by Frank James

Voters, especially Democrats, are more interested in the coming presidential election than they've been in two decades, a trend that could significantly boost turnout and give Sen. Barack Obama a big advantage over Sen. John McCain, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Another finding from the Pew poll that could augur well for Obama is that voter engagement was especially high among younger voters under 50, exactly that voter group Obama is counting on to turn out in large numbers for him.

The Obama campaign is hoping for historic levels of turnout amoung voters on the young end of the age scale in particular, voters who in past elections have typically not shown up at the polls the way older voters have. The poll suggests that such voters are psyched for Obama. The question, of course, is whether they'll stay excited about Obama all the way to the election booth.

Here's yet another interesting result: despite the good news for Obama, there was bad news for him too. Democrats weren't as unified behind him as Republicans were behind McCain. But what Obama lacked in party unity he made up for in enthusiam, an area that was a McCain weakness.

And here's why both candidates are taking such pains currently to move towards the center of the political spectrum: Pew's results suggest there exists a substantial pool of undecided swing voters out there yet to be won over.

Here's a summary from Pew:

The outlook for the presidential election at mid-year is substantially different than at comparable points in time in recent campaigns. First, turnout is likely to be higher this fall - perhaps much higher than in previous elections - as voter interest continues at record levels. Second, as has been the case since the start of the campaign, Democrats enjoy a substantial engagement advantage over Republicans that may significantly alter the composition of the November electorate.

by Clarence Page

A WARNING TO UNDER-AGED READERS:

Now that I've got your attention...

This has to be some sort of new speed record. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has issued an apology this afternoon for a story that has not even been reported yet.

"For any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused, I apologize," the statement from the Operation Push president begins. "My support for Senator (Barack) Obama's campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal. I cherish this redemptive and historical moment...."

Oh? What "hot mic," as in "microphone" conversation about Obama is Jackson talking about?

Well, Swamp fans, as Jackson explained to me by telephone, his remarks occurred during an off-air moment during a Fox News Channel interview that aired Sunday.

Jackson didn't realize that the mics were still "hot," as in turned on and recording when he made a few off-the-cuff remarks about Obama's faith-based programs.

Bill O'Reilly has the story and plans to report it on his Fox program, "The O'Reilly Factor" tonight.

Even though O'Reilly has booked me and another guest to respond to the video, he is withholding a full transcript or recording of Jackson's remarks even from me until the program airs.

So far I have only been told by a producer that Jackson criticizes Obama's proposed faith-based programs for "talking down to black people."

And (A warning here to younger or more sensitive readers) Jackson also says something about how the senator was "going to get his (twin objects of male anatomy) cut off."

Jackson, who recalled his remark as, "The senator is cutting off his you-know-what with black people," expressed deep regrets for saying it, even in what he thought was a "private conversation."

"I want to be clear," Jackson said. "My support for Barack Obama is unequivocal. I apologize to Barack and the Obama campaign for my crude and hurtful comments."

The full text of Jackson's apology follows:

by Don Frederick

A year in which Barack Obama heads the Democratic national ticket is not a year in which the party's decades-old lock on the black vote will show any signs of loosening.

Indeed, a recent Associated Press story noted that because of the precedent-shattering nature of Obama's candidacy, even some well-known African American voices from the right were thinking twice about what they would do with their secret ballot.

Commentator Armstrong Williams said of Obama: "I don't necessarily like his policies; I don't like much that he advocates, but for the first time in my life, history thrusts me to really seriously think about" voting for a Democrat for president. "I can honestly say I have no idea who I'm going to pull that lever for in November. And to me, that's incredible."

Also on the fence, according to the story, is J.C. Watts, the former House member from Oklahoma who for years -- in virtually every story that quoted him -- would at some point be identified as "the sole black Republican member of Congress."

Against this backdrop, the surprise in November will be if Obama fails to better the high mark for black support that exit polls found was hit by two Democratic presidential candidates -- 90 percent, posted by Walter Mondale in 1984 and equaled by Al Gore in 2000 (John Kerry came close four years ago, winning 88 percent).

But also against this backdrop, it is worth noting a small milestone for a black GOP politician that occurred last week in South Carolina.

Tim Scott, a businessman who also chairs the Charleston County Council, won his party's nomination for a seat in the state's House of Representatives. He faces no Democratic opposition in the general election, setting the stage for him to become the first black Republican to serve in South Carolina's Legislature since Reconstruction ended in 1877.

In writing about Scott's achievement, the State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., reported that when Scott takes office, South Carolina will be "on par with Georgia" as the only Deep South state where the ranks of state legislators include black Republicans.

Don Frederick, a political editor in the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, wrote fhis for Top of the Ticket, the L.A. Times political blog.

Andrew Zajac

The WaPo has an interesting story tracing Barack Obama's path to the Democratic presidential nomination back to John Mercer Langston, by most accounts the first black man to hold elective office when he was voted in as Brownhelm Township clerk in northern Ohio in 1855.

Langston was educated a few miles away, at Oberlin College, which calls to mind another aspect of race and politics in the U.S., the Republican Party's departure from its roots as the party of Lincoln.

Until the 1970s, the area around Oberlin was heavily influenced by the GOP, reflective at least in part of the town's, college's and the party's origins intertwined with abolitionism.

For example, Republican Albert Baumhart represented the area in Congress for three terms until 1961, when he was succeeded by anther Republican Charles Mosher who served 16 years until 1977.

These were not lightweights either. Baumhart was director of the Republican National Committee in the early 1950s and Mosher was a player on science issues and an early advocate of solar energy.

But Mosher, an early opponent of the Vietnam War, was no social conservative of the sort who dominate the GOP today.

There once was a whole wing of the Republican Party filled with social moderates and liberals. Today they are about as plentiful as ivory-billed woodpeckers and the party's agenda has not had the same place for certain social issues, like civil rights, that it once did.

Some of this was by design, of course, part of the GOP's "southern strategy."

Since Mosher gave up his seat in 1977, it's been held by Democrats Donald Pease, Sherrod Brown and Betty Sutton.

The town of Oberlin, dominated by the college, is liberal. But much of the rest of the 113th district, not so much. It's got a lot of farmers and factory workers worried about trade policy and job outsourcing. The GOP has had a tough time crafting an economic message that addresses those voters' feelings of insecurity.

by Frank James

When you watch the Democratic National Convention this summer and see the diverse ocean of faces, keep in mind that the diversity you're witnessing didn't happen by accident.

Instead, it will be the result, in substantial measure, of a very strong affirmative action program within the Democratic Party which at times seems virtually indistinguishable from the use of quotas.

This comes through in an informative Wall Street Journal story by June Kronholz about the other campaign going on in the Democratic Party currently, the effort many people have undertaken to become delegates to the party's national convention in Denver.

The story explains how some candidates for delegate spots host parties at restaurants, bake cookies or produce campaign videos for cell phones in order to win a delegate position. It also explains how various state party organizations go about filling their delegations.

But here's a key passage that speaks to the use of what many would view as quotas.

The states and parties have different ways of filling those seats. Some, like Pennsylvania, put delegates' names on the primary ballot. Party central committees name some delegates in others. But for Washington state's Mr. (Jody) Rodgers, for example, the road to Denver began at a Feb. 9 caucus at his West Seattle elementary school. There, his neighbors elected him an Obama delegate to Seattle's 34th Legislative District convention, which in turn elected him an Obama delegate to the state's 7th Congressional District convention.

The odds are long: The party's big-tent diversity goals reserve six of Washington's convention seats for blacks, 10 for Hispanics, and others for Asian, American-Indian, young, disabled, and gay, lesbian and transgendered Democrats. Any diversity seats that haven't been filled at the congressional-district meeting will be plugged at the state convention.

by David Nitkin

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele entered the race for U.S. Senate two years ago with a major push from President Bush and his allies.

National Republican leaders were looking to build their party's brand identity among African-Americans, touting Steele, Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania and Ken Blackwell of Ohio as part of a new breed of candidates who would help expand the GOP tent.

It was a tough sell in a post-Katrina environment. All three lost; Steele was defeated by Democrat Ben Cardin.

But Steele continues to stay near the spotlight, partly with help from his friends on Pennsylvania Avenue and elsewhere in Washington. Since his defeat, Steele has served as chairman of GOPAC, which recruits and trains Republican candidates for state and local office.

Today, Bush named Steele as part of a seven-member delegation heading to Tanzania next month to participate in a summit on economic and social development in Africa, the Leon H. Sullivan Summit VIII. Leading the delegation will be Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. Read past the jump to see the other members of the delegation.

Steele recently told a Maryland political blog that he's interested in running for governor in 2010, if former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. decides against a rematch with Democratic incumbent Martin O'Malley.

by Mike Dorning

Barack Obama's once-unlikely campaign for the presidency is poised to pass a crucial threshold tonight, winning a majority of the elected delegates to the Democratic National Convention. It's a moment the campaign celebrates as a claim to a popular mandate for his party's nomination, even though Obama still must gain more commitments from elected officials and political insiders who are superdelegates before he can clinch the Democratic nomination.

The history-making campaign of the freshman senator who now seems likely to be the first biracial major-party presidential nominee and first Generation X nominee started not with a campaign rally or a television appearance but with a short video posted on his web site.

From his Internet announcement that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007 to the legions of small-dollar donors who have funded a campaign that bested the formidable fundraising machine of a former president and first lady, the Internet has figured powerfully in each step of Obama's presidential campaign in much the same way that the then-new medium of television helped propel John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960.

Here, then, are a few of the most memorable Internet moments of Barack Obama's bid for the White House.

Some of the best moments:

1. "Yes We Can" video by will.i.am generates at least 14 million views in several postings on YouTube.

2. The Obama Girl's "I got a crush...on Obama" becomes a pop culture phenomenon.

3. The debut of MyBarackObama.com on the day of his February 2007 official campaign kick-off rally in Springfield, Ill., stirs supporters to create more than a thousand Obama groups on the first day of business.

4. The Obama campaign's first quarterly fundraising total bests Hillary Clinton in cash raised for the primary, in part because of large haul of Internet dollars, foreshadowing a big draw of small-dollar donors over the Internet that will give him financial superiority over the Clinton's well-tested fundraising network.

5. Obama announces his presidential exploratory committee over the Internet on his web site.

6. A video of Obama's full speech on race relations, "A More Perfect Union," is viewed at least 5.5 million times in several postings on YouTube.

Some of the worst Obama Internet moments:

1. Excerpts of incendiary sermons from former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright are posted on YouTube gaining even greater attention after the clips are aired on television.

2. E-mail campaigns spread false rumors that Obama is a Muslim and unwilling to hold his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance.

3. An Obama internet consultant is linked to an unauthorized "mash-up" video portraying Hillary Clinton as 1984's "Big Brother," based on a famous Super Bowl ad for Apple lampooning IBM.

by Frank James

If you look at images of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign appearance at an auto plant in Sterling, Mich. yesterday, the stop where he called a female reporter "sweetie," you'll notice an American flag pin on his lapel.

It's not just happenstance that Obama, who more often than not goes flag pin-less, was wearing it when he visited a job site filled with the kind of voters he has had so much trouble winning, white blue-collar workers.

With many of those voters questioning Obama's patriotism because of false stories bouncing around the Internet, it shouldn't surprise anyone if Obama increasingly showed the flag or, more precisely, the flag pin going forward.

He once explained that right after 9/11 he voted to wear a flag pin before he voted against wearing one, feeling that it was a superficial form of patriotism.

But that was then. He's going to need every vote he can get in swing states, especially if the racial animus in flyover country is as strong as this Washington Post story indicated.

A flag pin on his jacket would at least help take one small but lingering issue off the table. So we'll likely be seeing a lot more of it when he's out in middle America courting this demographic.

Sen. Barack Obama on his campaign plane at Chicago's Midway Airport en-route to Washington DC, May 7, 2008 (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

by Frank James

Now that the Democratic presidential nomination race between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton has pretty much been resolved in the senator from Illinois's favor, at least according to the conventional wisdom in Washington, maybe we're not totally jumping the gun by turning our attention to the general-election campaign.

And what a campaign it promises to be, the first in which a black American, if everything follows the expected trajectory, will become the presidential nominee of one of the U.S. two major political parties.

That fact alone is enough to make many observers nervous about how the next few months could play out. The 2008 general-election campaign may become one of the nastiest in American history, the mother of all race-baiting efforts.

True, the next six months could pleasantly surprise us. There could be relatively few outright racial and racist appeals meant to torpedo Obama's candidacy.

But the history of U.S. political campaigns when one of the candidates is African-American isn't encouraging on this score.

by Whitney Blair Wyckoff

Tony Zirkle, who spoke at an Adolf Hitler birthday party last month on how prostitution and pornography impact white women, came in third place in Indiana's 2nd Congressional District Republican primary yesterday. Fighting prostitution and porn is a major plank in Zirkle's platform.

He has said that he will speak to any group who invites him, but he dodged questions from an Indiana paper asking whether he was a white supremacist sympathizer.

Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has the story:

Tough news last night in the closely watched Republican primary in Indiana's 2nd Congressional District.

Zirkle, whose top campaign issue is opposition to pornography and prostitution, finished a distant third behind Goshen, Ind., businessman and GOP establishment candidate Luke Puckett and Culver, Ind., newspaper delivery man Joseph Roush. Puckett won with 48 percent of the vote; Zirkle drew 16 percent.

Mildred and Richard Loving, January 26, 1965. (AP Photo)

by Frank James

On this day when people in Indiana and North Carolina are choosing between the Democratic candidates for president, one of whom is the offspring of an interracial union, it's mind-boggling to think that just over 40 years ago, marriages like that which produced Sen. Barack Obama were illegal in many states, including North Carolina where voters are going to the polls.

But all that was changed in 1967 because of two quiet and courageous people who fought for their love by fighting an unjust law, Richard and Mildred Loving of Virginia. Their desire to have their marriage recognized in the eyes of the law in native state led them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws in the nation.

Mildred Jeter Loving, an African-American, died at 68 last week. Her husband was killed in 1975 by a drunken driver. But she and he will forever have a place in history as the Loving family in ironically perfect legal citation Loving v. Virginia.

A humble woman by all accounts, Loving didn't see herself as a hero akin to Rosa Parks. But she and her husband started something that hasn't ended, for champions of same-sex marriage view the Lovings as a model.

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

by Frank James

How much of Sen. Barack Obama's supposed patriotism deficit among voters has to do with his being African-American?

The answer to that is likely an especially difficult if not impossible to reach. How would you disentangle the perceptions of Obama the candidate from Obama the African American?

Still, it's a question worth asking.

What's the evidence that many whites see blacks as less patriotic? The best I can do this morning is a study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which, in a poll back in the early 1990s, found that 51 percent of whites held the view that blacks were less patriotic than whites.

Assuming that the trend towards improvement in racial understanding seen since the Second World War continued in the last 17 years, that 51 percent is probably smaller.

Sen. John McCain greets the crowd in Memphis Friday, April 4, 2008 (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer.)

by Frank James

Perhaps being shot down over enemy territory and spending years as a prisoner of war makes Sen. John McCain less intimidated than other politicians at the thought of speaking to unfriendly audiences. After all, what's a little heckling after you've endured years of North Vietnamese tormenters.

That thought crossed my mind as I watched McCain speak last week in Memphis to an African-American crowd gathered outside the Lorraine Motel, the site of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr'.s 1968 assassination.

The venue was certainly well beyond the typical suburban comfort zone of Republican presidential candidates. And it was especially hot spot for McCain who voted against the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, a historic fact that drew boos from some in the audience when he mentioned it.

But there he was.

And as John Dickerson of Slate writes, it's part of a McCain campaign strategy that will find him visiting inner city and poor rural areas, places Republicans usually write off as too Democratic to waste precious campaign time in.

by Frank James

Sen. Barack Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, is fed up and not going to take it anymore. "It" would be the media intrusions that have come with the controversy over the by- now infamous comments of its retired senior pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The church's new lead pastor, Otis Moss III, held a press conference yesterday to make two points. He called for a national conversation about race. And he wanted to read the riot act to some reporters who have gone overboard in the opinion of church members and others, in their pursuit of interviews with Trinity members.

The call for a racial dialogue gave the press conference a more elevated gloss than if it had been merely held for the purpose of telling reporters to cease and desist from bothering church members.

But one got the sense from watching the press conference that the main purpose was to tell the media to back off.

The church is clearly feeling besieged and not just by the media. There have been death threats and other warnings of violence.

But overzealous reporters have been a very real and present annoyance. According to Moss, journalists have tried to conduct interviews during church services. They have accosted members as they've headed into the church.

Some journalists have even actually gone as far as calling church members whose names they found on the sick and shut-in list that appeared in the church bulletin, a list which included the names of people dying in hospices. (Chicago Tribune religion writer Manya Brachear had this very good story about Trinity's sense of having been invaded.)

By Jim Tankersley

Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia this week and the emotionally charged reactions to it, pro and con, illustrate a hard truth about America circa 2008: We still struggle to talk openly and honestly about race.

Perhaps it's the long and tumultuous history of race relations in this country, from slavery to the civil rights era to the great affirmative action debates of recent decades. Perhaps it's the still-divergent views among Americans of many races of whether we're even close to "equality" in this country. Perhaps it's lingering prejudice. Perhaps it's a nagging worry, from people who believe they harbor no trace of racism, that a stray word could brand them "racist" in the eyes of society.

Whatever the reason, it remains one of the most difficult conversational minefields for Americans to navigate civilly. Just take a look at the Swamp comments section.

Several newspapers examine the issue today in thought-provoking terms.

Tribune reporters Rex W. Huppke, Jodi S. Cohen and Antonio Olivo note that Obama's speech encouraged Americans to break "the racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years." But, they write, "But those in the trenches of racial dialogue know that whatever progress might result won't come fast, or easy. Fruitful conversations require listening without being defensive, identifying common goals that transcend race and having a willingness to be uncomfortable."

In The Oregonian newspaper, the major daily in the state Obama visited at the end of the week, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes today that talk of race "paralyzes. Even here. In progressive Oregon." She goes on to quote a University of Texas professor saying, of Americans, "The way we talk about race is wholly inadequate."

by Frank James

Looking at the reaction of a MediaCurves focus group of 709 viewers to Sen. Barack Obama's race speech in which he took on the issue of his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah C. Wright, it's once again interesting to see the racial divide in how the speech was received. It's the same racial split Obama so deftly described in his speech.

Blacks who took part of the survey had higher levels of agreement with Obama than non-blacks. And Democrats had more favorable impressions of the snippets of the speech they were shown than independents and Republicans.

Watch for the reaction to Obama when he asserts that he never heard his pastor say anything derogatory about specific ethnic groups. Non-black respondents weren't necessarily buying that while blacks did.

That could indicate a real problem for Obama going forward if a lot of voters believe he's being less than candid.

But even Republicans came back to Obama when he said Wright's mistake was that he was blind to the progress that had made on race issues, advances that explained the reality that one of Wright's own members was, indisputably, a serious contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, in large part because he had forged a multiracial coalition.