Dowd to Obama: Don't Blow Off W. Va. Loss

Where Barack's missing out and what Hillary needs to do

(NEWSER) - John Edwards’ endorsement may have helped Obama turn the page on recent troubles, but pundits say he should face up to them—or he leaves an opening for Hillary to climb back in:

• Sure, it was a “rational, prudent decision” to skip West Virginia, David Broder allows, but it will keep Obama’s blue-collar question alive into the fall. He could have staged a JFK-style coup in the Mountain State—he certainly had the money and foot soldiers.

It's all about whether he can woo those pesky blue-collar white voters

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama's West Virginia loss by a whopping 30 points probably won’t cost him the Democratic nomination, writes John Dickerson in Slate. But the loss does put a chink in Obama’s argument that he can unite disparate groups, since, apparently, these powers have failed him among at least one key voting block—the blue-collar whites that are Hillary Clinton's base. More»

Senate seat the perfect ending to her 'fairy tale'

(NEWSER) - Sure, you can make a case against it, but Caroline Kennedy becoming a senator would be the perfect ending to a "modern fairy tale," Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post. Putting aside her tendency to "recoil from political dynasties," Marcus points out that there are plenty of politicians who didn't exactly pay their dues—does Jesse Ventura ring a bell? More»

A la JFK's Cabinet, too often masks poor judgment, inexperience

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama has won praise for appointing “the best and the brightest” to his Cabinet during a time of war and economic hardship. But all the back-patting sounds a little too familiar, Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees,” he observes. More»

Repub must become a fighter

(NEWSER) - John McCain desperately needs a dose of the strategy that kept Hillary Clinton competitive with Barack Obama during primary season, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru write in the National Review. McCain should adopt a “conservative version of her occasional theme of a ‘fighter for you’”—the “you” being middle-class Americans and the enemy being “lobbyists, institutions, and liberals.” More»