Could gay marriage become an issue again in the next Congress — in a different context?

It seems possible if Democrats keep control of the House and Senate and Barack Obama wins the White House, since Obama wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that bans any federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows states to refuse to recognize marriages performed in another state.

Obama recently said that the marriage issue should be decided at the state and local level and that his job as president would be to “make sure that the federal government is not discriminating.”

Guess he’s not going to get Dr. James Dobson’s vote. More importantly, though, he’d have the support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who voted against the legislation when it passed Congress. It’s not clear how actively she would help, though. When Pelosi was asked at a press conference today if she would support Obama in pushing for repeal, she simply said, “yes” — and quickly moved on to the next question.

Is it the first thing a House speaker would want to put on the agenda for next year? Probably not. But the idea that a repeal of the law could even be on the table shows how radically the politics of gay marriage, under a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, would change from the days of a Republican president and a Republican Congress.

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago when Senate Republicans were pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage — and always seemed to schedule the votes during even-numbered years. (John McCain, who supports the 1996 law, voted against the constitutional amendment in 2004 and 2006, saying he’d only support it if state initiatives to ban same-sex marriage were struck down by the courts.)

Still, Obama shouldn’t count on much help from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid voted for the 1996 law, a fact that would probably dampen his enthusiasm for repealing it.

There has been a notable shift in the tone of John McCain’s campaign since Steve Schmidt, a former Hill press secretary and a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, took over the day-to-day operations from campaign manager Rick Davis earlier this month. Now, the attacks on Barack Obama are so constant that there are days when there is almost nothing else coming out of the campaign.

The negative tone has been earning McCain some scathing press coverage lately. The Washington Post took the unusual step of running a front-page feature today scolding McCain for repeatedly accusing Obama of cancelling a visit to a military hospital in Germany because he couldn’t take the press with him, “despite no evidence that the charge is true.” He has been roundly criticized for charging that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”

More worrisome to some Republicans, the constant attacks have effectively allowed Obama, rather than McCain, to set the narrative for this election. “They need to be on offense. I think it’s been too defensive,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a top party strategist who is retiring at the end of this year.

But there doesn’t seem to be any widespread anxiety among Hill Republicans about how the past few weeks have gone for the McCain campaign. If anything, some of them think the increased aggressiveness means the campaign is finally getting its act together.

“I think what you’re seeing is the McCain campaign is finally hitting its stride,” said Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee. “If you don’t define your opponent, they will define you. McCain is going to do a better job defining Obama than the other way around.”

Part of the issue for Republicans is not just the message of the McCain campaign, but how well he’s organizing in the battleground states. “What they need to do is get a good organization in place in the key states,” said Davis. “There’s about 20 of them that will make the difference. And I’m not sure they’ve done that yet.” But since most voters won’t really tune in until after Labor Day, Davis said, that’s when it will matter.

And Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina thinks it’s a good sign that Obama hasn’t gotten a “bounce” in the polls since his international trip last week. He thinks McCain is on “the right side of the war, the right side of energy right now.” And he believes McCain’s support for offshore oil exploration might turn the race around for him — especially if Senate Republicans force a showdown with Democrats over the issue in September, when a spending bill to fund the federal government for the rest of the year could become a platform for another debate over offshore drilling.

The challenge for McCain, though, will be to make sure these kinds of fights change the campaign narrative enough so that he becomes the focus again.

From looking at Barack Obama’s schedule today, you could easily get the sense he thinks he’s already won the election.

Obama spent the day discussing the economy with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and talking with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani about how to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban, before ending the day with a rousing pep talk with the House Democratic Caucus. The rounds of high-level talks brought back echoes of some of the only criticism he got during his international trip last week — that all of those meetings with foreign leaders might have been a bit premature.

But House Democrats who sat in on Obama’s meeting with the caucus tonight insisted that, no, he really does remember that the election hasn’t happened yet.

Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., said Obama refused to get too specific about what he’d do on various policy issues for that very reason. He quoted Obama as telling the caucus, “I’m not going to jinx myself. I’m not going to talk about that kind of thing until I actually get there.”

Crowley said House Democrats are trying not to get ahead of themselves either, given the difficulties Obama is likely to face and given that his lead over John McCain isn’t overwhelming in most polls. “People are realistic about the challenges that lie ahead, whether it’s race or regionality — all the unknowns that are out there.”

And Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Pa., said he and his colleagues are reading the same polls everyone else is. “Most people in the caucus are pretty smart. They read the polls, they see what’s ahead. And I think Senator Obama knows he’s got a lot of work ahead of him. This is not put away by any means.”

“You know the saying about the Democratic Party: ‘They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ That’s not going to happen, not by any stretch,” Carney said.

Keep watching, though — especially if Obama is still in the lead in October.

John McCain may not have been in the Senate today to vote with his fellow warrior against “pork barrel” spending — Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — but he was there in spirit.

This afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada tried to bundle a bunch of measures Coburn has blocked into one big package and tried to push them through the Senate. He failed; the package came up eight votes short of the 60 it needed.

Reid warned that Republicans would pay a price for voting against measures to help investigate unsolved civil-rights-era murders, fund programs for homeless youths, and boost research to help people with Lou Gehrig’s disease. McCain, however, sided with Coburn and said the roughly $8 billion package “represents Washington at its worst.”

“I urge all of my colleagues to support Senator Coburn in his efforts to rid the federal government of wasteful pork barrel spending and to vote against the Reid Omnibus legislation loaded with provisions for special interests,” McCain said in a statement just before the vote. “While there are certainly parts of it that are worthwhile, I hope this measure will not pass.”

Like Coburn, McCain has taken loud stands against “wasteful” spending throughout his Senate career in ways that have angered his colleagues. These days, he doesn’t usually show up to vote against spending bills he opposes, but he does go on record against them rather than simply dodging the issue.

By contrast, Barack Obama — who has worked with Coburn on several open-government measures, including a federal spending database that remains one of Obama’s main Senate achievements — was nowhere to be found.

As long as we’re smacking John McCain around for mixing up the history of the Iraq surge — the one thing he’s supposed to know about — we also need to blow the whistle on Barack Obama for mixing up his own committee assignments.

From today’s press conference in Sderot, Israel:

“Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Sorry, senator, that’s not your committee. You’re on some other ones. Foreign Relations, an assignment that is really coming in handy this week. Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Veterans’ Affairs. All very nice committees.

But you’ve never been on Banking.

Maybe he just slipped up, you might say. After all, the Iran sanctions bill the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee approved last week is similar to one Obama introduced last year. So if he’d said “my bill” — or, better yet, “based on my bill” — he would have been fine.

But when you’re running for president after three years in the Senate, and you’re still trying to convince the public you’ve got enough experience to be president, it’s generally not a good idea to sound like you can’t even remember which committees you’re on.

Once again, the bar is higher.

John McCain has been getting a lot of grief lately for making verbal slips that may or may not reveal anything about his understanding of foreign policy. When he referred the other day to the “Iraq-Pakistan border,” which doesn’t exist, a reading of the full context suggests he probably meant the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So at worst, he might have spaced out for a second, which a lot of us do.

At other times, though, he gets so worked up in lecturing Barack Obama that he gets fundamental facts wrong.

Last night, McCain got a lot of unwelcome attention when he mixed up the history of the U.S. troop “surge” and what its impact has been. In an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, he suggested that the surge led to the “Anbar Awakening,” in which Sunni tribal leaders turned against al Qaeda in Iraq:

Couric: Senator McCain, Sen. Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Except that it isn’t. As the left-leaning National Security Network and many others have pointed out, the Anbar Awakening began long before the surge. One account, co-authored by Col. Sean MacFarland, the military commander McCain cited in the interview, says the awakening started in September 2006. Bush didn’t even announce the surge until January 2007.

By last night, the story was all over cable news, and not in a way that was flattering to McCain. So this morning, McCain’s surrogates were ready for the question during a campaign conference call with reporters.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s foreign policy adviser, said the surge “enabled the awakening to survive,” citing testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, before the House Armed Services Committee in April that attributed the awakening’s success to the surge.

And Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, said he met with Sunni tribal leaders in fall 2006 and claims they wanted to switch sides, but wanted to make sure U.S. and Iraqi forces could bring stability to Anbar province if they did. “One could not have happened without the other,” Hoekstra said of the relationship between the awakening and the surge.

So it’s not that the surge had nothing to do with the awakening — it just wasn’t the cause.

Petraeus’ testimony in April seems the fairest way to sum up the history of the awakening: “It started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge, because that enabled us to clear areas over time.”

But that’s not what McCain said. “It began the Anbar awakening” is a pretty clear statement. If McCain wasn’t basing so much of his campaign on the argument that Obama doesn’t understand foreign policy and he does, he might get a pass. One could argue that if he had just said “it helped the Anbar awakening,” everything would be fine.

But when you’re running on your national security expertise, the bar is going to be higher.

If you read between the lines of Barack Obama’s press conference in Jordan today after his visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, you can easily see how the actual number of troops a President Obama would withdraw from Iraq might not live up to the hype.

Obama spent much of the time talking about how his responsibilities would be different from those of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq — who, he acknowledged, “does not want a timetable” for withdrawing troops. If he wins the White House, Obama said, he would have to balance the needs of the commanders in Iraq with the need for more troops in Afghanistan and the need to “shore up a U.S. economy that is really hurting right now.”

If that’s all you heard from Obama’s press conference, it might sound like he’s going to pull all the troops out no matter what — exactly the notion John McCain’s campaign is trying to advance.

“The difference between Senator Obama and John McCain is that Senator Obama is deciding based on a calendar, and John McCain believes that withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground,” Republican Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico said on a campaign conference call with reporters this morning.

But Obama also threw in so many caveats that it’s very easy to see how he could end up keeping a large number of U.S. troops in the region and withdrawing far fewer than his campaign would like the voters to believe.

For one thing, Obama said he would satisfy the commanders’ need for flexibility by letting them define how many troops he’d keep in Iraq to defeat any flare-ups from al Qaeda or renewed attacks from Shia militias. “I have deliberately avoided providing a particular number on that because that is precisely the kind of thing where our military commanders have to tell me what they need in order to accomplish that mission,” Obama said.

He also seemed to leave himself some wiggle room to send troops back, if necessary.

“If, for example, you started seeing a resurgence of ethnic violence that was — that presented the possibility of genocide, that I would always reserve the right as commander in chief to intervene — hopefully, with the international community,” Obama said.

The bottom line, he said, is that “facts have to affect your decision-making, and, you know, over the course of 16 months things are going to constantly change. But that doesn’t detract from the importance of setting a set of clear objectives and having a sense of where you’re trying to steer the ship. And that’s what we haven’t had, and that’s what I think is so important.”

Call it the fine print, an escape hatch, whatever you want. But if Obama is the president a year from now, just don’t say you’re surprised if the big troop withdrawal fizzles.

There are a number of reasons John McCain probably wishes former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had paid less attention to him in his 2003 book, “Like No Other Time.”

For one thing, Daschle says his aides had “serious discussions” with McCain’s staff in 2001 about getting him to leave the Republican Party — a story that McCain’s advisers have tried to minimize, saying he listened but never seriously intended to switch sides.

And Daschle writes about the weekend he and his wife, Linda, spent with McCain and his wife, Cindy, at McCain’s home in Arizona that year — at McCain’s invitation. The visit drew attention because it took place shortly after then-Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party to become an independent, handing control of the chamber to the Democrats.

But there’s also a reason Daschle, now a vocal supporter of Barack Obama, may wish he had never written the book. He speaks so highly of McCain, reinforcing almost all of the current talking points McCain’s supporters use now, that Daschle could easily give the nominating speech at the Republican convention this summer. Or, at least, have a starring role in a 30-second ad.

“I admire John tremendously,” Daschle wrote. “He is an independent thinker who is willing to act on the courage of his convictions. He has the political courage to stand up to the leadership of his own party when he disagrees with their positions. He also has been a major factor in many of the legislative victories that we have won, in large measure because of his principles and that courage.”

Here’s a development that could have significant implications if Barack Obama wins the presidency: He has endorsed the idea of updating the federal measure of poverty, a proposal that is slowly gaining some traction after years of being confined to quiet talk among poverty experts.

New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called for a new poverty measure this week, and Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington held a hearing on his own proposal yesterday in the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, which he chairs.

But Obama’s support for the idea has the potential to advance the idea significantly, if he wins the election and pushes for it aggressively.

“Senator Obama knows that the federal poverty guidelines, which were developed decades ago, simply do not take into account the rising costs of child care, health care, transportation, and housing that make it difficult for many families to make ends meet in our globalizing economy,” campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro told me yesterday.

“Senator Obama believes that we should modernize the federal poverty guidelines to more accurately reflect the costs of living and the economic pressures on American families. Without an accurate measure of poverty and economic insecurity in America, we will not be able to fully tackle the effects of these problems on our children and families.”

John McCain hasn’t taken a position on the idea yet, campaign spokesman Taylor Griffin told me this morning.

The method of calculating the federal poverty line has been a back-burner issue for years among poverty experts because it hasn’t been updated since the 1960s. At that time, food cost a third of a typical family’s budget, which isn’t true anymore — it’s only about one seventh of a typical family’s costs now. At the same time, though, housing and work-related costs have become much more expensive than they were when the poverty guidelines were drawn up.

So the use of the outdated poverty measure, according to experts who testified at McDermott’s hearing yesterday, has had the paradoxical effect of underestimating a modern family’s expenses while also underestimating the amount of help they get from antipoverty programs like food stamps, housing assistance and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The current measure “simply does not reflect this common sense understanding of what it means to be poor in 2008,” Douglas W. Nelson, president and chief executive officer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, testified at yesterday’s hearing.

Instead, Bloomberg called for a new measurement, based on a 1995 proposal by the National Academy of Sciences, that would count the benefits of the antipoverty programs but also account for the growing costs of housing, transportation, utilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses. McDermott’s bill would require the Census Bureau to come up with a similar standard.

(Update: Bloomberg praised the Obama campaign’s announcement in a statement released Friday night. “Poverty is one of the great challenges of our day and I applaud Senator Obama’s campaign for standing up for a more honest way of measuring it,” Bloomberg said. “Without an accurate look at our nation’s problems, it is hopeless to expect to address them.”)

Changing the federal guidelines could, in theory, have a major impact on how many people are eligible for a wide range of programs that are tied to the poverty rate, from Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and food stamps. That’s probably the biggest reason the idea has never gotten off the ground. (McDermott says any eligibility changes wouldn’t be automatic in his bill; they’d be decided on a program-by-program basis.)

And even with a president’s support, there would be years of inertia to overcome. But now that it has Obama’s backing, the idea can’t be dismissed as just another academic pipe dream, either.

Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina had a helpful suggestion for Barack Obama: If he’s so interested in Afghanistan — the battlefield he’s about to visit — why not hold a hearing on the Afghanistan war in the Foreign Relations subcommittee he chairs?

It was another way for John McCain’s surrogates to tweak Obama for not holding any hearings, on Afghanistan or anything else, in the Subcommittee on European Affairs that he has headed since last year. He has, of course, been running for president the whole time. DeMint, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, sent Obama a letter asking for a hearing and guest-starred in a McCain campaign conference call, telling reporters that “we have missed a lot opportunities to take more responsibility and to bring to public light the problems.”

So this morning, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a potential Obama running mate — gently reminded DeMint that the full committee has, in fact, held hearings on Afghanistan, and argued that a full committee hearing trumps a subcommittee hearing anyway.

“As you are aware, under my Chairmanship the Foreign Relations Committee has addressed most Afghanistan issues at the Full Committee level,” Biden wrote to DeMint. “I believe that this is the best way of ensuring the most comprehensive examination of the complex issues involved, and of ensuring the highest-level Administration participation.”

Biden cited two hearings held during this Congress, one in March 2007 and the other in January 2008, as well as a September 2006 hearing held under then-chairman Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind.

So what did Obama do in those hearings? In March 2007, he asked retired Marine Gen. James Jones Jr., the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, what could be done to make the Pakistani military more aggressive in fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan. That was the only question he got in, thanks to time constraints on Jones’ schedule. (Jones gave a vague answer about the need to find “a way to scratch the itches on both sides of the border.”)

According to the transcripts of the other two hearings, Obama either wasn’t there or didn’t ask any questions.

So Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, one of Barack Obama’s former rivals for the Democratic nomination, is being vetted as a potential running mate. Here’s a tip for the vetters: You might want to check how Dodd voted on that electronic surveillance bill this week.

Because Obama voted for it, and Dodd was, well, leading the charge against it.

Dodd and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin held up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill so the Senate couldn’t vote on it before the July Fourth recess, and he sponsored the amendment to strip out the immunity for the telecommunications companies.

“If we do not change course and stand for our Constitution at this hour, for what is best for our country, for what we know is just and right, then history, I am confident, will most certainly decide that it was those of us in this body who bear equal responsibility for the president’s decisions — for it was we who looked the other way, time and time again,” Dodd said in a floor speech.

It’s the kind of speech that tends to get quoted back at you if you’re the running mate of a senator who voted the other way.

By voting for the FISA bill, Obama may have considerably narrowed the field of senators whom he could comfortably pick as a running mate. After all, it’s not a minor issue. When the bill’s opponents quote the Constitution, and the nominee’s base is furious at him for supporting it, you can pretty much guarantee that people will ask how the presidential and vice presidential candidates would settle their differences.

It’s not just Dodd, who isn’t at the top of most VP speculation lists anyway. It’s also Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of Delaware, who is mentioned more seriously and also voted against the FISA bill. There’s also Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and former Army paratrooper who is sometimes mentioned as a running mate who could boost Obama’s national security credentials. He opposed the bill, too.

And for anyone who’s still hoping Obama will team up with Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, her “no” vote probably will make that even more difficult than it was before. (She did say, in a statement, that “I respect my colleagues who reached a different conclusion on today’s vote.”)

That leaves Obama with Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Ken Salazar of Colorado, all VP prospects who supported the FISA bill. And if Jim Webb of Virginia ever reconsiders his decision to take himself out of the race, Obama could pick him, since he voted for the FISA bill, too.

Obama might not want a senator, of course, and a governor wouldn’t present these problems, since none of them got to vote on the bill. But it’s a safe bet that even the governors would be asked how they stand on the issue. And if they disagreed with Obama, they would be wise to talk about it in as non-threatening a way as possible.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama now have official congressional liaisons to try to keep the campaigns and their party colleagues in Congress on the same page. Funny, though — you wouldn’t know it from watching the candidates and the congressional leaders over the last two days.

This morning, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio announced that he’ll take 10 House Republicans (all of them freshmen) on an “American Energy Tour” next week. It will take them to, among other places, a part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), where House Republicans would like to drill for oil.

They’ll have more of the public on their side than they did before, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, since $4-a-gallon gas is making people more receptive to expanding the search for energy resources. One person they won’t have on their side, however, is McCain. He has always opposed drilling in ANWR, and said last month that “When America set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we called it a ‘refuge’ for a reason.”

Oops.

And yesterday, Obama returned to the Senate to vote for the compromise legislation rewriting the nation’s electronic surveillance law. He was one of 21 Democrats who voted for it — mostly centrists like Evan Bayh of Indiana, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and non-running-mate Jim Webb of Virginia.

So who were some of the 27 Democrats who voted against it? Let’s see: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles E. Schumer of New York, and Democratic Conference Secretary Patty Murray of Washington. In other words, pretty much the entire Democratic leadership.

Oops.

Both candidates have tried to paper over their differences with the Hill on these issues. McCain’s new-found support for offshore energy exploration has provided congressional Republicans with one energy proposal they can enthusiastically embrace, and both Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have done so (McConnell gave a floor speech on the subject this morning).

And Obama, as promised, did vote for an amendment yesterday that would have knocked out the section of the surveillance legislation that would give immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The amendment failed miserably, as expected — it got only 32 votes. But at least the attempt put Obama, temporarily, in the company of the Senate Democratic leaders.

Still, both episodes prove that, as much as the presidential candidates and their congressional surrogates may sound like they’re parroting the same talking points, there will always be issues where they can’t or won’t get in sync. And there is only so much the campaigns’ ambassadors to Congress can do about it.

Yes, we’ve come to the point in the campaign where the surrogates are attacking what other surrogates said. But the subject today actually was a serious one: whether Barack Obama would drop his plans to pull one to two brigades out of Iraq each month, and have all combat troops out within 16 months.

On a conference call with reporters, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, on the behalf of the John McCain campaign, jumped on a statement by Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, on behalf of the Obama campaign yesterday about Obama’s Iraq policy. In an interview on MSNBC, McCaskill was asked whether Obama would change his plan, given that an article in the New Yorker concluded that “his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reenergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse.”

McCaskill gave probably the only answer she could have given: “No, he will not.” (It’s usually frowned upon when surrogates announce major changes in policy.)

But on a conference call with reporters today, Cantor, said the exchange proved that Obama’s policy “ignores the facts on the ground” and accused him of “clinging to a very ideological commitment on his part, and, frankly, a commitment to some left-wing supporters that he won’t change his mind.”

Campaign spokesman Brian Rogers put it another way, referring to Obama’s reported plans to visit Iraq sometime this summer: “If indeed, you know, he’s going to go to Iraq, and nothing that he sees will change or impact his decision-making on this, then why is he going?”

It’s clear from the exchange how McCain is trying to box Obama in on Iraq. If Obama ever actually said he’ll change his withdrawal plans because Iraq is becoming more stable, well, what a flip-flopper. If he doesn’t, even if he learns new things when he visits Iraq, he’s a close-minded ideologue.

It’s still nothing compared to the dilemma McCain faces, as a staunch supporter of an unpopular war that will tie him to President Bush for the rest of the campaign. But the surrogate debate foreshadows a real problem Obama could face if he wins the presidency.

If, indeed, the reality of the Iraq war that greets him is different than the one he campaigned on, he could easily face the change or no-change dilemma all over again.

And then, the stakes would be greater than just winning or losing a campaign.

Hope you all have a happy Fourth! Back on Thursday, July 10.

Normally, the future of the Supreme Court isn’t one of the top two or three issues that are at the front of voters’ minds in presidential elections. This year, though, it’s striking how the John McCain and Barack Obama campaigns are both trying to draw attention to the court, each convinced they can make its future a real rallying cry.

McCain tried it this morning, in a speech to the National Sheriffs’ Association. The speech was full of pledges to help law enforcement in various ways, but McCain also touched on last week’s Supreme Court ruling that child rapists can’t get the death penalty. He called it a “jarring decision,” and gave Obama credit for criticizing it. But McCain also insisted that more of these kinds of rulings would be on the way if Obama got to nominate the next Supreme Court justices:

“Why is it that the majority includes the same justices he usually holds out as the models for future nominations? My opponent may not care for this particular decision, but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama Court.

“Should I be elected president, I will look for accomplished men and women with a proven record of excellence in the law, and a proven commitment to judicial restraint. They will be the kind of judges who believe in giving everyone in a criminal court their due: justice for the guilty and the innocent, compassion for the victims, and respect for the men and women of law enforcement.”

It’s a clear sign that McCain thinks there are still plenty of socially conservative voters to be mobilized, Democratic year or not.

Obama’s supporters, meanwhile, are equally convinced they can head off any defections of women voters to McCain by reminding them that the next president can nominate justices who could actually tip the balance against Roe v. Wade. That was a big part of the discussion last week when Obama met with House Democratic women.

“They’d say, just make sure you talk about three words: the Supreme Court,” said Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean, one of Obama’s Illinois colleagues. “When they get that, it’s over for him.”

If this kind of back-and-forth continues to develop in the coming months, voters on both sides might have an unusually strong sense of why the Supreme Court matters in the choice they’re about to make.