It’s been a tough few weeks for Fox News. Rudy went down in flames. Mitt schlepped offstage. And they were left with John McCain.

How fortunate then that Michelle Obama said yesterday that she is “really proud” of her country for the first time in her adult life. Bingo!

The comment, admittedly somewhat hard to figure, has gotten regular rotation all day on Fox. You can watch the emergence of a general election attack theme here, as Brit Hume mulls the glorious possibilities:

The McCain camp knows a good thing when it sees it, and Cindy McCain became the campaign’s point person for highlighting the remark as evidence, apparently, that Michelle Obama is an America-hater at heart:

Cindy McCain was more expansive in a later appearance at a rally, milking the line for a big round of applause.

A general election preview, in February.

In his victory speech, John McCain immediately trained his fire on Barack Obama.

Late Update: TPM Reader DM has a keen ear:

Trying to bring today’s news into his speech tonight, McCain said of Obama “he said he’d bomb our ally Pakistan”.

Unless I’ve missed something, Obama’s remarks about bombing Pakistan were something like : “if we have actionable intelligence on Bin Laden’s location in Pakistan and the government of Pakistan will not attack him, I will take unilateral action.”

The Obama camp should jump on this with both feet. So should the media (I’ll not hold my breath).

Later Update: Ironically enough, the Washington Post is reporting today on just such a U.S. military strike into Pakistan:

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Nets call Wisconsin for Obama.

Tough timing there for Hillary. She was barely into her speech in Ohio when Obama came on stage in Houston. Looks like all the networks cut away to Texas.

TPM Reader JS:

So is it safe to say that Obama’s 10 point victory in Wisconsin put to rest any idea that Clinton’s recent negative attacks are driving down Obama’s poll numbers?

A couple of things jump out from tonight’s Wisconsin results.

First, despite polls showing a relatively close race, Obama looks likely to have a final winning margin in the double digits. In other words, not close at all. It’s one thing to endure a month of losing, as the Hillary camp has steeled itself for, it’s quite another to hold on through a series of landslide defeats, which is what they’re facing now.

The other thing that doesn’t bode well for her is that the electorate isn’t remaining static. It’s moving, and the exit polls suggest it’s moving toward Obama. Last week, Obama made gains among white voters and women in Virginia and Maryland. Today, the exit polls show him eroding her core constituencies further: he almost won among women and won among middle-aged voters, among lower-income voters, and among union households.

If you’re a Hillary supporter, there’s not much in the Wisconsin results to raise your spirits.

Late Update: Let me correct one thing. Hillary just nipped Obama among women. He won 49% of the women vote, according to the exits.

John McCain, in Columbus, Ohio:

Hillary Clinton, in Youngstown, Ohio:

Barack Obama, in Houston, Texas:

Some time a week or so ago I read an article about the Obama-McCain relationship (send me the link?). And the gist was that the antagonism between these two men (at least from McCain’s side) isn’t something cooked up to order for this campaign. This goes all the way back to when Obama showed up in the senate. And it seems to come down to a sense of ‘I’ve been working at this my whole life and who the f–k is this Obama kid?’

I was looking back through the TPM archives, because I remembered they’d had an earlier tussle over campaign finance reform. And I found this post from early 2006, which has this McCain quote …

“I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics, I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s efforts to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness.”

The passage exudes a delicious tension because you can feel the gritted teeth held barely in check by the ornateness of the sentences. A senator doesn’t get ginned up like that for normal political boilerplate. It’s got to come from some deep touched chord. And the same can be said for the attacks McCain is rolling out today.

The networks are calling Washington State for John McCain.

No word on whether Boss Esser’s back of the envelope analysis mirrors the exit polls.

With 84% of the vote counted, Barack Obama has a 17% margin over Hillary Clinton. And the trend of the evening suggests the spread could get closer to 20%. This is looking like another blow out.

I was thinking Hillary Clinton had at least an outside chance of an upset tonight. But as we noted below, it was another blow out, and a big enough one for Obama to add real numbers to his delegate advantage. I think David hits the key point here though: less daunting than the overall margins in the races this month (which are pretty daunting) is the trend in the underlying fundamentals.

The premise of Clinton’s campaign after Super Tuesday has been her trump cards of female voters and working class/lower income Democrats. But that assumption is due for a major reevaluation. In each successive contest he’s cutting more into those core constituencies. Tonight in Wisconsin Obama tied Hillary among female voters and beat her by 10 points among voters making less than $50,000 per annum.

We’ve had four big post-Super Tuesday primaries — in LA, MD, VA and WI. The topline numbers in each were relatively similar — ranging from 17% in Wisconsin to 29% in Virginia. But the underlying story is that from Louisiana to the Chesapeake to Wisconsin, the underlying demographic structure of the electorate, the playing field, as it were, got better for her. But it didn’t help.

Clinton’s hope to even come close among pledged delegates rests on big wins in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the trends in support among key demographic groups give very little reason to think those outcomes are likely.