I suspect the earlier poll showing a tie was just an outlier. But one way or another, the latest poll shows Barack Obama with a 20+ margin over Clinton in North Carolina.

It’s not just Hillary reigniting the Wright story. A member of Hillary’s finance committee has been pushing it publicly, too, equating Wright with David Duke in a little-noticed Irish radio interview.

You can always tell when a scandal story has peaked and is ebbing, almost down to the minute: when your political opponents start to raise it explicitly against you. That was the minute I knew Bill Clinton was going to weather the Monica story — the moment when Republicans first started hitting him over it. It took a few days. And I remember rejoicing about it at the time. Same thing here with Wright. The Clinton camp can see that it’s drifting. So they’re deciding to stoke it. Also useful to get the Tuzla stuff off the front page.

Here’s one other point I want to raise about Wright. Having watched the full sermons that his sound bites were grabbed out of, it’s pretty clear to me that the snippets running on Youtube were taken out of context and heavily distorted. (But that’s life, to a degree — political hits don’t usually come packaged with extenuating context) I’m also not going to get into the business of full-scale defenses of someone who has apparently suggested that the US government had some role in “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

But in the debate about Wright, which Sen. Clinton has just reignited, it seems to be spoken of now as an unquestioned assumption that Wright traffics in racist rhetoric or hate speech. But is that really true? I’ve seen some stuff that strikes me as whacky. I’ve heard soundbites that critics would not have much trouble spinning as anti-American. But are there really quotes that justify the charge of racism? I’m not saying that purely as a rhetorical question. I have not made myself a full Wrightologist. But I do get the sense that a lot of people believe he’s so radioactive that it makes no sense to point out when others are treating as granted claims that appear demonstrably false.

Elections are becoming for lawyers what tax season is for accountants.

The Clinton campaign is urging its lawyer supporters to head to Texas this weekend, with a goal of having at least one lawyer present to monitor each county and state Senate convention site.

On the GOP side, TPMmuckraker has learned, vote-suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky, formerly of the U.S. Justice Department, will be giving a talk next week to the L.A. chapter of the Federalist Society titled “Litigating Elections: the Campaign Process in 2008.”

TPM Reader JW hits the breaking point:

Can there be a rule that neither campaign is allowed to have their surrogates give interviews with anyone, especially foreign press? By the time the convention rolls around, neither campaign will have any surrogates left, since they are “distancing” from ~2 per week.

OMG make it stop. Who cares what these people say? Is it really Hillary’s strategy to attack Obama through Irish radio? Or Obama’s to attack Clinton through the Scottish press?

Sure you know about Eliot Spitzer’s hooker-gate implosion. But did long-time Spitzer nemesis and GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone grease the skids for Spitzer’s downfall with information he learned while chillin’ at a Miami swingers club? In today’s episode of TPMtv we bring you all the lurid details …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

As you know, earlier today Hillary Clinton tried to stoke the Jeremiah Wright controversy by telling an editorial board meeting in Pittsburgh that Jeremiah Wright “would not have been my pastor” and then going on to note that she had denounced Don Imus in contrast to Obama’s allegedly more tolerant attitude toward hate speech.

Later in the afternoon she repeated the same comments at a press conference and when asked why she had chosen to engage Obama on the Wright controversy she seemed to suggest that rather than being intentional she was only providing an answer to a direct question. “Well I answered a question in an ed board today that was very specific about what I would have done,” Clinton told the reporter, “And you know I’m just speaking for myself, and i was answering a question that was posed to me.”

Now obviously, Hillary’s been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it’s actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.

In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.

This alone has to amount to some sort cosmic encounter like something out of a Wagner opera. Remember, this is the guy who spent millions of dollars puffing up wingnut fantasies about Hillary’s having Vince Foster whacked and lots of other curdled and ugly nonsense. Scaife was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Those of us who spent years defending the Clintons from all that malarkey learned this point on day one.

But there’s more.

Let’s game this out. Hillary’s saying this wasn’t some planned thing. She just got hit with this question and she answered it. But here’s my question. You think Richard Mellon Scaife might want to dig into the Jeremiah Wright story? This is sort of like, ‘Hey, I go on Hannity and next thing you know he’s asking me about Wright and Farrakhan. How was I supposed to see that coming?’

I don’t know just how this went down. But the idea Sen. Clinton and her staff went into an editorial board meeting with Scaife and his lackey reporters without a clear sense that they were going to get at least one choice Jeremiah Wright question just somehow doesn’t ring true to me.

Why the sudden up-tick in violence in Iraq — and why now? Paul Kiel has the rundown.

The new Gallup poll says that 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain over Hillary and a whopping 28% of Hillary supporters would abandon Obama for McCain.

Whoever wins those numbers will flatten out considerably. But starting from such high numbers is a big, big problem.

From TPM Reader PG …

Josh, do you think the poll results you’re flogging right now have much merit? I mean, I’m a hardcore Obama Democrat, and I’m so disgruntled about Hillary’s tactics that if you were to ask me today, I’d say if she wins the nomination I might not vote.

But I know not voting is not an option, and in the unlikely event she manages to win, I’ll do what is in the best interests of myself and my party and vote for her. Don’t you think it’s pretty much the same with Clinton supporters? Really, how many people get behind Hilllary Clinton and then even think about voting for John McCain? Maybe Hillary is no flaming liberal, but McCain is very conservative.

We’ve gotten a number of emails like this from both sides. And basically I think the great majority of these people will come to their senses and return to the Democratic fold. Not that I think the Democratic party per se has some moral claim to anyone’s vote. But if you actually care about the issues these candidates are running on then it’s pretty hard to see where, with a few months to think it over, will vote for McCain.

How many Democrats really want to vote for a candidate committed to appointing Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and keeping US troops occupying Iraq for another generation? I think those facts and others will become far more salient as the heat of the current craziness subsides.

I also think there’s at least a decent structural argument for why Hillary supporters are more likely, for the moment, to say they’ll vote for McCain. I think everybody realizes — whatever they’d prefer — that Obama is a strong favorite for the nomination at this point. And I think the simple truth is that it’s a lot easier to be magnanimous, take the high road about party unity or simply be less mad if you’re confident that your candidate is going to win. That just strikes me as common sense.