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.

Tonight could be the last time Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton debate.

The debate on MSNBC, which begins at 8 p.m. (CST), is the last one scheduled before next Tuesday’s primaries, which have the potential to knock Clinton out of the race.

NBC’s Brian Williams will moderate the event at Cleveland State University, and Tim Russert will join in the questioning.

If you don’t have cable, you can watch the debate on msnbc.com.

As Wisconsin’s primary next Tuesday approaches, most of the action has taken place on the Democratic side (Mike Huckabee, trailing far behind John McCain in the polls, barnstormed the state for three days, hoping to fire up his base of conservatives and evangelicals). Barack Obama has been working the state nearly non-stop since Tuesday and Hillary Clinton arrives Saturday, planning to stump the state until primary day.

The intensity of the Democratic battle has shown up on Wisconsinites’ TV screens. Clinton, widely perceived as having lost momentum to Obama, has been itching to debate him and threw up an ad this week in which an announcer sneers that Obama would “prefer to give speeches than have to answer questions.”

Oh, yeah? countered Obama’s camp, coming up with an ad that accuses Clinton of “phony charges and false attacks.”

Perhaps predictably, it didn’t take long for some anonymous wiseguy to come up with a parody of Clinton’s ad.

Stay tuned.

Barack Obama’s Minnesota campaign has snagged an endorsement from the Minnesota Daily, the venerable, well-regarded daily paper published at the U.

At first blush, that might seem like relatively small potatoes, but the campaign spun it convincingly, calling it a perfect example of the chord Obama has struck among young adults, overwhelmingly winning their support and spurring them to turn out at unheard-of levels in the early states.

Here’s what the paper’s editorial board had to say.

A new poll of registered voters in Minnesota 10 months before the general election Democratic presidential candidates handily beating their Republican counterparts — with the notable exception of John McCain.

The poll, conducted by this week by SurveyUSA for three of the state’s TV stations, posed head-to-head matchups of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama against McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani or Mike Huckabee.

A few grains of salt: Much like national polls at this stage in the campaign, this poll can be as much about name recognition as about the state of the race if the election were held today. Also, with a relatively small sample size of 550 poll respondents, the survey has a whopping margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. That said, here are the matchups:

McCain, 49%
Clinton, 45%
Undecided, 6%

McCain, 49%
Obama, 42%
Undecided, 9%

Clinton, 50%
Romney, 40%
Undecided, 9%

Obama, 55%
Romney, 36%
Undecided, 10%

Clinton, 51%
Giuliani, 40%
Undecided, 9%

Obama, 52%
Giuliani, 36%
Undecided, 11%

Clinton, 50%
Huckabee, 42%
Undecided, 8%

Obama, 49%
Huckabee, 42%
Undecided, 10%

Full poll results and methodology are available here.

Barack Obama’s campaign announced Thursday that it will begin airing an ad in Minnesota from now until the Feb. 5 caucuses. Here’s the ad.

And here’s the transcript of the radio ad:

BO: I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.

Anncr: Maybe it’s because you want to end a war…

Brian: Obama was against [the war in Iraq] from the beginning.

Anncr: Maybe it’s because he gets where we’re coming from…

Dante: Obama is the candidate for our generation.

Anncr: Or because you’re looking for someone who’ll do what’s right, instead of play political games.

Katie: Barack Obama just has an ability to bring people together.

Anncr: So Barack Obama’s the answer. But here’s the question. What are you doing February 5th? At 6:30 pm?

The change we need begins with you. Caucus on Tuesday, February 5th. But don’t be late – voting ends by 8:00 pm.

Text MN to 62262 or visit Minnesota dot Barack Obama dot com to learn more.

Because Barack Obama’s change we can believe in.

BO: I want you caucusing for me… You have the chance to decide the next president. You’ve got to get involved. You’ve got to get mobilized.

Anncr: It’s your world. On February 5th – help change it.

Two of Hillary Clinton’s prominent Minnesota supporters, former Sen. Mark Dayton and longtime DFL activist Rick Stafford, took to the telephone lines Friday afternoon to smack down Barack Obama over recent comments he made (a move the campaign replicated in other Feb. 5 states).

Speaking to a newspaper editorial board in Nevada (which holds its caucuses Saturday), Obama had said, “I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there, over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging the conventional wisdom.”

Arguable, and, on its face, not that controversial. But that’s not the way Dayton heard it. Clinton, he said, “has challenged the conventional wisdom” and that Republicans provided “really poor models” to the nation.

Those Republican ideas, Stafford added, came from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann.

Referring to another Obama trope, that he’s not interested in endlessly re-fighting the battles of the 1960s and ’70s, Dayton reeled off the accomplishments of that era he laid at the feet of Democrats: Civil rights, Medicare, environmental protection. He even threw in the sainted names of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale (another Clinton supporter) for good measure. “Are these what he calls the excesses of that era?” Dayton demanded.

Only 18 days until the DFL caucuses. . .

Belated update: The Obama campaign offered this rebuttal:

“It’s hard to take Hillary Clinton’s latest attack seriously when she’s
the one who supported George Bush’s war in Iraq, the most damaging
Republican idea of our generation. While others were triangulating and
poll-testing their positions, Senator Obama has been fighting for
progressive ideals for over two decades.” - Obama spokesman Bill Burton

This week’s Democratic presidential food fight, over the rules governing Saturday’s precinct caucuses in Nevada, has been resolved. Short version: Barack Obama won, Hillary Clinton lost.

Here’s the AP’s somewhat longer take on the dispute:

An attempt by Democrats with ties to Hillary Rodham Clinton to prevent casino workers from caucusing at special precincts in Nevada failed in court Thursday.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan was presumed to be a boost for Clinton rival Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential caucuses Saturday because he has been endorsed by the union representing many of the shift workers who will be able to use the precincts on the Las Vegas strip.

“State Democrats have a First Amendment right to association, to assemble and to set their own rules,” Mahan said. Nevada’s Democratic Party approved creation of the precincts to make it easier for housekeepers, waitresses and bellhops to caucus during the day near work rather than have to do so in their neighborhoods.

The state teacher’s union, which has ties to Clinton, and other plaintiffs brought the suit against the special precincts shortly after local 226 of the Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination. The union is the largest in Nevada, with 60,000 members. The Clinton campaign said it was not involved in the suit.

The lawsuit infuriated D. Taylor, president of the Culinary Workers Union, who told the Wall Street Journal: “This is the Clinton campaign,” he said. “They tried to disenfranchise students in Iowa. Now they’re trying to disenfranchise people here in Nevada. You’d think the Democratic Party elite would disavow this, but the silence has been deafening.” (The Democratic National Committee belatedly supported the Nevada party’s stance.)

Of all the back-and-forth between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, the choicest was former President Bill Clinton’s lengthy on-camera rant about the whole kerfluffle:

For its part, the Obama campaign fired off a well-spun e-mail shortly after the judge’s ruling:

“We’re glad that the Nevada court upheld the Nevada Democratic Party’s
caucus plan which encourages voter participation. While the Clinton camp
clearly believed the voices of workers should be silenced in service of
their perceived political interest, they enjoyed a twenty five-point
lead two months ago and have much of the party establishment in their
camp. So, despite their inherent advantages we are pleased this should
be a close and competitive contest Saturday,” said Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton.

And late this afternoon, the Clinton campaign issued its own version of the decision:

“Nevadans have the opportunity to play a special role in the nominating process on Saturday, and we are thrilled with the energy and support we are seeing across the state. It is clear that Nevadans are excited about participating in this process. While we were not involved in this lawsuit, and have always said that we would play by the rules that we’re given, it has always been our hope that every Nevadan should have equal access and opportunity to participate in the caucus. Make no mistake –the current system that inhibits some shift workers from being able to participate, while allowing others to do so, would seem to benefit other campaigns. More importantly it is unfair. We also are concerned with recent news reports about voter intimidation tactics that would further discourage some Nevadans from participating on Saturday. Our strategy remains the same - we want as many people as possible to participate in the caucus, and we are going to reach out to as many Nevadans as possible in an effort to do as well as possible on Saturday. The Obama campaign has been clear in its belief that whoever wins the culinary union endorsement will win Nevada. We will leave it up to the people of Nevada to make that decision.”