A friend points out to me that both John McCain and Barack Obama have agreed to accept matching funds and abide by spending limits for the general election if their opponent also agrees to do so. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made no such pledge. If you’re a hard-core campaign finance reformer I guess this is a reason to support Obama. But if you’re a normal person, it looks like a strategic mistake on Obama’s part; he’d seem to be forfeiting a potentially large financial advantage.

This gets especially problematic when you think about the intervention of outside groups. It’s fairly easy for, say, a group of insurance companies to just decide to each pony up some cash and run ads attacking a candidate who they think is bad for their interests. By contrast, it’s hard to see Obama’s small- and mid-sized donor base spontaneously organizing itself into a viable independent expenditure group.

TNR’s Jonathan Cohn reports that SEIU announced today it will be launching a $75 million election-year campaign for universal coverage. According to the union’s press release, the effort will feature paid advertising to “draw sharp distinctions between the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees’ approach to health care, and what those differences will mean to working families.”

An interesting Son/Mother exchange on the Obama or Clinton question up at N + 1‘s website does a great job, I think, of highlighting both the arguments and the underlying dynamics in play.

A correspondent observed with regard to my post on the US Senate’s affection for Mormons and Jews that the crux of the matter here may be that there are tons and tons of rich people in the Senate, and Mormons and Jews are a much larger swathe of the “rich people” population subset than we are of the general population. That seems plausible.

In 2004, the 9/11 Commission recommended the establishment of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board “to ensure that concerns with respect to privacy and civil liberties are appropriately considered” by the President “in the implementation of all laws, regulations, and executive branch policies” related to national security. The board was also charged with determining “whether guidelines designed to appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties are being followed.”

But the panel has been shrouded in controversy since its implementation, beginning with the fact that “the board was not sworn in until March 2006, due to inaction on the part of the White House and Congress.”

Now, the board is officially vacant. The terms of the original members expired on Jan. 30, 2008, but “no nominations have been sent to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which must approve appointees for the five vacancies“:

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States. [...]

Terms for the board’s original members expired on Jan. 30, but no nominations have been sent to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which must approve appointees for the five vacancies.

Though the board “has no real powers of investigation,” the White House has sought to undermine its oversight capabilities throughout its existence. In May 2007, Lanny Davis — the sole Democrat on the board — resigned in protest after the Bush administration “made more than 200 revisions” to the panel’s first report to Congress.

At least one of those revisions was meant to give the White House political cover during the U.S. attorney scandal:

Chairman Carol E. Dinkins told board members March 29 that the White House counsel’s office had asked to delete the passage, fearing the revelation might inflame the ongoing political controversy over the administration’s dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys, according to documents and interviews with board members.

Before joining the board, Dinkins “served as a campaign treasurer for President Bush and was a partner at the same law firm as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.”

As Bush pushes for more surveillance powers, the White House appears content to not have to deal with the accountability and oversight that a civil liberties board would provide.

An annual report released today by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that worldwide, “65 journalists were killed in 2007,” which marks “the highest toll in more than a decade.” Thirty-two journalists were killed in Iraq in 2007, bringing the total toll since the 2003 invasion to a record “174 media personnel” killed.. The report also stated that the Iraq war is “the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history.”

Here’s an important observation from Mark Kleiman:

Here’s a cheerful finding from the Pew poll: neither Obama’s unfavorables among Clinton voters (now 30%) nor Clinton’s unfavorables among Obama voters (now 31%) have been rising noticeably . So it looks as if (so far) the bitterness of the battle is largely restricted to the political junkies who read and write blogs.

This jibes with my experience of talking to not-so-political folks. It also, I think, explains a lot of the volatility in the race. You have a large number of people who like both candidates and, as a consequence, can very easily be swayed from one to the other by relatively minor turns of events.