After subsiding a bit early this week, the drumbeat continued, in drips and drabs, that the end may well be within sight of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s once-supposedly-unstoppable presidential bid.

The pundits continue to pile on, parsing the significance of such disparate news items as Vermont Sen. (and Barack Obama backer) Pat Leahy saying Friday she should get out of the race to Sen. Chris Dodd’s (also with Obama) saying much the same just the day before.

Then came new poll data showing that Obama has regained his national lead over Clinton and that her negative ratings had returned to as high as they were seven years ago.

On and on it went, with Slate Magazine topping the exercise with “The Hillary Deathwatch,” a feature that will be regulary updated with the current odds of her winning the Democratic nomination. As of Friday, the odds stood at 12 percent.

Amid all this (and much more piling on), Clinton’s campaign sent out a letter Friday to fundraisers that read, in part: “Have you noticed a pattern?

“Every time our campaign demonstrates its strength and resilience, people start to suggest we should end our pursuit of the Democratic nomination.

“Those anxious to force us to the sidelines aren’t doing it because they think we’re going to lose the upcoming primaries. The fact is, they’re reading the same polls we are, and they know we are in a position to win … we aren’t going to simply step aside. You and I are going to keep fighting for what we believe in, and together, we’re going to win.”

Remember the presidential candidacy of Mike Gravel? Don’t be abashed if you don’t, because the former Alaska senator who launched the longest of long shots for the Democratic nomination has pretty much disappeared from view. He made a ripple of news this week by saying he’d pretty much given up on his party and joined the Libertarians. Whatever happens to him, he leaves behind one of the most, uh, memorable ads of this campaign cycle.

Just in time for the campaign trail lull that will accompany Easter weekend, a new meme began catching hold today among some Hillary Clinton watchers. Short version: The end may be nigh.

It actually started Thursday, when the New York Times frontpaged an analysis blandly headlined, “Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination.” Detailing the breaks she absolutely, positively needs to wrest the nomination away from Barack Obama, the story’s bottom line:
“[A]ll this has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February. But that shot seems to have grown a little longer.”

Slate Magazine quickly picked up on the new CW: “The question is, who is going to tell Hillary it’s over? Certainly not Bill. Certainly not her aides.”

The notion kept gaining traction. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin listed 14 “painful things Hillary Clinton knows — or should know.” Among them: “She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.”

Finally, Politico.com went kinda meta on the question, putting it in the context of the sausage machine that covering a campaign often becomes, explaining why Clinton “has virtually no chance of winning” — and why that bpottom line hasn’t taken hold more widely in the media.

Bottom line:
“Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

“People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.

“As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.”

Sure, this CW may evaporate over the weekend, gather steam or be replaced by a 180-degree switcheroo, in which the pundits proclaim yet another Clinton comeback. But for now, it’s out there.

Under a withering barrage of rhetorical fire over the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama delivered what his strategists called a “major” speech on race and its role in the campaign.

The talking heads and bloggers are already praising it for its nuance or ripping it to shreds for such soundbites as his reference to Wright as “like family to me.”

All of the bloviating aside, here’s the transcript of “A More Perfect Union.”

Here’s the video.

Update: The Obama campaign released this statement by the candidate this afternoon.

This isn’t the first time the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor, has created a controversy for the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, but this one has turned into a veritable firestorm that shows no immediate sign of abating. In a videotaped 2003 sermon, Wright told his congregation, “They want us to sing God Bless America — no, no, no. Not God Bless America. God damn America.”

First reported Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” here’s the abbreviated version of what’s fanning the flames on talk radio and in the blogosphere.

For more context, here’s the original ABC report, assembled after the network’s reporters reviewed Wright’s sermons and found this particular stunner.

Obama has repeatedly distanced himself from Wright’s most incendiary comments, likening him to “an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” And Thursday, confronted with his pastor’s newly-reported comments, Obama told a reporter, “I profoundly disagree with some of these statements.

His church, Trinity United Church of Christ on the south side of Chicago, first became a focal point of controversy months ago, when reporters pointed out that its mission statement asserted that it’s a congregation that considers itself “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” Here’s the church’s website.

Not surprisingly, conservatives lit into Obama, with Rush Limbaugh taking the lead, calling Wright “a racist, hatemonger pastor.”

The guys at PowerLine weighed in, as well.

But some folks on the left were somewhat aghast, wondering if this could mortally wound Obama’s campaign. An anonymous poster at TalkingPointsMemo summed up the queasiness among many liberals.

Even The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, as big an Obama devotee as can be found on the Web, was troubled by the statements and the fallout, even as he tried to spin it in the most positive way.

This will either flare out relatively quickly as the pace of campaigning heats back up after the lull of the past few days, or it will gain traction and have a lasting effect on Obama. Stay tuned.

First Hillary Clinton, then husband Bill, have repeatedly floated the balloon that Barack Obama might make a great Number Two on a presidential ticket headed by none other than Hillary Clinton. Obama’s short answer so far: Thanks but no thanks.

Hillary Clinton’s most recent forumlation came over the weekend in Mississippi, when she told voters, “I’ve had people say, ‘Well, I wish I could vote for both of you’. That might be possible some day, but first I need your vote.”

Her husband chimed in the same day, calling a Clinton-Obama ticket “an unstoppable force.” As per NBC News: Clinton said that Hillary believes that if there was a way to “unite the energy and the new people” that Barack Obama has attracted with the appeal he said his wife has shown in “small town and rural America, they’d “be hard to beat.”

Over the weekend, the blogosphere and pundits went nuts, pointing out the obvious contradiction: A big chunk of Clinton’s kitchen sink barrage of Obama consists of her contention that he’s too green and unqualified to be Commander in Chief …. uh, but he’s perfectly acceptable to become the person one heartbeat away from the job?

The New York Daily News’ Michael Goodwin (no friend of the Clintons), put it this way: “It’s a dream team all right, as in dream on. It’s a fantasy because, in the Clintons’ pitch, naturally, she is on top of the ticket and Obama is her No. 2. That’s rich of her, considering that Obama leads in both the delegate race and the popular vote. Forget those pesky voters - Hillary has declared herself the winner!”

Time’s Karen Tumulty put it succinctly: “There’s one big problem with the Clinton campaign encouraging all this talk of a dream ticket: It undercuts their argument that Obama is not prepared to be Commander-in-Chief. If they really believe that to be the case, how could they justify putting him in a position where he is one tragedy away from the job?”

You get the idea. Even as his wife’s campaign was busily tearing down Obama, comparing him to none other than special prosecutor Kenneth Starr (who’d have thought in a million years the Clintons would be the first to invoke the memory of you-know-who), Bill Clinton airily dismissed the negative back-and-forth this way: “That’s politics.”

Monday afternoon update, via the New York Times:

Senator Barack Obama implored voters here today to discount the political chatter about him joining the Democratic presidential ticket with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, declaring: “I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place can offer the vice presidency to someone who’s in first place.”
“If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president?” Mr. Obama said. “Do you understand that?”

Go to the tape, courtesy of MSNBC:

Sure the election is still a political light-year away, but the polling firm SurveyUSA has just taken a stab at gaming the Electoral College results, by way of a poll of 30,000 registered voters in all 50 states.

The result: With 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Barack Obama beats John McCain, 280-258; Hillary Rodham Clinton beats McCain, 276-262.

In the matchup, Obama would carry 24 states and the District of Columbia; Clinton would carry 20. He would run more strongly in the Midwest, South West and West Coast. While Obama outperforms Clinton in 33 states, the opposite is true in 15 states.

Closer to home, SurveyUSA found that Clinton would win Minnesota by 4 percentage points, while Obama would take the state by 7.

The firm added a boatload of caveats to its polling: “There are specific limitations to this exercise. The winner’s margin in each state is not always outside of the survey’s margin of sampling error. Rather than show states where the results are inside of the margin of sampling error as “leaning” or “toss-ups,” SurveyUSA for this illustration assigned Electoral Votes to the candidate with the larger share of the vote, no matter how small the winner’s margin. The Democratic nominee is not yet known. Running mates on neither side are known. These are not surveys of likely voters, these are surveys of registered voters. Those caveats stated, the exercise is a remarkable foreshadowing of how contested, and how fiercely fought, the general election in November may be, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.”

For the full results, with maps and methodology, click here.

What has to be the single most bizarre political ad of this election cycle just surfaced and is virally making itself from computer to computer. It’s an endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by Jack Nicholson (who in fact endorsed Clinton awhile back). It’s a compilation ofclips from his movies stitched together with pitches for Clinton. The video, alterately described as “bizarre” and “creepy” by a variety of blogs, was created by director Rob Reiner, a Democratic big shot in Hollywood, the Guardian reported today.

The paper continues: “The usually press-shy actor has admitted that the Clinton campaign made a direct request for help and insists that Hillary is the right candidate for the White House. “She’s been there,” Nicholson told MTV News. “The only thing I can say is it’s obvious one person is more experienced.”

Take a look for yourself.

Perhaps inevitably, within a matter of hours, a parody was put up, presumably by Obama supporters.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty spent the weekend schmoozing with other Republican politicos at the Arizona home of Sen. John McCain, once again fueling speculation about his political future.

The name of Pawlenty, one of the national co-chairs of McCain’s presidential campaign, has persistently popped up on short lists of potential vice-presidential running mates for the Arizona senator.

McCain and Pawlenty have consistently dismissed speculation about Pawlenty’s future role, saying they’ve never discussed it.

The presence of Pawlenty at McCain’s vacation home outside Sedona was noted Monday in several political blogs, which had been buzzing about the weekend off the campaign trail.

Among the other GOP officials who stopped over the weekend were longtime McCain ally Sen. Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, and South Dakota Sen. John Thune (who’s also ended up on some vice-presidential lists).

The weekend was billed as a chance for McCain to kick back before the primaries Tuesday that are expected to clinch the Republican nomination for him. Characteristically, he also served up barbecue for the traveling press corps he used to jokingly refer to as his “base.”

Here are a few of the blog accounts of the get-together in the desert.

From The Swamp.

Politico’s take. (scroll down)

And Fox News…