Charles Gibson gives a rare look inside Senator Obama’s campaign headquarters in downtown Chicago.

Ralph Nader announced on Meet the Press this morning that he will run for president as an independent. Time magazine link to the story.

Spent most of his time on Meet the Press going after Barack Obama, whom he sees as lacking in embracing core liberal principals on corporate and military waste. Also said that if Democrats don’t win this election in a landslide they should simply give up before going into a laundry list of reasons why Americans will not support John McCain.

Also took a dig at Senator by saying his run will be streamlined and won’t rely on highly paid political consultants whom he sees as ruining Clinton’s chances.

David Sirota has a wonderful piece about the missing element in the coverage of the Clinton/Obama bickering. He notes and notes well that while everyone is focused on the candidates minutia of their plans and their attacks we are all forgetting that the next president must deal with Congress, neither will simply waltz in and declare what they want and then receive.

mid the noise, few remember that what candidates say or propose can bear little resemblance to what ends up happening once they are in the Oval Office.

As proof, look no further than candidate Bill Clinton who said, “I’d be for [the North American Free Trade Agreement] but only—only—if [Mexico] lifted their wage rates and their labor standards and they cleaned up their environment so we could both go up together instead of being dragged down.” And yet, hesubsequently steamrolled NAFTA through Congress.

Check out the rest.

Today should mark the end of a dark era in Cuba’s history. Fidel Castro’s stepping down is an essential first step, but it is sadly insufficient in bringing freedom to Cuba.

Cuba’s future should be determined by the Cuban people and not by an anti-democratic successor regime. The prompt release of all prisoners of conscience wrongly jailed for standing up for the basic freedoms too long denied to the Cuban people would mark an important break with the past. It’s time for these heroes to be released.

If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring the Americans together.

It seems like the resignation of Fidel Castro is the main news for the morning with very little happening aside from the Clinton-Obama-he-said-she-said campaign talk. I guess everyone is gearing up for the vote tonight.

Meanwhile it is my hope that by saying nothing is happening there will now be a flood of interesting things to prove me completely wrong. That seems to be the way things work so lets hope.

With that said what do you think this Castro news will do on the campaign trail? We’ve now spent so many decades waiting for this moment, for Cuba to no longer be under the rule of Fidel. It’s here, now what? For now it seems the embargo will remain. Should be interesting to see if any candidates go out on a limb in the coming weeks/months. Obama said he would talk to Castro, so I guess that means he will also talk to his successor. Undoubtedly the topic will come up in the next debate.

New York Magazine writer John Hellemann looks at the potential reasons why Obama has come under so little scrutiny in Election 2008 while Clinton has received nothing but. The author looks at the current state, potential causes, long-term effects and more.

From the article:

Divergence in tone is one thing, double standards are another. And it’s the latter that most galls the former advisers to the other, now-departed, Democratic candidates. “Obama has been able to get away with a stunning amount of hypocrisy that would get called on her,” says one such operative. “They’ve run the nastiest, most deceptive pieces of paid media: the mailer they did lying about her health-care plan, with the Harry and Louise look-alikes. The idea that it took Hillary growling Tony Rezko’s name in a debate to get any national coverage. How he complained in Iowa about 527s and then had them supporting him like crazy in Nevada and California. And nobody says a peep about it. It’s fu^&ing comical!”

There are countless other examples of this syndrome, both large and small. The way that Clinton’s famous fumbling of a question about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have driver’s licenses in a debate last fall was hammered on for weeks—whereas Obama’s flubbing of the same question in the next debate was essentially let slide. The way that Obama’s evisceration of his rival in his stump speeches was applauded by the media—whereas Clinton’s plunge into negative territory was widely condemned. The way that Clinton was roundly criticized for being inaccessible, and thus unaccountable, to the press—when Obama has since January been even less available for questioning than she.

The article largely comes to the conclusion that it is the meta-narrative of each candidate that is responsible for this disparity. Obama is a new commodity who is surging up, Clinton is a known commodity that has no room to go but down and all the stuff inbetween that fits into both camps just writes itself. The PR, the message crafting played into the coverage. Rather than reporters looking for the answers, they went with the spin to help build pre-existing notions. Obama rising up from nothing, Clinton stagnating from the top.

I call it all terrible reporting, bias and a sign of just how indiscernible this nations Fourth Estate is from the three branches of government, corporate America, and the Liberal sections of the Entertainment Industry and Academia. But that is just my take.

From The New York Times comes a report that the McCain camp will ask the White House for the President’s participation in major fund-raising events but will only seek limited appearances. As the article points out McCain faces a tuff choice, while Bush still remains popular with many core conservatives his embrace could turn off undecided and moderate voters who make up the core of McCain’s base.

From the article:

“What an incumbent president can do is help a new nominee with fund-raisers, maybe with unifying the party, maybe with getting out the vote in Republican areas,” said Charles Black, a top adviser to Mr. McCain and an outside adviser to the White House who has been part of every Republican presidential campaign since 1976. “But the important thing to remember is, the nominee is on their own. And no president, no matter how popular and effective politically, can carry somebody.”

Ed Gillespie, the White House counselor to Mr. Bush and the chairman of the Republican National Committee during Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, echoed Mr. Black. “Senator McCain has his own identity,” Mr. Gillespie said in an interview, “and he’s going to be campaigning as John McCain and the things that John McCain believes in.”

There is a precedent: President Ronald Reagan campaigned only selectively and made only rare appearances at the side of George Bush in the 1988 campaign, even though Mr. Bush was his vice president.

So look for Mr. Bush to make solo appearances on behalf of Mr. McCain before evangelicals and in Republican pockets across the country, and to campaign in places where there are important races for the House and Senate, like Idaho and Kansas, which will not be critical destinations for the Republican nominee.

OK so this is kind of election related but I wanted to go off on a rant here for a moment. Right now the Republicans in Congress are walking out after spending a day disrupting procedures in the House including a memorial service apparently over Intelligence legislation. It is all kind of confusing but there is one central point I want to make here. Can Congress get off its butt and do something for once?

We had a do-nothing Congress which was overturned in 2006 and it was replaced with, wait for it, a do-nothing Congress. Wonderful. While your Congress spent yesterday watching a real live baseball player talk about the past our economy continued heading toward recession. While half of your House of Representatives walks out on their job today, our nation is fighting two Wars.

How does either party expect to run on their record this fall when it hasn’t done anything? Congress passed a stimulus bill which many people believe is too little, too late and that is about it this year. Meanwhile the top three candidates for president are part of this mess. So basically in November we get to elect these people back into their jobs and potentially raise one of them to the presidency. Wow, what a change.

Is it just me or does that thought kind of make your skin crawl?

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All watching expect Senator Obama to sweep D.C., Virginia and Maryland today but Martin Frost writing at the Politico suggests that because of Maryland’s history he might win the state but not get the sweep he is hoping for.

Though now considered a heavily Democratic state and a generally liberal enclave, Maryland has a long — but little-known — history of racial division that may cut into Obama’s margin. It is not by accident that the Mason-Dixon Line (separating the North and the South) is the northern boundary of Maryland.

Maryland has a large black population, which would seem to favor Obama. The black vote could be even larger than normal because of a contested congressional primary in Prince George’s County and a sliver of neighboring Montgomery County. In the 4th District, community activist Donna Edwards is challenging Rep. Albert Wynn from the left; both candidates are black, and the primary will be held the same day as the presidential voting.

However, for a variety of reasons, the dynamics of the Maryland presidential primary may boost Clinton’s support. White voters on the Eastern Shore and in the western part of the state are very conservative and may be reluctant to vote for a black candidate.

The liberal bastion of Montgomery County in the D.C. suburbs contains many former officials from Bill Clinton’s administration, and Hillary Clinton’s share of the women’s vote could be very strong there.

Also, largely ignored is the fact that Maryland has a sizable Jewish population. When I was a young man in the 1960s, my Maryland relatives used to kid me about the fact that Baltimore had a larger Jewish population than the entire state of Texas, where I grew up. Texas has probably caught up by now, but the Jewish population of Maryland is still very large and very politically active.

There is a lot more in the article so check it out!