my part I think it makes her claim not to have known anything about this seem a bit dubious.

McCain today on Barack Obama ...

I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare....If senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.

(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader BO for the catch.)

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) tried to lean on a federal prosecutor, then tried to get him fired, and all he got for it was this letter of qualified admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee.

A senior Obama adviser tells TPM Election Central that Obama will "take Fox on" in his Fox News appearance Sunday.

M.J. Rosenberg: What would Hannah Arendt say about Doug Feith?

I've been giving a lot of thought to how John McCain could have changed his positions on the economy by 180 degrees, not once, but actually twice in the last decade. There are many examples. But the clearest is on tax policy. Remember, McCain was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cuts. And he was quite clear at the time that he did so not only on fiscal responsibility and deficit grounds but on equity grounds equally if not more so. Now, he's not only championing the tax cuts he voted against and pushing for them to be made permanent; he's pushing for a new round of tax cuts on the Bush model.

There's a reason why McCain has been relatively consistent over the last decade on foreign policy but all over the map on economic policy: he just doesn't know very much about economics. That's something he's often admitted. But I'm surprised at a number of his quotes over the last year that have cast this point into exceptionally high relief.

This got a little attention at the time. But in a Q&A with construction and building trade unions, in an effort to illustrate why undocumented migrant farm workers will do work Americans will not, he used this example ...

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Now, my friends, I'll offer anybody here $50 an hour if you'll go pick lettuce in Yuma this season and pick for the whole season. So -- OK? Sign up. OK.

You sign up. You sign up, and you'll be there for the whole season, the whole season. OK? Not just one day. Because you can't do it, my friend.

(ed.note: see further discussion of what McCain might have meant below.)

Undocumented migrant farm workers make $50 an hour? Let's do the math. Obviously the work is seasonal, not all year long, but let's compute it on an annualized basis. $50 x 8 hours (which understates the hours) = $400 a day x 5 is $2000 a week x 52 is $104,000 a year.

I think would put these migrant farm workers in like the top 5% of the US labor force in income. Does this guy have any idea how much money ordinary Americans make or don't make?

Late Update: Some readers say that I've misconstrued McCain's meaning, that he's not saying migrant farm workers make $100,000 a year but that Americans wouldn't do the work even if it paid $100,000 a year. And on second reading I think they may be right. But in terms of out being of touch with the wages most Americans make, I think it's basically the same difference. Who thinks you couldn't find Americans willing to work in lettuce fields if it paid over $100,000 a year? US labor statistics say the actual wage for this work is about $10,000 per year. And at that wage -- which, let's be honest, we all reap a benefit from in the form of cheap lettuce prices -- no wonder Americans are unwilling to do it.

Senate Committee 'admonishes' ("qualified admonition") Sen. Domenici for pressure phone call to later-canned US Attorney David Iglesias.

Well, reporters did ask John McCain today during his trip to New Orleans about Rev. John Hagee's remarks that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for the sins of New Orleans:

"It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense. I dont have anything additional to say. It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, I don't have anything more to say....it's nonsense. I reject it categorically."

Matthew Yglesias observes that Obama and Hillary suddenly stopped talking about foreign policy -- and wonders why.