Still early, but it’s looking like two congressional incumbents from Maryland — Al Wynn (D) and Wayne Gilchrest (R) — may be going down to defeat in contested primaries.

If things continue on their current trajectory and Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee we should get used to much more of the still largely subterranean effort to scare Jews and broader portions of the electorate into believing that Obama is anti-Israel. The truth is that there’s little apparent difference between Obama’s position and Hillary’s or, for that matter, anyone else in the mainstream of the Democratic party or most of the non-Taliban wing of Republican party. Here’s a relatively mild example of the effort — a story in the New York Sun about how Obama supporter Zbigniew Brzezinski (the article calls him an ‘advisor’ — he’s probably something between a supporter and advisor) is leading a delegation to Syria sponsored by the highly controversial left-wing Rand Corporation.

On another front, here is a recent post at The Politico about emails sent out by a member of Clinton’s finance committee asking friends and acquaintances to “read the attached important and very disturbing article on Barack Obama.” The enclosed article is this one by the neanderthal American Thinker blog by Ed Lasky.

There’s much more of this going on than you realize. And it may be prepping to expand dramatically.

It’s going to be rough day for the Clinton campaign.

On MSNBC this morning, Joe Scarborough greeted Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson with faux congratulations on Wolfson’s having kept his job in yesterday campaign staff shakeup, just the latest internal turmoil to roil the campaign.

The AP‘s Ron Fournier takes a no-holds-barred look at the state of the Clinton campaign, particularly what he describes as shaky loyalty to the Clintons among superdelegates.

There’s no question that a series of losses–big losses–with no wins in sight for another three weeks has the Clinton campaign in a precarious situation. You can judge that simply by who’s willing to say what to reporters, Fournier in this case:

Two senior Clinton advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly, said the campaign feels the New York senator needs to quickly change the dynamic by forcing Obama into a poor debate performance, going negative or encouraging the media to attack Obama. They’re grasping at straws, but the advisers said they can’t see any other way that her campaign will be sustainable after losing 10 in a row.

Clinton strategists are famous for poor-mouthing their own campaign in order to lower expectations, but these advisers have never played such games. They’re legitimate, and legitimately worried.

The fear inside the Clinton camp is that Obama will win Hawaii and Wisconsin next week and head into the March 4 contests for Ohio and Texas with a 10-race winning streak. Her poll numbers will drop in Texas and Ohio, Clinton aides fear, and party leaders will start hankering for an end to the fight.

Keep in mind that Super Tuesday was only a week ago yesterday. Seems a lot longer ago, doesn’t it? Obama’s string of uninterrupted wins only started Saturday. But the tenor of things has already changed dramatically. We’re not in the predictions business, but the Clinton campaign itself isn’t expecting a victory for her for another three weeks. That is a very, very long time.

CNN morning show producer canned for blogging.

With the Bush-approved surveillance bill through the Senate, attention now turns to the House, where there are already signs of moderate Democrats defecting in the face of Administration scare tactics.

If you were looking for a silver lining to Hillary’s losses last night, this ain’t it:

Obama narrowly defeated Clinton among white voters in Virginia, 52 percent to 47 percent, while Clinton won with that group in Maryland by just 10 percentage points, according to an exit survey conducted for The Associated Press.

Even white women were beginning to move toward the Illinois senator — Clinton won nearly 60 percent of their votes, a much lower percentage than in contests past. Clinton has based her candidacy in large part on her appeal to white women.

In addition to his usual strong showing among young voters, Obama was also running about even among those over 65, a group Clinton usually dominates.

Hillary has a new negative ad up on TV in Wisconsin.

I’ve got the Roger Clemens hearing going in the background, and I swear I just heard Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) decrying “trial by media” and “circus” hearings in his defense of Clemens.

If you weren’t of age during the Clinton years, then you missed Burton in his trial-by-circus-hearing heyday:

Burton regularly makes headlines with attention-getting stunts. In 1993, he fired a rifle at a “headlike thing” in his backyard in front of a homicide expert to prove his theory that Clinton advisor Vincent Foster did not commit suicide but was murdered and that his body was moved to a Virginia park. In 1995, he wrote Clinton, demanding to know whether taxpayers were footing the cost of stationery and postage for the fan club dedicated to Socks, the first cat. (They were not.)

One of the most exciting things about this Democratic race is that it’s between two genuine titans, each of whom has brought off clutch victories that propelled them back into contention. And they are each in their own ways masters of the game. Whatever the eventual outcome, when I look at the younger generation of people who make up most of the TPM staff, I wonder how much relative newcomers to the political process have a view for how rare it is to have two such evenly matched contenders go head to head so deep into the primary calendar. And yet, looking at these two worthies, for those of us who need our fill of snark and derision we have the risible Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, who’s probably at least responsible as anybody in the country for her current predicament — whether that’s the glass jaw ‘inevitability’ strategy he ginned up for her or the brilliant decision not to invest any resources in a slew of states across the country the campaign would need to compete in if Obama scored early victories.

As I noted on Monday, on the eve of what turned out to be a series of crushing defeats for his candidate in Maryland, DC and Virginia, Penn decided to cut out for an evening to discuss and sign copies of his micro-book Microtrends at the Strand Bookstore on the edge of Greenwich Village here in downtown Manhattan.

Here we join the festivities in progress, as reported by the New York Observer …

“I was determined to take an hour out and talk about the book,” Mr. Penn told the audience, some of whom ate yogurt as they listened by the stacks of art and auction catalogs on the bookstore’s second floor. “It’s not a political book.”

With that, Mr. Penn, who speaks softly and always looks a little nervous, began his presentation.

“The theory of the book is that the era of big trends is over,” he said.

He talked about how society had become “infinitely personalized” because of an increasingly evident “individualistic streak” that manifested itself in, among other things, the way “people don’t want to wear the same clothes.”

As Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor who is working on a Hillary Clinton book, took notes to his left, Mr. Penn emphasized his distaste for the microtrend he calls “impressionable elites”—supposed leaders of society who, as he sees it, show more interest in a candidate’s personality than policies.

Mr. Obama enjoys the support of this chattering class, Mr. Penn believes, while Mrs. Clinton speaks more to working-class people who really care about policy because policy really impacts their lives. Worse still, Mr. Penn sees the “impressionable elites” growing in number, so much so that he has considered turning “that trend into an entire book someday, because it is becoming more and more evident.”

At least one attendee was skeptical. “Obama strikes me as a macrotrend, not a microtrend,” said Kevin Costa, a 48-year-old government analyst and undecided Democrat, during the question-and-answer session.

“It’s not just in the political context,” Mr. Penn said, explaining that more and more people were being persuaded by media stories and making important decisions in their life based on “hearsay.”

Asked after the event what, if anything, had gone wrong with the Clinton campaign, Mr. Penn suggested that Mr. Obama had simply turned out to be a tougher candidate than originally expected.

“After he won Iowa, he was a different candidate with a larger constituency,” said Mr. Penn. “I think that very much changed the course of the race, but I think you have seen us come back time and time again in situations where the polls and the media were ready to call it, and the voters said otherwise.”

I must say that the image of Mark Penn — master of the suburban, poll-doctored demographic cliche — falling back on ‘working class people’ against the ‘impressionable elites’ is enough to make all the late nights here reporting poll results at TPM HQ all worthwhile.

Viva Penn!

Late Update: TPM Reader JM was there at the Penn event and gives a dissenting (to the Observer’s read) take on Penn’s presentation.

Roger Clemens makes early bid for Golden Duke Award.