The tag line for John McCain’s first general election TV ad:

“John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for.”

Late Update: TPM Reader SW feels the patriotism:

Is the Onion running McCain’s slogan department?

There’s not enough “America” in his ad. I’m not sure – is he running for prime minister of Canada?

So to be crystal clear, he needs to up the ante in the slogan:

John McCain, American: The American President of America that Americans have been waiting for. America!

Later update: TPM Reader SG:

So we’re “waiting for” an American president? Someone ought to ask McCain why he thinks George W. Bush isn’t American enough.

Setting aside the gratuitous verbal wrapping in the flag, this seems to be a calculated attempt to contrast McCain from that weirdly named, foreign sounding, “other” candidate named Barack Obama. Patriotism and fear will be the first, last and omnipresent refuge for the GOP this cycle. It’s all they have — they have nothing positive to run on.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), an Obama supporter, had this to say on Vermont Public Radio (via Tapper):

“There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama. Now, obviously that’s a decision that only she can make frankly I feel that she would have a tremendous career in the Senate.”

Election Central has more.

As you’ve probably heard, our local boss in Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, sternly set forth a 72 hour deadline for members of the Mahdi Army to surrender their weapons or his government forces would take them by force, attack, whatever. Well, things haven’t been going well and now he’s extended the deadline until April 8th, according to this report from NPR. And to sweeten the deal, he’s apparently added on what in this country we call a gun buy back program.

In other encouraging news, Iraqi police in Baghdad are apparently deserting en masse to the Mahdi Army, thus leaving city police checkpoints to be manned by Iraqi Army soldiers, who are conveniently available because the US military is getting pulled in to take over the fight with the Mahdi Army.

Chalk up another Bush Administration success in fighting efforts to fight global warming.

The latest remarkably brazen move: EPA chief Stephen Johnson says that he needs public input to consider a decision that he already made last December. Paul Kiel explains.

It appears that we may be seeing the first signs of the long predicted super delegate move against Sen. Clinton. Casey’s endorsement today of Obama is a clear sign — he’d been pledged to neutrality. Also of note is Dodd’s call to bring the race to a close and Leahy’s call for Sen. Clinton to get out of the race. On the one hand that’s hardly surprising. They’ve both already endorsed Obama. So of course they want him to win it. But it’s also a line they’ve been unwilling to cross to this point — and a high hurdle for a fellow senator.

What’s caught my eye even more (and we’re putting together a piece on this) has been the trickle of comments — often only noted in local papers — from Clinton super-delegates who are maintaining their support for Hillary but also saying that that support either may or will change if Obama wins the majority of the pledged delegates.

There are clearly a number of forces in play here, not least of which is the clock and the math. But also playing a clear role are the initial signs that Obama has weathered the Wright controversy relatively unscathed. And perhaps more than anything the fact that in the last week or so the Clinton campaign has just descended into something like an all-night shark hop.

The letter from Hillary’s top funders threatening to cut off funds to the DCCC if Pelosi wouldn’t change her position on pledged delegates was clumsily goonish, but more than that just silly. As Atrios notes, about a third of the superdelegates are members of the DCCC, i.e., Democratic members of Congress. Presumably it’s not a strong argument for them.

The Bosnia thing would be a couple days of embarrassment if it weren’t for the fact that it was her speech line in an argument that is fundamentally bogus — namely, her claim that she has significant foreign policy experience in the legislative and executive branches. Again, as I’ve said before, an argument she doesn’t need to make. Many great commanders-in-chief have come to the presidency without such experience. But her campaign’s arguments on this front have been an insult to one’s intelligence.

And now there’s this.

In a conference call with Texas supporters, as reported by ABC News …

“Right now, among all the primary states, believe it or not, Hillary’s only 16 votes behind in pledged delegates,” said Bill Clinton, “and she’s gonna wind up with the lead in the popular vote in the primary states. She’s gonna wind up with the lead in the delegates [from primary states].”

“It’s the caucuses that have been killing us,” he added.

Support for Bill Clinton has been a foundational part of my political identity. But I just find this sad. Perhaps especially because of that. Newsflash: Mitt Romney is ahead in the popular vote among the states that he won. It’s not quite that silly. But it’s close. Hillary’s ahead if you lop off half the nomination process. And that’s the thing, she’s not even ahead among primaries. As I’ve noted previously, I’m a bit of a caucus skeptic. But even among primaries she’s not ahead. The only rationale for a dim view of caucuses is their relatively low turnout compared to primaries. But it’s really not clear to me what the rationale is for writing off the votes of the people who actually participated.

But this is the essential silliness of this argument or perhaps its purpose, that it pulls you down into this rabbit hole of nonsense that momentarily distracts you from its essential ridiculousness. It’s like the Patriots on their final drive against the Giants saying that if you went by just touchdowns they were actually tied.

Here’s another example of what I was talking about below, with respect to the super delegate contest and the argument over how they should or will make their choice. Joe Andrew is a dyed-in-the-wool Clintonite. He was chair of the DNC, along with Ed Rendell, during Clinton’s last two years in office. He’s now a superdelegate from Indiana supporting Hillary Clinton.

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette …

Joe Andrew, like Parker, a Hoosier superdelegate to the Democrats’ nominating convention, says his commitment to Clinton is “profound.”

Nevertheless, if Clinton and Obama head into the August convention with an equal number of delegates from state primaries and Obama has amassed more votes in those primaries, Andrew sounds less wedded to his commitment.

“I want to vote for Hillary Clinton, don’t get me wrong,” said Andrew, a former chairman of the national Democratic Party. “My commitment to her is profound, but I would be troubled if either she or Barack Obama actually became the nominee because superdelegates decided, opposed to actual voters going to the polls and pulling the lever.”

I won’t go so far as to say it’s Freudian, but in the current climate, Sestak’s slip-up is amusing:

Presidential aide Felipe Sixto resigns over allegations involving the misuse of grant money from USAID at his previous job with the Center for a Free Cuba.

Jared Bernstein, on Obama, Krugman and the mortgage meltdown.

Sen. Clinton gave a pretty astonishing interview to the Washington Post in which she appears to say she will stay in the race till the convention in August, where she will take her fight to the credentials committee to have the delegates from the non-sanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries seated.

The convention of course starts on August 25th, roughly five months from now.

The key quote from the interview is this one: “I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong. I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don’t resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention — that’s what credentials committees are for.”

So she’s promising to remain in the race at least until June 3rd when the final contests are held in Montana and South Dakota and until Florida and Michigan are ‘resolved’. Now, that can have no other meaning than resolved on terms the Clinton campaign finds acceptable. It can’t mean anything else since, of course, at least officially, for the Democratic National Committee, it is resolved. The penalty was the resolution.

The Obama campaign has always been willing to ‘resolve’ the matter by splitting those states’ delegates down the middle. But of course that’s something the Clinton campaign can never accept since splitting them down the middle is the same as not counting them at all. It leaves both campaigns right where the started, i.e., with him ahead and her behind.

That leaves two real possibilities: seat the non-sanctioned January primary delegates or hold the primaries again, a revote.

I don’t know many people who’ve ever thought possibility one was going to happen. And the consensus seems to be that the time window on possibility two has closed (though it’s not completely clear to me why it couldn’t be reopened if everyone agreed they wanted to do it.) So that really does sound like she’s saying she wants to take this to the credentials committee at the convention at the end of August, regardless of the outcome of the next ten primaries and caucuses.

So there it is. Since neither side now seems to think revotes are likely and the Obama campaign and the DNC will never agree to seat the delegates from the non-sanctioned primaries, Sen. Clinton seems to be saying pretty clearly that she plans on taking her campaign all the way to Denver.

By saying she’ll continue through the remaining ten contests, regardless of the outcome, and implicitly, I take it, regardless of any superdelegate declarations over the next two months, Sen. Clinton is saying it’s no longer about pledged delegates, or superdelegates or popular votes. It’s about Florida and Michigan. Period.