Sen. Hillary Clinton in Charleston, West Virginia, May 13, 2008. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

by Frank James

The Hill newspaper draws back the curtain on something a lot of people, including me, didn't know. Sen. Hillary Clinton was the motive force behind the Senate Democrats's war room to combat their Republican colleagues and which has contributed to the poisonous partisan politics in that chamber.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was the original impetus behind the Senate Democratic "war room," a legacy the candidate does not mention on the campaign trail but one that has significantly changed the upper chamber.

Daschle did not respond to several requests for comment.

Travis Childers delivers his victory speech in Booneville, Miss., Tuesday night May 13, 2008. (AP Photo/Michael H. Miller)

by Jill Zuckman

Another Republican district bites the dust.

First, House Republicans lost previously safe seats in Louisiana and Illinois - including the one belonging to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Last night, they lost a third in Mississippi.

Travis Childers, a Democrat, defeated Republican Greg Davis in a special election to fill the remaining months of the congressional term. The seat had been held by Roger Wicker who moved to the U.S. Senate after Trent Lott stepped down.

"The scoreboard now reads 'Change 3, Status Quo 0,'" crowed Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "In districts across the country, the American people are rejecting Bush Rubberstamp Republicans and casting their votes for real change."

House Republican Leader John Boehner issued a somber statement calling the news "a wake-up call to Republican candidates nationwide."

Andrew Zajac

One more sign congressional Republicans may be in for a rough ride this election season: Democrats are fielding strong candidates in GOP breadbasket districts, like the western Miami-Dade county redoubt of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Diaz-Balart cruised to victory in 2006 with nearly 59 percent of the vote, but he faces an energetic and savvy challenger in Democratic operative Joe Garcia, who is wasting no time in zinging the GOP incumbent as obsessed with Castro at the expense of bread-and-butter economic issues.

In the not-too-distant past, no Castro obsession was too strong for the rabidly anti-Fidel exile community in south Florida. But the 1960s-era generation of exiles is aging and their children and grandchildren don't always take the same rock-hard line toward Cuba.

Garcia himself has the street cred to call out Diaz-Balart on Cuba because he is a former director of the ardently anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation.

Click here for a taste of what Garcia's throwing at the Diaz-Balart -- and at his brother, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who occupies a neighboring seat and holds similar Cuban policy views.

Andrew Zajac

Faced with a scandal-soiled attorney general who won't go away, the Ohio Democratic Party is trying a 'if you can't beat Marc Dann, erase him' strategy.

Click here to get to the ODP web site. Then click on 'elected officials'.

Whoa. Where's Marc Dann?

There's a statement on the front page of the web site from top Democrats asking Dann to step down, but his bio listing is gone.

Here's some background on why Ohio Dems are so eager to see Dann disappear.

The Democrats attempted erasure recalls those old Kremlin group photos in which a commissar or field marshal who'd fallen from favor was airbrushed out of the pic.

Except in those cases, the pariah really was gone, to the gulag, the grave or, if he was lucky, to a gilded confinement at his dacha.

Dann's still around, vowing to ride out the heat from both parties. But it's hard to imagine an end game that works out favorably for him. One factor in his intransigence may be lack of another job. Word is that Dann has been calling around to various Ohio politicos looking for a place to land.

by Frank James

Tom Edsall of the Huffington Post writes about the Obama campaign's efforts to cut a deal with the Clinton camp that would allow the former to help pay off the latter's campaign debt as a way of buying peace in the party i.e. getting her to end her campaign.

But there are problems. As Edsall reports:

The first is obvious: the deep and growing animosity of Obama supporters towards Clinton, whom they see as raising issues of race and 'elitism' that will hurt the Illinois Senator in November.

For many Obama backers, Penn, the former chief strategist for Clinton
and head of one of the biggest PR-lobbying conglomerates in the nation's
capital, is the quintessential Washington insider, capitalizing on political
connections to become a multi-millionaire.

If you run a presidential campaign that skewers Washington lobbyists, as Obama has, it would send a contradictory message to turn around and indirectly drop a cool $10 million or more into the lap of one of Washington's wealthiest lobbyists.

Then there's one more problem for Obama, as Edsall reports: a lot of his supporters viscerally hate the Clinton campaign and might revolt if he helps her pay down her debt.

by Matthew Hay Brown

In the public service announcement they taped recently to promote cleaner energy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Speaker Newt Gingrich joked that they don't agree on much.

It sounds now as if they can add a second item to the list.

Earlier this week, Gingrich pleaded with fellow Republicans to "chart a bold course of real change" or face "catastrophe" at the polls in November.

Pelosi appears to agree.

"Right now I would say we would gain seats," the California Democrat told reporters Thursday. "I wouldn't venture a guess as to how many. But I do see November as a time of great victory for the Democrats."

With special election wins in Illinois and Louisiana, Democrats already have increased their House majority by two seats this year. Pelosi says a major electoral shift is underway.

"We will have an historic election as to whom we elect as the president of the United States, either the first woman or the first African American, but a person who can unify America," she said. "We will have a strong, confident, predictable Democratic Majority to take us forward, and then we will be in 2010, 2012, and on the path to a strong Democratic leadership for a long time to come."

by Matthew Hay Brown

House Democrats are taking exception to President Bush's dismissal today of a housing bill expected to pass today in the House.

Bush, after meeting this morning with House Republicans, said he would veto the bill to insure new loans for cash-strapped homeowners. The White House has called it a "bailout;" Bush said today it would reward "speculators and lenders."

"American families confronting foreclosue deserve better from the president than a veto threat," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in response to Bush's remarks. "They deserve the House's bipartisan housing plan that will protect the American dream of home ownership."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was more pointed.

"As the second term of his failed presidency winds to an end, President Bush has little left on the agenda but finger-pointing. With gas prices skyrocketing and with Americans losing their homes to foreclosure at record rates, the president can do little but blame, criticize, and pass the buck. ... Americans saw today an Administration out of leadership, and a president out of ideas."

Bush said he was "committed to a good housing bill that will help folks stay in their house, as opposed to a housing bill that will reward speculators and lenders. There's a House alternative that will do the right thing for the American people when it comes to housing."

by Matthew Hay Brown

House Democrats picked up an anti-abortion member over the weekend with the special election victory of Don Cazayoux, and could gain another if Travis Childers defeats Greg Davis in Mississippi next week. So does that mean the caucus, which has relied on the support of voters who favor legal abortion, is growing more conservative?

"This is not a party issue," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said this morning, when asked the question at his weekly meeting with the Capitol press corps. "We don't make that a party issue. We don't whip that issue. Members have to vote their conscience on that issue, and do."

Hoyer, himself a moderate Democrat from conservative Southern Maryland, listed the issues that unite the party as "the quality of life for real people, jobs, their health care, their education for their kids, and their national security and homeland security and security at home."

"That is why people are Democrats," Hoyer said. "And that is what distinguishes, I think, the Democratic Party from the Republican Party. The social issues are issues which people feel strongly about for one reason or another. But the issues that I think you will see pretty consistent Democratic unity on are issues affecting families every day."

by Matthew Hay Brown

With the victory Saturday of former prosecutor and state legislator Don Cazayoux to the Louisiana seat last held by Republican Richard Baker, House Democrats have gained another seat ahead of the November election.

In March, Democrat Bill Foster won the special election in Illinois to succeed Republican former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. The Democratic House majority now stands at 235, up two since the elections of 2006.

"Democrats are winning in solidly Republican districts because the country agrees it's time for a change from the status quo in Washington," House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel said today. "Louisiana has sent a clear message about that need for change."

In a memo circulated late Saturday, the National Republican Congressional Committee said there was a lesson to be learned from the result.

"When Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi were introduced into this campaign, Don Cazayoux was leading by a large margin in the polls," the NRCC said. "Since then, Republicans saturated the Baton Rouge airwaves in an effort to nationalize this contest and make the election about the real life consequences of a Barack Obama presidency and a continued Pelosi-run Democratic Congress. In that time, Republicans made substantial ground.

by Matthew Hay Brown

Perhaps it was a coincidence. Or, perhaps, the Obama campaign wanted to remind anyone who might have been paying attention Saturday that they've got Kennedys, too.

Two e-mails relating to the Democratic dynasty landed in our inbox Saturday afternoon. First came the news from the Clinton campaign that the Maryland State Democratic Committee had elected former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and a Hillary supporter, an automatic delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Just 96 minutes later, and another Kennedy heard from: Townsend's cousin Caroline, daughter of John F. Kennedy, writing on behalf of Obama.

"My father called on Americans to ask what they could do for their country," she said.

"Those who answered his call built a movement that transformed our country and brought out the best in our national character.

"Barack Obama has followed in that tradition - dedicating himself to public service as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and then as a state and U.S. Senator."

What follows is a pitch for the Obama Organizing Fellowship, for which the campaign is seeking students and recent graduates who "will be trained on the basics of organizing & campaign fundamentals and then placed in a community to carry out grassroots activities."

In Democratic circles, Caroline Kennedy, the sole surviving heir to Camelot, might be the more influential of the two cousins. As of Saturday, however, Kennedy Townsend is the one who gets to vote at the convention.

(Photo by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

by Frank James

Sen. Richard Durbin knew he potentially could be stepping on a cow pie yesterday if he didn't carefully answer a reporter's question yesterday about the inflationary effect U.S. ethanol mandates might be having on food prices around the world.

The Senate's second-in-commade represents Illinois, after all, a state with large farm interests. And his party's presidential and congressional fortunes also depend on voters in states significant agricultural interests.

So Durbin was not only careful in what he said, but he was clear in asking reporters to report his answer accurately. He basically acknowledged that ethanol is part of the problem without saying much that would offend farmers. Budding politicians should study it as a great example of how to straddle an issue.

REPORTER: Senator Durbin, a lot of people, hunger experts, say that the demand for biofuels, ethanol and other biofuels, is contributing a lot to the increase in prices.

But we have to understand that it's had an impact on food prices, and let's be honest about it. Even in the corn belt, we'd better be honest about it.

by Frank James

Despite all the pleas by Democratic Party officials, including Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, that his party's superdelegates make up their minds and soon, about whom they'll support for their party's presidential nomination, there are apparently still unswayed superdelegates who might wait all the way to the convention.

According to a Los Angeles Times story today:

But many superdelegates preferred their place on the fence, content to watch as the race plays out. "I feel no compulsion whatsoever to cast my vote until the convention, but I may make a determination following the primaries," said Nancy Worley, vice chairwoman of the Alabama Democratic Party.

Larry Gates, the Kansas state chairman, said he too was content to wait, knowing any decision he makes is bound to tick off somebody. "I like them both," he said of Clinton and Obama. "Always have."

Workers leave the Warren Truck Assembly in Warren, Mich. during a shift change, Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

by Frank James

For Sen. Barack Obama, there's good and bad news as far as white working-class voters are concerned.

The good news is that the kind of voters who once again showed in Pennsylvania their unwillingness to vote for him are declining as a percentage of the electorate.

The bad news is that their proportion among voters generally isn't going to shrink fast enough to help him.

That and other conclusions can drawn from a new and very enlightening paper by Ruy Teixeira, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University.

In "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class," Teixeira and Abramowitz say that however you define the white working class--by income, education, or occupation--its percentage among all voters is declining. It has fallen 30-50 percentage points since the World War II period till now.

Depending on which definition you use, the white-working class population has gone from being the vast majority of white Americans 60 years ago to a third or less of then white population.