There has been a flare up of campaign insiders concerned about Obama's chances which has spread to some of the big pro-Obama blogs. The proximate cause is what Obama supporter Nate Silver describes as weakening electoral college strength:

Although Barack Obama remains a slight favorite in this election, his position is more vulnerable than at any point since the primaries concluded, and he no longer appears to have a built-in strength in the electoral college that we had attributed to him before.

Various insiders expressed unease to the NY Times:

As Senator Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic presidential nomination next week, party leaders in battleground states say the fight ahead against Senator John McCain looks tougher than they imagined, with Mr. Obama vulnerable on multiple fronts despite weeks of cross-country and overseas campaigning.

Politico reports that:

The DNC just announced that "Governor [Janet] Napolitano will chair the Platform Drafting Committee. Michael Yaki will serve as National Platform Director and Karen Kornbluh will be the Principal Author of the Platform."

These appointments suggest that the platform will be a more centrist document than party platforms are traditionally. Usually the candidate treats the platform as a bone for the base, with the proviso that nothing in it may hurt him politically. Candidates sometimes identify a particular issue that is important to them, such as when Kerry removed support for the death penalty from the current platform. Given this selection of staff Obama does not intend to offer the platform as a refuge for those to his left in the party, though it does suggest that choice is safe as a party principle (Napolitano is a strong choice advocate). It may be that instead Obama has decided to use the platform to mollify women.

Governor Napolitano recognized Obama as a DLC kindred spirit early:

Napolitano represents a particular subset of Obama supporters, those who embraced the "third way" moderation of Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council during the 1990s, but came to see Obama, not Hillary Clinton, as the inheritor of that legacy, updated to account for the ugly realities of the post-September 11 world.

Back in the 1988 campaign George Bush senior derided Michael Dukakis as a "card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U." It was part of the Republican campaign to demonize all things liberal as far left, out of the mainstream and vaguely Communist. It was always a perverse charge, the ACLU defines a uniquely American form of liberalism rooted in the Bill of Rights. Liberals, and the ACLU, favor an expansive interpretation of the Bill of Rights tilted toward the individual, conservatives favor a narrow interpretation that expands the power of government. Supreme Court cases often most clearly illuminate these competing interpretations.

On the eve of our Independence day celebrations it may be worthwhile to reflect on the meaning of liberty, the Bill of Rights that protects it, and how our nominee sees both. One way to understand Barack Obama's point of view on liberty is to compare his positions on civil liberties issues to the ACLU's. The beginning of the general election and a series of Supreme Court decisions have given us an opportunity to do so. Four of the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights have been in the news recently, and Barack Obama has weighed in on each. In each case Barack Obama has opposed the interpretation of the ACLU.

May has been a hard month for Hillary Clinton and her supporters. We entered the month with cries of "The Math" from the Obama campaign. The North Carolina and Indiana primaries on the 6th did not do nearly enough to dent Obama's delegate advantage. After she made up significant ground in West Virginia and Kentucky on the 20th the Obama campaign cranked up its sleaze and smear campaign. They soon realized that blaming their losses on Appalachian racism was wrong and self destructive, so they turned to their most despicable tactic and promoted a story so deranged that even the NY Post backed off from it. Exploiting the death of RFK was the lowest point to date for a campaign with a history of character assassination and division. That very weekend an Obama friend of 20 years gave a divisive and misogynist sermon at Trinity UCC, Obama's now former church, putting Obama on the defensive and yielding another misstep. I never thought I would see a Republican reject attacks on Hillary Clinton with more grace than the Democrats, but here was John McCain saying "I respect her and I think that kind of language and that kind of treatment of Senator Clinton is unwarranted, uncalled for and disgraceful," while all Obama could think about was himself "That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause" Other Democratic party leaders couldn't even manage that "more in sorrow than in anger" response to hateful rhetoric aimed at a Democrat. But the last blow was to come from the party hacks.

Everyone but the most deluded Obama supporters knew that the DNC's Rules and Bylaws committee would reverse itself and give Florida and Michigan meaningful representation at the convention, that was clear from the day of their decision last year. The only question was what compromise they would negotiate. In the end the Obama campaign wrung enough delegates from the committee to put the nomination out of Clinton's reach, but only by taking Clinton's Michigan delegates. In doing so Obama (He had the votes) and the RBC abandoned any notion of rules and gave a final insult to Clinton, her supporters and democracy.

Once again voters rallied to Clinton's side. She finished off the month with a big win in Puerto Rico.

One would think that politically, from Obama's point of view, none of this makes any sense. Obama needs Clinton's supporters to be even competitive in the general election, why would he be kicking Hillary while she was down if he had the nomination in the bag? That drives them to McCain. Obama has two problems, both of which do serious damage to his prospects in the general election. One is that he did not have the nomination in the bag, and he damaged himself by aggressively overcompensating for his real weaknesses. His second problem is that he is disconnected from and tone deaf to the concerns of large segments of the Democratic electorate. He and his supporters have been consistently blind to the offense their attacks have given to women, Hispanics and working class people, while being hypersensitive to any offense to him.

It is hard to imagine, after the RBC meeting, that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination. No doubt she will do what she has always promised to do: work her heart out for the nominee. But she cannot save Obama from himself. So far he shows no sign of even understanding how deeply his actions have offended voters, and no sign of desiring to repair the damage. Maybe in his big speech tomorrow he will skip the soaring but empty rhetoric, finally acknowledge his own role in the divisiveness of this primary and begin to talk to the people he has pushed away.

Barack Obama's economic philosophy has been a mystery to me for most of this campaign. Most people on the liberal blogs assume he is anti-DLC because he is running against Hillary Clinton. But any serious look at his policy prescriptions show them to be similar to DLC proposals and to the right of John Edwards's and Hillary Clinton's progressive populism, as documented in numerous Paul Krugman columns. Obama himself has been pretty cagey and non-committal about his views on economics, sticking to Democratic boilerplate. An article published next month in the New York Review of Books, Economics: Which Way for Obama?, sheds some light on the intellectual underpinnings of an Obama economics.

The article describes Obama's advisers (such as Austan Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein) and plans as out of the University of Chicago, but not of Milton Friedman's "Chicago School". Sunstein describes their approach, in the book reviewed, as a Third Way libertarian paternalism:

Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened. If people want to smoke cigarettes, to eat a lot of candy, to choose an unsuitable health care plan, or to fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise--or even make things hard for them. Still, the approach we recommend does count as paternalistic, because private and public choice architects are not merely trying to track or to implement people's anticipated choices. Rather, they are self-consciously attempting to move people in directions that will make their lives better. They nudge.

But to the degree that their approach is "libertarian", it is not progressive:

Once you concentrate on the reality that people often make poor choices, and that their actions can harm others as well as themselves, the obvious thing to do is restrict their set of choices and prohibit destructive behavior. Thaler and Sunstein, showing off their roots in the Chicago School, rule out this option a priori: "We libertarian paternalists do not favor bans," they state blankly. During a discussion of environmental regulations, they criticize the Clean Air Acts that banned some sources of air pollution and helped to make the air more breathable in many cities. "The air is much cleaner than it was in 1970," they concede, "Philosophically, however, such limitations look uncomfortably similar to Soviet-style five-year plans, in which bureaucrats in Washington announce that millions of people have to change their conduct in the next five years."

After his significant loss in Pennsylvania and fading poll numbers in North Carolina Obama has returned to his most effective tactic: using race to divide the Democratic electorate and super-charge his base support. His campaign was charging Women's Voices. Women Vote. (WVWV) with suppressing the African American vote in a conference call with reporters:

Pricey Harrison, a local Obama supporter on the call, said it was "a possibly deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters."

Bauer also said some aspects of the calls violated the law and, speaking in general, said, "One of the tools of choice in inducing voters suppression is the use of robo-callls that mask their identity."

WVWV is a non-profit, non-partisan group founded in 2003 to register unmarried women to vote. Like the NAACP, another non-partisan group which focuses on registering African Americans, ACORN and Project Vote who register low- and middle income people, and the unions who register working people, WVWV uses a number of techniques to find and encourage people who are not registered to vote to do so.

One interesting question about our war in Iraq has been the extent of Iranian involvement. Left blogistan tends to scoff at the idea, since the Bush administration has used the threat from Iran to argue for more war, but less partial observers note that Iran naturally has interests in what happens to its large neighbor.

An article out the other day from McClatchy, co-authored by Warren Strobel who has done some of the most accurate reporting out of Iraq, covers a particular aspect of Iran's involvement through one man, Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani (aka George Clooney). Suleimani is the commander of Iran's Quds force, which among other things is Iran's covert paramilitary force, and he has reportedly used his own skills and the assets of Quds to exercise considerable control over Iraqi politics and the Iraqi resistance:

Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani commands the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, an elite paramilitary and espionage organization whose mission is to expand Iran's influence in the Middle East.

As Tehran's point man on Iraq, he funnels military and financial support to various Iraqi factions, frustrating U.S. attempts to build a pro-Western democracy on the rubble of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

According to Iraqi and American officials, Suleimani has ensured the elections of pro-Iranian politicians, met frequently with senior Iraqi leaders and backed Shiite elements in the Iraqi security forces that are accused of torturing and killing minority Sunni Muslims.

"Whether we like him (Suleimani) or not, whether Americans like him or not, whether Iraqis like him or not, he is the focal point of Iranian policy in Iraq," said a senior Iraqi official who asked not to be identified so he could speak freely. "The Quds Force have played it all, political, military, intelligence, economic. They are Iranian foreign policy in Iraq."

Or did Obama punk Howard Dean?

The DNC and the Obama campaign are proceeding with a plan to set up a primary joint victory fund, where donors can donate up to $30,800 with $2,300 going to Obama and $28,500 to the DNC. Kerry did the same in 2004, and McCain has set one up with the RNC, but to do so before the nomination is settled is unprecedented. The DNC may have been driven to this by necessity, their fundraising has been abysmal compared to the DCCC, DSCC and RNC, and this kind of primary fund can only raise money before the convention. But getting this story out before arranging a deal with Clinton, or doing a deal Obama but not with Clinton, flies in the face of Chairman Dean's personal commitment to be a fair arbiter of the primary. It is hard to claim neutrality when the bulk of your revenue is coming in through a big donor deal with one candidate.

It does support the inevitability story Obama is pushing, so it may be that the Obama campaign leaked this early. The deal also demonstrates the hypocrisy of Obama's campaign finance reform claims, but he largely abandoned that issue when he decided to break his public financing deal with Mr. McCain/Feingold.