The notice, posted earlier in the month for a demonstration at D.N.C. headquarters when the Rules and Bylaws Committee meets over the fate of the Florida and Michigan delegates, includes this line:

But, really, is this huge—or even surprising—news? Obama was going to win the nomination with or without Edwards’ backing.

For the past 14 weeks, as Edwards sat on the sidelines, Obama has turned himself into the inevitable nominee. On countless occasions in that time, rumors of an impending Edwards endorsement sprouted, but they all quickly died. Only now, with Obama in firm mathematical control of the Democratic race, and Clinton playing out the string, has he finally decided to speak up. He’s the guy who waits until a fourth-quarter blowout to tell you which team he’s pulling for.

There were plenty of moments when Edwards’ endorsement could have had a meaningful impact on the outcome of the race. But this would have involved a level of risk that Edwards, evidently, was unwilling to assume.

The first opportunity came as soon as he ended his own campaign, just after the Jan. 26 South Carolina primary and about a week ahead of Super Tuesday. In the media’s telling, Obama was the ascendant candidate in the wake of South Carolina, his support surging in the big Feb. 5 states that had long formed the backbone of Clinton’s strategy. An Edwards endorsement in this window would have been gasoline on a fire. But he stayed quiet.

Then there was the run-up to Ohio on March 4. With his string of decisive small- and midsize-state victories in February, Obama had pulled significantly ahead of Clinton in the delegate race, and her campaign appeared to be in collapse. Only a convincing Ohio win could save her. What a perfect moment for Edwards, who fared better in Ohio’s 2004 primary than in almost any other state, to rally the state’s working-class voters to Obama’s side. But nothing.

A similar moment presented itself before Pennsylvania, with Clinton—and the media—openly challenging Obama’s ability to connect with and relate to white working-class voters. But Edwards did nothing, and Clinton won. The battleground shifted to North Carolina and Indiana, the ideal setup for an Edwards endorsement: his home state and a rust-belt state. Still not a peep.

Obama broke even with Clinton on Super Tuesday, ran off a dozen straight wins in mid-to-late February, weathered the Ohio and Pennsylvania storms, and then last week fared better than anyone expected in North Carolina and Indiana. And it was last week that was the decisive moment in this campaign, the night it became clear that Clinton had not made a dent in Obama’s coalition. He would win the pledged-delegate race commandingly. He would win the popular vote by any fair measure. And he would win over most of the remaining superdelegates—a steady stream that accelerated the morning after North Carolina and Indiana. The race was ending, and there was nothing that anyone—not Clinton, not the media, and certainly not John Edwards—could do about it.

It was in this context that Edwards finally broke his silence and took sides, the flock leading the shepherd. All Edwards did on Wednesday was to endorse the presumptive Democratic nominee, and there really was never any question whether he’d do that. During his campaign, he said over and over again that he’d happily back Clinton or Obama if either of them won the nomination. Since he dropped out, the suspense has been about whether he’d publicly choose one of them before the Democratic rank-and-file did. He didn’t.

Certainly, there are signs that he was at least somewhat torn between Obama and Clinton, as much because of their deficiencies as their positive attributes. For most of his campaign, he aimed his sharpest attacks at Clinton, shredding her for her ties to lobbyists and the establishment nature of her campaign. Most memorably, he ridiculed her as an obstacle to fundamental change in a debate the Saturday night before New Hampshire. That might have been a mostly tactical move—his strategy at that point called for forcing her to drop out after New Hampshire and securing a one-on-one race against Obama for himself—but his words also revealed the depth of his disdain for the way Hillary and Bill Clinton play politics.

By the end of his campaign, though, it was also clear that Edwards had doubts about Obama. Rather than rushing to his defense (as he did in that New Hampshire debate), Edwards derided Obama in a subsequent debate for all of his “present” votes in the Illinois State Legislature. Anonymous Edwards associates were soon quoted in news stories making clear that Edwards was unconvinced about Obama’s depth and leadership skills. It also seemed, eventually, that Elizabeth Edwards came to favor Clinton, mostly because of her health care plan, which is more in line with Edwards’ than Obama’s.

But a bigger factor in Edwards’ reluctance might simply have been the risk to his clout and reputation that taking sides represented. Had he made a big show of endorsing Obama before, say, Pennsylvania, Obama’s loss would have been read, in part, as a sign of limited clout on Edwards’ part. Why risk the kind of humiliation that Al Gore suffered in 2004, when his endorsement of Howard Dean miserably backfired?

And anyway, perhaps Edwards recognized that, even more than usual, endorsements don’t seem to matter to voters this year. In general, high-profile endorsements help create or sustain momentum. But the Obama and Clinton coalitions both seem impervious to momentum. Through good news and bad, they have remained stubbornly stuck in place—as West Virginia affirmed on Tuesday.

If there’s no chance it will really affect the outcome, then there’s really no reason to endorse until the outcome is certain. It seems that that’s exactly what John Edwards was waiting for.

He called Hillary Clinton a "formidable opponent," and congratulated her for her victory in Indiana, and expressed confidence that the party would be united come November.

The full speech follows:

UPDATE: In the delivered speech, Obama congratulated Clinton on "what appears to be her victory" in Indiana.

So why has his campaign felt like a long march over broken glass?

“It is painful to watch,” said an influential Obama supporter and delegate in an interview the day before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. “It’s exhausting for everyone involved. It’s exhausting for Barack and Michelle. It’s exhausting for all the campaign staff, and I know it’s exhausting for the supporters.”

The May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana provided the campaign and its backers some long-awaited relief. Nominally, it was a split-decision—Hillary Clinton won, as expected, in Indiana—. But Mr. Obama's thumping win on the friendly turf of delegate-rich North Carolina destroyed the Clinton campaign's last hope for a narrative-shifting upset and may well have killed off the contest in the eyes of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates.

It's the first good news the Obama campaign has had in what seems like an eternity.

In the past month, as Mr. Obama was thrashed in the press over the comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and suffered a concurrent dip in his poll numbers, he and his campaign took on a halting, almost mournful air. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, settling comfortably and unapologetically into attack mode, looked downright giddy.

Even the Obama campaign’s process-based spin—that he had an unassailable lead—went from devastating gloat to sad-sack defense. Two months ago, in the context of Obama’s string of post-Super Tuesday victories, campaign manager David Plouffe’s stark warning to the Clinton campaign that “they are going to fail and fail miserably” in overcoming the 160-odd pledged-delegate deficit was a dagger intended to convince the still-skeptical press to stop treating Hillary Clinton like a winner and to show superdelegates that they’d do well to get on board quickly. More recently, when the campaign repeated the same statistical argument, it was to convince those same superdelegates (and journalists, maybe) to ignore what was plain for them to see: that Mrs. Clinton had been getting the better of things again and again and again.

On Monday night, as Mrs. Clinton completed her morph into a Wall Street-bashing, China-baiting, whiskey-shooting populist, Mr. Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, sent out a statement noting that with the three superdelegates endorsing Mr. Obama earlier that day, Obama was “only 273 delegates away from securing the Democratic nomination.” That was followed by a list of “The Math” and a link to maps and timelines on a “Results Center” page on the campaign Web site. Comforting stuff for Obama supporters, if not exactly inspiring.

“She is certainly working harder in North Carolina—she and President Clinton and Chelsea have been to more than 40 communities in North Carolina,” said Representative G. K. Butterfield, an Obama supporter whose district is in the northeastern part of the state. Mr. Butterfield intended this as an explanation, if not a defense, of Mr. Obama’s shrunken lead in the statewide polls in the days leading up to the election.

“So she is certainly working harder,” he continued. “The nomination doesn’t necessarily go to the one who works the hardest but the one who gets the number of delegates. And right now, mathematically, Senator Obama is going to get the required number of delegates, and I cannot imagine that the superdelegates who are uncommitted will support someone who did not succeed with the voters.”

Ed Turlington, a former adviser to John Edwards who endorsed Obama last month, said, “The math is resounding in its own way.”

It was not resounding enough, apparently, for the media, for whom Mr. Obama became the laughably plodding front-runner that Mrs. Clinton once was.

In The New York Times on May 4, Allan Gurganus—who is clearly sympathetic to the Obama cause—panned Mr. Obama’s campaign performance in North Carolina in a guest Op-Ed: “Is he fatigued? And we aren’t? He puts in his full 40 minutes. He punches a clock. That clock is 20,000 souls he knew he had already.”

By contrast, the media made much of Mrs. Clinton’s scrappy new persona. The front page of Monday’s Times featured a story about Mrs. Clintons’ “Love of the Fight” next to one with the more tepid headline “Obama Survives Furor.” Inside, a critique of their respective Sunday morning talk show appearances—Mr. Obama was grilled by Tim Russert in a one-on-one interrogation; Mrs. Clinton toyed with George Stephanopoulos in front of a sympathetic live audience—spoke of “an arresting tableau of the reversal of fortunes in the Democratic race.”

This constant drumbeat, too, had been depressing for Mr. Obama’s supporters. “There aren’t many newspapers that sell stories of ‘Obama still ahead and still likely to win,’” said one major donor to Mr. Obama with experience with past presidential campaigns. “I can’t think of a candidate who went on a consistent upward glide path to the nomination or to the presidency. It doesn’t mean it’s fun. In fact, to the contrary, it is not fun. But anything other than that would probably be counterproductive in the long run.”

Maybe. Or maybe, more precisely, the conclusion to draw from the weeks leading up to North Carolina and Indiana is that “feelings” about the election are irrelevant.

Which is the good news for Mr. Obama’s meandering campaign: The math argument, while uninspiring and joyless, is proving absolutely correct. All indications are that the candidates will continue to share the delegate spoils in the remaining contests—good for Mr. Obama, deadly for Mrs. Clinton—and the superdelegates have shown no sign whatsoever of making a collective break into the Clinton column.

Mr. Obama did seem to be rebounding somewhat, or at least refocusing, in the final days before Tuesday’s primaries. Seizing on a proposed gas-tax holiday, he reframed Mrs. Clinton as a disingenuous Washington hack and himself as the bearer of much-needed change and truth in government. His young daughters and wife made campaign appearances with him to illustrate, physically, what a normal American family guy he is. (“He’s got some Midwestern roots, and most people have families, so we relate to seeing his,” said Greg Apple, a 53-year-old construction worker and supporter who went to see him at a “family day” picnic in Noblesville, Ind.) He shot baskets and talked kitchen table issues, drank beer and asked for extra gravy with his biscuits.

And when asked, he insisted, however cautiously, that he will be the nominee.

“Senator Clinton will have to make her own decisions if she is behind in the delegate count,” said Mr. Obama at an Indianapolis press conference on the Friday before the election.

He asserted that over the final stretch of the race he intended to run a positive campaign about the strength of the American dream. “If we do that over the next month, regardless of where the polls go, regardless of the outcomes of any particular contest, then I think I’ll end up being the nominee,” he said.

And as primary day finally arrived for the voters of North Carolina and Indiana—these contests were widely touted by analysts as the last of many last chances for Mrs. Clinton to alter the seemingly inexorable Obama-ward direction of the campaign—Mr. Obama’s supporters finally sounded as if they were actually preparing to feel like front-runners again.

“Once you get past tomorrow,” said James Rubin, a New York investor and a major Obama donor, “even if it’s a split, you get back to the fact that he is an extraordinary candidate and he is winning.”

“It’s not uncommon for a nominee to lose states down the stretch,” said Representative Artur Davis of Alabama. “It’s not uncommon for there to be some last-minute buyer’s remorse that kicks in.”

Mr. Davis acknowledged that Mr. Obama had endured a very rough couple of weeks. But, he said: “The psychology of the race may change from week to week, but as a practical matter, Senator Obama continues to add to his delegate count,” while the Clinton campaign “is running out of innings.”

The math, he said, no longer left any room for doubt.

jhorowitz@observer.com

A few days ago, in a disheartening display of more of the same, Clinton joined McCain in supporting the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer. In contrast, Obama continued to oppose the tax suspension. With key primaries coming up in Indiana and North Carolina and in a clumsy attempt to court the hard-pressed middle class, Clinton has abandoned principle for a moment of possible political gain. Obama, who seems to be remembering that he is always at his best when he levels with the voters, deserves credit for doing the right thing on this issue.

This latest bit of political gamesmanship is part of Clinton’s newest attack line: Barak Obama is out of touch with the concerns of average Americans. After a year of intense campaigning and constant travel I’m quite confident that both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are fully aware of the concerns of the American public. It’s a contrived argument—and Hillary knows it is. Anyone who gets in a car or doesn’t have a million bucks in the bank knows that the middle class is feeling the squeeze. The answer to that squeeze is policies that generate real wealth and then work to ensure that the middle class shares in the wealth they help generate.

Revitalizing the economy won’t be accomplished by sending rebate checks in the mail or defunding our infrastructure. We need to invest in science and technology, build a fossil fuel-free green economy and help working Americans and their kids get the education they need to participate in the global economy.

The war in Iraq is another drain on our economy, as amply demonstrated by my Columbia colleague, Joseph Stiglitz in his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (co authored with Linda Bilmes). Clinton and Obama both know this. While I realize it’s too much to ask that the Presidential campaign be used to educate the country about the real challenges we face, the candidates could at least avoid misleading the American public.

The gasoline tax is needed to build and maintain our roads and bridges. Lower fuel taxes will encourage more driving and add to air pollution and global warming. A lower gasoline tax is bad public policy and it really saddens me to see someone I admire as much as Hillary Clinton sink to this level to try to squeeze out a few more votes in this campaign.

I suspect that most people can see through these blatant political maneuvers and they don’t really work. People think that gasoline is too expensive, but they also know we need to figure out a way to reduce our addiction to it. We have had seven years of politics that appealed to self interest and fear. The result of that has been an endless war and an economy on the skids.

Thee surest sign that Senator Clinton is on the wrong side of this issue was President Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden on Tuesday that he was open to the idea of suspending the gasoline tax. Of course, the President thinks the real answer to high energy prices is additional oil exploration and refining capacity. Perhaps his Texas oil friends are envious of the profits being made by BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe's two biggest oil producers, who recently announced combined first quarter profits of $17 billion. We have paid a heavy price by allowing our energy policies to be dominated by the oil industry.

We need fresh thinking and honesty from our politicians on energy policy. We see signs of honesty from Obama, less and less of it from Clinton, little of it from McCain and of course none of it from President Bush.

Not everyone fits the stereotype. Among those who will help decide the Democratic contest is a 51-year-old office administrator and piano teacher in Dublin, Ireland, who has not lived in the U.S. for more than two decades and follows the race in large part through coverage in the Irish and British media.
Liv Gibbons, a native of Los Angeles, will cast her vote at her party’s convention in Denver for Barack Obama.

Ms. Gibbons has a seat on the Democratic National Committee as a representative of Democrats Abroad, the party’s overseas branch. Democrats Abroad has eight superdelegates, though the vote of each one only counts as half that of a regular superdelegate.

At present, three other DA superdelegates are committed to Mr. Obama and two to Hillary Clinton; two are uncommitted. Among their number are residents of Japan, Switzerland, France, Italy and Canada.

Ms. Gibbons argues that the perspective gained by living abroad can add valuable insight to the American political conversation.

“You can see how America is viewed from abroad and how policy decisions made there ripple through the rest of the world,” she said by telephone from her home in Sutton, a northern suburb of the Irish capital.

In Ireland, she added, the image of the U.S. “is generally very positive, but it has declined during the Bush years. Look at Guantánamo, look at how there hasn’t been habeas corpus. America used to stand more for universal human rights, and its standing has been diminished.”

Ms. Gibbons moved to Ireland in 1985, having met her future husband, an Irishman, while at UCLA. She said she had “always voted Democrat in the States,” but was “never involved in Democratic politics” until becoming an expatriate.

Ms. Gibbons makes regular political pilgrimages back to the U.S. for the twice-yearly meetings of the DNC. It was at one such meeting last year that she met Mr. Obama for the first time. Though the meeting was brief, it was also testament to the importance of the personal touch in political campaigning.

The favorable impression Ms. Gibbons took away from her brief encounter with the Illinois senator was, she said, “one of the reasons” she decided to support him.

“It wasn’t any big policy discussion, but he just gave me his full attention,” she recalled. “I wanted him to sign some books so I could raffle them off to raise money for our organization. And he was very nice, very courteous. As he was talking to me, people tried to cut in on us and he kinda sent them to the back, saying he was helping his party. I thought that was very respectful of me and what I was there to do.”

Ms. Gibbons said she had long doubted Mrs. Clinton’s electability in a presidential election given that “so many people view her negatively.” But it was the complaints from the Clinton camp about the running of the Nevada caucuses in mid-January that proved to be the final catalyst for her to pledge her support for Mr. Obama.

“I was going to stay unpledged as long as possible,” she said, “but I wasn’t that happy about that.”

Since then, she added, she has received regular mail from supporters of Mrs. Clinton trying to get her to change her mind.

“I think there is a very active Hillary Clinton cell around San Francisco,” she said with a laugh. “I have gotten a lot of letters from there.”
Though Ms. Gibbons, like all superdelegates, was free to make up her own mind about whom to support, her choice also happens to be in line with the majority of her far-flung “constituents.”

The Democrats Abroad primary ran for a week starting Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, and Mr. Obama emerged with over 65 percent of the 23,105 votes cast from 164 countries and territories.

The result in Ireland, where voters who did not wish to vote by mail or Internet could cast their ballots in a Dublin pub, was roughly in line with the overall tally. Mr. Obama received 243 votes to Mrs. Clinton’s 142.

Ms. Gibbons said she was “surprised” by the scale of her favored candidate’s victory.

In Ireland, she noted, Mrs. Clinton is “very popular. If the Irish people had voted, it might have gone two to one the other way. But people want a change. They want a break from the past.”

Ms. Gibbons may be watching events unfold from across the ocean, but her concerns about the recent twists and turns in the race seem to echo those of many U.S.-based Democrats.

“The supporters of the candidates have become very polarized, and it is going to take some time to work on these people afterward and say, ‘We’re on the same side, don’t even think about staying at home or voting for the Republican.’”

Not surprisingly, she feels that it’s the other team that is more responsible for the descent of the campaign’s tone.

“The Clinton campaign—not her personally, but the people close to her—were the ones to start throwing stones. And that’s very difficult for him to respond to, because he is trying to be a healer and a uniter.”

She said she hopes that the trailing candidate decides to pull out of the race well before the Denver convention. But whether that happens, she will be there to register her half-vote for Mr. Obama.

“I voted for a candidate, yeah,” is about all Mr. Dukakis, the state’s former governor and a lifelong resident of Brookline, will say.

Mr. Dukakis has maintained an adamantly neutral public stance throughout the campaign, hoping instead to sell both candidates and their campaigns on the need for assembling a massive grassroots organizing effort—a captain and six block leaders in all 200,000 precincts in the country—for the fall. But he also said that Barack Obama will probably be the nominee and the race decided by early June, and possibly much sooner, with primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on tap next week.

“If Obama wins both of those states on the sixth of May, I don’t see how as a practical matter he doesn’t have it,” Mr. Dukakis, who officially clinched the Democratic nomination in June 1988, said in an interview this week.

If he doesn’t score a two-state sweep, Mr. Dukakis said, the contest will be decided “relatively quickly” after the final primaries, in South Dakota and Montana on June 3, with the remaining undecided superdelegates quickly making their preferences known. Asked whether the pledged-delegate count—which Sen. Obama is assured of leading—and popular-vote tally will be decisive, Mr. Dukakis said, “I would think. I mean, we’ve had a contest. You look at the numbers.”

An ally of Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman who has taken a hard line against Florida’s and Michigan’s claims to full convention representation based on their January contests, Mr. Dukakis bristles at the notion that Sen. Clinton should get any credit—in delegates or in popular votes—for her nominal victories there.

“Florida and Michigan are off the table,” he said. “I mean, how many times do you move the goal posts? There were no contests in Florida and Michigan—none. My solution is to split the delegations and seat them 50-50 (half for Sen. Obama and half for Sen. Clinton). That’s all. The Clinton campaign wouldn’t be happy about that.”

That’s putting it mildly. Under Mr. Dukakis’ guidelines, it’s next to impossible to create a scenario in which Sen. Clinton overtakes Sen. Obama in the cumulative popular vote over the final month of the campaign. So if he believes superdelegates should lean on the pledged delegate and popular vote metrics and that they should not factor Florida and Michigan into their thinking, isn’t Mr. Dukakis, in effect, saying that she has no realistic chance of emerging with the nomination?

“All I can tell you is at this point it looks as if he is likely to be the nominee,” he replied. “But, you know, funny things happen in this business. I can’t tell you what they might be. All I can tell you is it ain’t over till it’s over.”

A funny thing, of course, once happened to Mr. Dukakis while he was on his way to the White House. Twenty years ago, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and the rest of George H.W. Bush’s image-makers reduced Mr. Dukakis to a laughable caricature of bloodless liberalism, turning what was once a 17-point Dukakis lead into an eight-point Election Day rout. That example has been cited countless times in recent weeks, with pundits—and pro-Clinton forces—positing that Sen. Obama will be vulnerable to similar caricaturing in the fall as a snooty lefty elitist.

Mr. Dukakis doesn’t buy it. Nor does he seem particularly alarmed by the material (i.e. Jeremiah Wright) that Republicans will have at their disposal in a fall campaign against Sen. Obama. He thinks, in short, that Sen. Obama doesn’t have any electability problem that Sen. Clinton doesn’t have in equal measure.

“Look, she’s got stuff, he’s got stuff,” he said. “Her negatives are higher now than when she started.”

He added, “Everybody knows what [the Republicans] are going to do, no matter which of these candidates it is.

“Bill Clinton was subjected to an even tougher attack campaign than I was in 1992. Nobody remembers that, for two reasons: First, he had learned some lessons from my demise, so he had that unit he called the Defense Department in his campaign that did nothing but deal with it. And secondly, the economy was collapsing. And so even though Bush 1 went after him as hard—or harder—than he went after me, it didn’t register.”

A similar climate prevails in 2008, Mr. Dukakis believes.

“In this case, the economy plus the war,” he said. “Or the war connected to the economy, or vice versa. But you’ve got to be ready for this stuff.”

When the Observer sat down with Mr. Dukakis last summer, he had just begun pushing the candidates—and the Democratic National Committee—to think seriously about a new voter contact model for the fall of 2008. The nomination, he predicted back then, would go to whichever candidate embraced the concept in the primaries. Neither has done so fully, he is quick to report eight months later, but Sen. Obama did in most of the caucus states—something that has made all the difference when you consider the narrow but seemingly insurmountable pledged delegate advantage that Sen. Obama amassed with his landslide wins in those small caucus states.

In conventional terms, Mr. Dukakis said, Sen. Clinton and her team “have run a pretty damn good campaign.

“So how come the other guy’s ahead?” he asked. “Because at least in the caucus states, he and his people understood better than the Clinton people what it takes to win.”

Sen. Obama needs to improve his organization too, Mr. Dukakis said. “Obama hasn’t done anywhere near as good a job at the precinct level in the primary states as I would have expected,” he said. “There was no precinct-based organization in Massachusetts. None.”

“Kitty Dukakis has been contributing to Obama since last spring,” he said, referring to his wife, “an Obama fanatic.” “She’s never received an e-mail saying, ‘Will you be a precinct captain?’ And the guy’s got, what, 1,200,000 contributors—every one of whom, in my judgment, by this time should have been enlisted at putting together a 200,000-precinct, 50-state operation. I don’t know why that hasn’t happened.”

The kind of program Mr. Dukakis has in mind, he said, would take five to six months to develop and implement, meaning the party had better start now if it wants to benefit from it before November. In an ideal world, he suggested, Howard Dean would secure the help of both the Clinton and Obama campaigns right now to begin building, through the D.N.C., a precinct-based system for the fall that would be handed off to the nominee when the contest is over. He believes this could be the difference between victory and defeat for Democrats this fall.

“I think we’ve got to be laying the groundwork for this 50-state campaign,” he said. “I don’t mean call 25 of your friends. That is not a precinct-based grassroots organization. Precinct-based is a precinct captain and six block captains for every precinct, accountable and reporting in every Sunday night—how many 1’s, how many 2’s, how many 3’s, how many 4’s. And thanks to [the Internet] you can do this for nothing.”

Mr. Dukakis is particularly critical of the Clinton campaign for its peremptory attitude toward Sen. Obama’s victories in red states. He called this line of attack “a serious mistake on their part” and said: “It is a terrible mistake to assume that you concede half the country to the other side and it comes down to Ohio and Florida. That’s just a terrible strategy.”

“Indiana is a red state?” he asked. “Oh, that’s interesting. Until the
current governor, they had Democratic governors for about 12 years, and their Congressional delegation is now majority Democrat. So why are they a red state? I think there are a dozen so-called red states with Democratic governors. Not bad.”

Sen. Obama has run better in red states, Mr. Dukakis suggested, in part because he’s organized them so well and in part because “this message of coalition-building and building consensus is appealing in those states.”

While Mr. Dukakis’ presidential campaign is best remembered, by historians and by the candidate himself, for its mistakes, he did get at least one thing right—perhaps more right than any other presidential nominee in the modern era: the running-mate choice.

Had the election in 1988 been a referendum on the judgment each candidate showed in selecting someone to sit a heartbeat away from the presidency, Mr. Dukakis’ choice of Lloyd Bentsen would surely have been good for coast-to-coast landslide against Bush and his deer-in-the-headlights No. 2, J. Danforth Quayle.

“That’s one of the things I did well,” Mr. Dukakis said, perhaps happy for once not to be talking about what went wrong 20 years ago. He noted, with pride, that four years after that campaign, Warren Christopher, who was then heading up Bill Clinton’s running-mate search, contacted Paul Brountas, Mr. Dukakis’ longtime friend and his ’88 campaign chairman, to request a copy of the memo that Mr. Brountas gave Mr. Dukakis at the outset of the ’88 V.P. search. He hoped this year’s nominee would take a look at it too, and go through the same methodology..

“First,” he replied, “you invite suggestions from anybody and everybody. You look over the list and you start narrowing it down, get it down to about 10 or 12. Then you start talking to the 10 or 12, and what you’ll find is that some of them will say, ‘Well, I think maybe I won’t.’ They’ve got to understand that they are going to be thoroughly investigated.”

For Mr. Dukakis, the four finalists were Bentsen, Al Gore and Richard Gephardt (both of whom had vied with him for the presidential nomination), and John Glenn.

“And then we organized teams of volunteer accountants and lawyers, one team for each of the four on the final list, who did an absolutely exhaustive investigation,” he recalled. “And the candidates had to understand that, and their families had to understand that. Brountas interviewed them. I interviewed them.”

If you handle the process the right way, Mr. Dukakis said, the right choice will eventually jump out at you—even if, as was the case with Bentsen, it’s a name that wasn’t necessarily on your radar screen at the beginning.

“You’ve got to go through this process,” he said. “People will come up who, on form, nobody would ever think of.”

Of course, in Mr. Dukakis’ view, even the right V.P. selection won’t compensate for a poor ground game. The election is within reach for Democrats, Mr. Dukakis said, if they’ll make the commitment to build at the neighborhood level. The point, he said, has been driven home by Sen. Obama’s recent failures in Pennsylvania and Ohio, states where he substantially outspent Sen. Clinton.

“Look at the kind of money Sen. Obama’s been spending on media,” Mr. Dukakis said. “Doesn’t seem to have an impact, right? What does that tell you? It tells you what anybody in the media business can tell you—unless they’re getting a cut of the media or something—and that’s that conventional media isn’t having the impact that it used to have.”