Times/Bloomberg has new polls of Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina.

Pennsylvania
Clinton 46%
Obama 41%

Indiana
Clinton 35%
Obama 40%

North Carolina
Clinton 34%
Obama 47%

We’re pleased to have Kevin Phillips blogging this week at TPMCafe about his new book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.

In it he propounds his thesis for why the current global economic crisis threatens to undermine U.S. economic leadership and points to a convergence of factors which have emerged since the 1980s: massive public and private debt and repeated government bailouts of the financial sector, among them.

Still more news coming out about Colorado Sen. candidate Bob Schaffer (R) and his efforts to bring the Marianas island sweatshop system to the mainland. In today’s episode we bring you the latest on Schaffer and video from the Marianas sweatshops themselves …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

E.J.Dionne in TNR: “But here are the two remaining Democratic candidates, Obama by speaking carelessly and Clinton by piling on shamelessly, doing all they can to make it easy for Republicans to pretend one more time that they are the salt of the earth.”

According to Doug Schoen, estranged partner of Mark Penn and one-time pollster for Bill Clinton, says Hillary Clinton should abandon her purely positive campaign and instead go negative on Obama.

From tomorrow’ WaPo …

Hillary Clinton took an important step Monday toward winning the Democratic nomination by launching an ad targeting Barack Obama’s recent comments about working-class voters clinging to “guns or religion.” The ad is a marked change from her recent determination to use a positive message until the Democratic convention, but for Clinton to capture the nomination she needs to completely abandon her positive campaign and continue to hammer away at Obama.

It pretty much goes on from there. But, seriously, what is Schoen smoking? Hasn’t Clinton been going after Obama pretty much tooth and claw for like eight weeks? Politics ain’t bean bag. And if you’re going to take down the establishment candidate you need to expect an onslaught, especially one with a potent and resilient base of support in the party. Perhaps the hothouse environment has simply gone on too long at this point. But it’s getting really hard for me not to conclude that a lot of these guys in the Penn/Clinton consultant world have simply gone insane.

There’s this meme I’ve heard recently that contrary to popular impression this campaign has been defined by what the Politico calls its “essential prissiness.” I guess if the point of comparison is one of the campaigns Karl Rove ran in Alabama or Texas in the 1990s that may be true. But it is hard for me to see where this is not the most bitter and negative Democratic primary in the last forty years. ’92 had some harsh moments. But Bill Clinton had it wrapped up too quickly for it to get too intense.

In any case, Schoen was once joined at the hip with Mark Penn, his polling and consulting partner. My understanding was that they were barely on speaking terms anymore — though Penn apparently reached out to him at one of the points earlier this year when he was swirling down the bowl of the Clinton campaign. And I notice he’s no longer listed as being a part of what was their firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. So I don’t know if we’re supposed to see this as in some sense coming from that direction.

But here’s the advice …

Clinton needs to argue that despite what Obama has said, he has done very little to actually promote and create bipartisan solutions in Washington and that he is, in fact, probably the Senate’s most liberal member. She needs to argue that his values are out of step with voters, as evidenced by his recent comments about why people are religious or seek to own guns. She also must argue that because of Obama’s lack of legislative accomplishments, he is ill-equipped to achieve what he sets out to do.

By making these arguments compellingly in public appearances, through television and radio advertisements, and direct mail, Clinton can take advantage of the clear majority of American voters who have already said that they wholeheartedly disagree with the views Obama expressed last week in San Francisco.

In other words, to win the nomination Clinton must portray Obama as an effete liberal, with San Francisco values, who is out of touch with ordinary Americans, who can’t reach bipartisan compromises and is an extreme liberal. Or to put it another way, she must run against him as a Republican.

I won’t put this on Clinton. The last I heard Schoen was working for Bloomberg. And his current connection with Penn is unclear to me. But I do think he is representative of some part of the consultant class. And from a Democratic perspective he represents something deeply malignant.

I’d be curious to hear from friends of mine who have or in other cases do work with, just what is up.

Late Update: Several readers have written in to point to 1980 as a campaign that rivals or surpasses this one for bitterness. That and 1972 probably qualify. So I’ll amend my statement above with those qualifiers. Giving it a little more thought, while I’ll stick to my general point about relative acrimony and bitterness, I think there’s something distinct about this race precisely because there is so relatively little in policy terms separating the two candidates. The 1972 campaign would be an example where there was a vast chasm dividing the Democratic party. I won’t begin to dispute how bitter those divisions were. But I think the relative inability of partisans on both sides of this current contest to point to clear ideological or policy divisions separating them from the other side has given the acrimony of this race an especially personal edge. Also, as I’ve noted before, this long period without any contests but only spin and war-room bloodsport has really untethered the debate.

ABC, sponsor of tonight’s Democratic presidential debate, has gone off the deep end:

According to the usage guidelines circulated by ABC, other news organizations are only allowed to excerpt half a minute from the broadcast.

That means choosing only one 30-second clip to use on television and the Web between 11 p.m. Wednesday and 5 a.m. Thursday. …

“We have an obligation to our West Coast affiliates to not make chunks of the debate available until their viewers have had a chance to see them,” an ABC spokesman said.

By tape-delaying the debate for its West Coast television stations, the network seems to be treating the debate as a television show rather than as a live news event. When cable news channels sponsor debates, they telecast the forums live across all time zones.

As the NYT article goes on to note, fair use doctrine probably allows circumvention of this attempted blackout. But if broadcast networks are going to package public events this way, should they count toward the various public interest obligations that networks and their affiliates are supposed to fulfill under FCC regulations?

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), who just published Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate, has been diagnosed with a recurrence of his Hodgkin’s disease.

A new Reuters/Zogby poll out this morning, with this finding:

McCain was seen as a better steward of the economy than either Democrat despite their repeated criticism of his economic credentials. He led Obama by 3 points and Clinton by 5 points on the question of who would best manage the economy.

In the overall matchup, McCain beats Hillary 45-41 and ties Obama at 45 apiece. The bulk of the poll was taken before the “small town” dust-up.

The latest FEC filings show Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and convicted Alaska businessman Bill Allen playing hot potato with a $37,000 check Young sent to Allen after the public corruption scandal up there broke.

It was an effort by Young to “reimburse” Allen for fund-raising expenses incurred on behalf of Young’s re-election campaign, expenses being scrutinized by the feds.

Allen didn’t want the money any more than Young did and refused to cash the check. The money ultimately wound up in the U.S. Treasury.

In today’s column, Maureen Dowd explains why she’s from salt of the earth and Obama’s a member of the cozened elite. And you know she’s got it bad when she has the bit so firmly in her teeth that she even finds herself saying good things about Hillary.

On a separate note, perhaps it’s time for the Times board to reconsider having a man who writes as a campaign operative occupying one of their slots on the oped page. The best evidence of the Times estrangement or I guess we’re supposed to say, out-of-touchedness, is not any lack of conservatives on their oped page but choosing one who writes caricatures of conservative writing. Conservative commentary is not limited to clownish analogies and character assassination. At least not entirely.

Late Update: A typical elitist reader adds the following …

You write that your critique of Kristol sounds “a separate note” than your take on Dowd, but I rather find them to be in perfect harmony. The two are equally guilty of employing “clownish analogies and character assassination” to enliven their columns. And that’s the real issue with both columnists; that instead of offering readers novel evidence or arguments, they just dress their trite and tired claims in flamboyant language, and pass them off as something new. There are no ideas in their prose, just a relentless focus
on personalities in place of policies.

The columns I most enjoy aren’t necessarily the ones with which I agree, they’re the ones that force me to think. When was the last time you could say that of either Kristol or Dowd?