Democrats plan to resolve nomination before convention

Democratic Party leaders signaled yesterday that they will stop any attempt by Hillary Clinton's supporters to take the dispute over Florida and Michigan past tomorrow's rules committee meeting and perhaps to the national convention.

If necessary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California congresswoman who is chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention in late August, said she will "step in" to resolve the nomination fight by late June.

"We cannot take this fight to the convention," she said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board published yesterday.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, also weighed in, telling a San Francisco radio station yesterday that he is pressing undeclared superdelegates to go public soon after the last primaries on Tuesday.

"We are going to urge folks to make a decision quickly - next week," Reid said.

He said he had talked to Pelosi earlier in the day and to the Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, on Wednesday night about making sure the nomination fight does not go past June. They and other Democrats fear that a convention battle could wound the nominee's hopes in November, perhaps fatally.

Pelosi also said Florida and Michigan Democrats should be punished for holding their primaries in January, before party rules allowed. "If you have no order and no discipline in terms of party rules, people will be having their primary in the year before the presidential election," she said. "So there has to be some penalty."

Asked about Pelosi's comments, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman, said on MSNBC that both states had already paid a "tough price" because the candidates didn't campaign there and that the priority should be making sure voters in Florida and Michigan don't feel disenfranchised, and thus favor Republican John McCain.

McAuliffe also said he agrees with Pelosi that undeclared superdelegates will decide soon after the final primaries on Tuesday. "I've always said sometime in June it'll be over," he said.

FOON RHEE

Obama decries mocking of Clinton from pulpit
Barack Obama yesterday repudiated more comments made from the pulpit of his home church, this time from a guest preacher.

Michael Pfleger, an outspoken activist Catholic priest from Chicago, mocked Hillary Clinton in a sermon on Sunday.

He suggested that Clinton felt entitled to the presidency. "I'm Bill's wife, I'm white, and this is mine," he said, pretending to get teary like Clinton. "I'm white, I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show."

Obama issued a statement saying he was "deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause."

Pfleger subsequently issued an apology, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama's life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them."

Last month, Obama rebuked the former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after a series of incendiary comments.

FOON RHEE

Study: McCain, not Clinton, got tougher press coverage
It is one of the core complaints of Hillary Clinton's loyalists - the media has been harsh toward her and soft on Barack Obama. But an exhaustive study out yesterday suggests that if anyone has a grievance, it's John McCain.

While the coverage of character was 69 percent positive for Obama and67 percent positive for Clinton, only 43 percent of the stories were positive for McCain, according to the analysis by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

The study "examined the coverage of the candidates' character, history, leadership, and appeal - apart from the electoral results and the tactics of their campaigns," between Jan. 1 and March 9, according to a release.

The dominant positive character trait for Obama was that he represents hope and change, while the most prominent negative theme was inexperience, the study found. For Clinton, the primary positive trait was that she is ready to lead immediately, and the negative theme that she represents the politics of the past. And for McCain, his coverage was dominated by the assertion that he is not a true or reliable conservative, the study concluded.

Obama's coverage became more negative over time, especially after a Feb. 26 debate where Clinton complained that the press was coddling her rival. But the study notes that while "public perceptions of McCain and Obama . . . largely tracked with the tenor of the press coverage's major narrative themes," with Clinton "the public seemed to have developed opinions about her that ran counter to the media coverage, perhaps based on a preexisting negative disposition to her that unfolded over the course of the campaign."

FOON RHEE