by Matthew Hay Brown

On Wednesday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Sen. Charles Schumer, the chairmen of the Democrats' House and Senate campaign operations, warned supporters against "irrational exuberance" over the party's prospects in November.

Today, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also hesitated over predicting the number of seats he expects Democrats to gain in the House elections - but for the opposite reason.

He says his guess may be too good to be true.

"The environment in which we find ourselves, from a political standpoint, is scary good," the Maryland Democrat told reporters during an hourlong chat. "And therefore, you sort of pinch yourself and say, 'Look, we just won a net 30 seats. We have 41 new members. Could we possibly follow that up with the substantial gains that if I were guessing, and we were off the record, I might say, but which I'm hesitant to do now, because it's just difficult to believe on top of the significant victory we had last time that we could do as well as I think we might do this time?' "

A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee took exception.

"It appears that Steny Hoyer is about as bad at playing the expectations game as Chris Van Hollen and Chuck Schumer are," spokesman Ken Spain said. "Here within lies the inherent problem facing the Democratic leadership; campaign politics is on their mind first and foremost, while legislating remains a distant second. With gas prices skyrocketing to all-time highs, the American people would undoubtedly disagree with Steny Hoyer's 'scary good' outlook for the future. Right now, they are just plain scared and the Democrat-led Congress is doing nothing to ease the pain."

Sen. John McCain with fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a news conference in front of Schmidt's Fudge Haus in Columbus, Ohio, Thursday, July 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

by Frank James

While Sen. Barack Obama, the all-but-official Democratic nominee, was in Europe trying to shore up his foreign-policy credentials, Sen. John McCain, his Republican counterpart, was plugging away stateside where the U.S. voters are.

And it appears that many of those voters are increasingly receptive to McCain's message, especially in some of the battleground states.

Our friends at the LA Times's Top of Ticket political blog report on a new poll that shows McCain gaining ground on Obama.

If John McCain and his loyalists were hoping for something to brighten their day amid the blizzard of coverage of Barack Obama's foreign tour, they've gotten it with new poll results from four key states -- Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The survey by the Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, conducted between July 14 and Tuesday, contains especially good news for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in Colorado and Minnesota.

The poll found McCain making even greater strides in Minnesota, host of the convention where McCain will formally become his party's nominee in early September. Obama's advantage over McCain there now is negligible -- 2 percentage points -- compared with a 17-point lead the same survey gave the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in June.

by Katie Fretland

Hispanic registered voters prefer Democratic Sen. Barack Obama over GOP opponent John McCain by 66 to 23 percent, according to a study just released by the Pew Research Center. The presidential candidates have battled for the Hispanic vote, which could play a key role in four expected battleground states.

Hispanic voters seem to have easily transferred their support from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Obama. The nonpartisan research organization found that more than three-fourths of Latinos who voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primaries now support Obama. During the primaries, Hispanic voters favored Clinton by a ratio of nearly two-to-one.

Hispanics make up about 15 percent of the United States population and just 9 percent of eligible voters, but experts say the bloc could be powerful in deciding which candidate wins Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

The poll also showed that 32 percent of Hispanics believe that Obama's race will help Obama in the election, while 11 percent believe that his race will hurt him. The majority reported that his race will not influence Hispanic voters.

A growing number of Hispanics are supporting the Democratic Party, a trend that mirrors the general population, said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. In 2004, President Bush won about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, compared to about 60 percent for John Kerry.

Hispanic registered voters rank education as the most important issue of the campaign, followed by cost of living, jobs and health care.

The survey's results are based on interviews with 2,015 Latinos across the country, including 892 who said they were registered to vote. Pew conducted the survey from June 9 to July 13 with a margin of error for registered voters of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

The full study can be found at the Pew Center's website: http://pewhispanic.org/.

by Mike Dorning

BERLIN--Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came to a city once divided by the Cold War and sustained in crisis by the Atlantic Alliance to call today for a strengthened commitment to international alliances for an era of new threats.

In a setting that evoked historic addresses by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Obama came not as the leader of the free world but as a candidate for the office. The speech offered an opportunity for him to demonstrate his capacity to represent American ideals to the international public.

Obama drew a crowd that stretched much of the way down a nearly mile-long mall in front the site of the speech, Berlin's Victory Column, which marks 19th century military successes. At the beginning and end of the speech, the European crowd chanted Obama's campaign slogan in English: "Yes, we can."

Berlin Police estimated more than 200,000 people were at the speech, more than twice as large a crowd as Obama has drawn at any event in the United States.

Obama used the imagery of the Berlin Wall to argue that the challenges of the modern era demand a strengthen rather than diminished commitment to the Atlantic Alliance that defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War and to international alliances elsewhere.

"The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," Obama said.

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand," he continued. "These now are the walls we must tear down. "

by John McCormick

Amid swimming and sprinting and gymnastics, there will be $5 million of "Change We Can Believe In."

There is no word yet on the exact spots that will run, but Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is planning to run commercials on the NBC network during its broadcast of the Summer Olympics next month, AdvertisingAge is reporting.

Obama has already done some advertising on national cable channels, but his campaign has kept most of its focus on television spending in 18 states it is targeting.

by Frank James

Both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have recently talked of surging U.S. troops to Afghanistan in order to beat back the Taliban and al Qaeda.

But adding more troops is the least of what the U.S. needs to do in Afghanistan, according to Anthony Cordesman, a national-security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After reading Cordesman's latest analysis, it's easy to come away wondering if it won't actually be a much longer and more difficult problem for the U.S. to solve than Iraq.

Working with the ANA and ANP (the Afghan national army and police) is different enough from working with the Iraqi forces so that special training is needed, and more fully qualified US advisors are even more important than more US combat troops. Recent GAO and DoD reports show that the combined NATO/ISAF/US force only has 30-40% of the qualified trainers and embeds needed for the Afghan Army, and the police effort is experiencing so many problems it has recently been zero-based and is now focused on a district by direct (sic. should be district by district) effort to reform the over 350 police districts at a rate of one critical district per month.

Finally, virtually every military officer, civilian official, and intelligence officer who deals with Afghanistan realizes that the war not only is unwinnable on a purely military basis, it is probably unwinnable without basic changes in the role that the Pakistani government its forces play in the FATA and Baluchi areas of Pakistan. This is not an Afghan war, it is an Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict. At present, the Pakistani Army is largely ineffective in counterinsurgency, and the Pakistani Frontier Corps is an unsalvageable mess. Worse, government forces now largely stand aside while Pakistan's internal power struggles play themselves out and competing Pakistani efforts are made to negotiate with local Taliban and other extremist forces.

by Jill Zuckman

A Republican friend of the Swamp helpfully points out that Sen. Barack Obama seems to have time to visit the gym for a workout today, but not to visit the troops during his stay in Germany tomorrow.

According to Spiegel Online, which is tracking Obama's every move, at 1:42 p.m. it learned that "Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday."

Thanks to a statement from senior adviser Robert Gibbs, the issue seems to be one of ethics and propriety, rather than time.

"During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops," Gibbs said. "For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign."

But that didn't cut it for the McCain campaign: "Barack Obama is wrong. It is never 'inappropriate' to visit our men and women in the military," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

Regardless of whether Obama made the right call about visiting Landstuhl on Friday, he still managed to squeeze in some workout time despite a heavy schedule leading up to his big speech at the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, around 7 p.m. Berlin time.

"4:49 p.m.: Obama enters the luxury Ritz Carlton hotel wearing a T-shirt, black sweatpants and white trainers -- apparently to work out in the hotel's gym. He kept up the campaigning on the way there, smiling and waving at tourists and other onlookers," the breathless Spiegel ticker reported.

(Photo credit: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

by Mark Silva

Barack Obama isn't traveling alone in Europe - anchors of the network evening news shows are traveling, too.

And Brian Williams, anchor of NBC Nightly News, sat with Obama in Berlin before a long-anticipated public address there. Williams asked Obama about Republican rival John McCain's remark, at a town hall-styled meeting, that Obama, calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.''

"Yeah, I was disappointed by that language,'' Obama said, in an excerpt of the interview airing this evening on NBC. "You know, John McCain and I disagree on policy. You know, we disagreed on going into the war in Iraq. We disagreed, until recently, about the need to get more troops into Afghanistan. But I've never questioned that he wants to make America safer. And for him to suggest that I don't -- for him to suggest that somehow I'm less concerned about the safety of my wife and daughter than he is I think was -- was unfortunate.''

Obama understands why voters consider him a riskier choice than McCain, as NBC's newest poll reveals, the candidate says in this talk. McCain has been in public life for three decades, he noted, while Obama is relatively "new to the scene.'' "It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't,'' Obama said.

There are no electoral votes in Berlin, the anchor noted in this interview with the junior senator from Illinois running for president.

The trip is worth it, Obama replied. "It is because I have firmly believed since the beginning of this campaign and for the last several years that we can't solve the problems we face in the United States alone. We can't solve the problems of terrorism without support from the international community.

by Frank James

Good piece in the Washington Post Style section about a new follow-up to an almost 50-year old book called The American Voter which found way back then in that black-and-white TV era that American voters were ignorant about many important policy issues and political candidates.

Guess what? On average, our brains are still pretty much virgin territory when it comes to important political facts, according to the political scientists who produced the new volume titled The New American Voter.

Their conclusion -- that the voter is pretty much the same dismally ill-informed creature he was back then -- continues a decades-long debate about whether Americans are as clueless as they sound.

Or not. Talk to other academics and it's unclear if we should be depressed at all. Many political scientists agree that the American voter doesn't always present well. Asked directly about certain issues, like whether he prefers diplomacy to military action for resolving international conflicts, he may profess ignorance or use some phrase he heard on television. Or she might say, when asked why she likes a candidate, "Oh, I just like the way he talks."

by Frank James

Members of the peace movement who saw Sen. Barack Obama as their candidate, presumably after the ardently anti-war Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul exited the primaries, don't like what they're hearing from the senator from Illinois and are issuing a warning: Don't assume you've got our votes.

This from a press release issued by Kevin Zeese, executive director of Voters for Peace, whose board includes the nation's most famous anti-war activist, Cindy Sheehan.

As Senator Obama continues his tour of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe many peace voters are warning him: Do not take out vote for granted. In a petition, signed by thousands in one day, peace voters are expressing concern about his plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Kuwait.

Obama's recent promise to escalate the number of troops in Afghanistan with 7,000 additional troops. Currently, 60,000 NATO troops are in Afghanistan, 36,000 of them U.S. soldiers. The Soviets and British learned this is a country not easily tamed by foreign troops. Afghanistan could become a more difficult quagmire than Iraq.

On Iraq, Americans who want to see that war ended may be disappointed by the details of his Iraq strategy. While his rhetoric is "end the war" and withdraw combat troops within 16 months, the details of his plan are: redeploying of combat troops to Kuwait to serve a strike force in Iraq, as well is to Afghanistan; and leave a "residual force," whose size Obama has not identified, but aids have said could be 30,000 to 80,000 troops in Iraq. Obama has defined the mission of this force broadly telling Larry King they will: fight terrorists and al Qaeda, protect U.S. bases and interests and train Iraqis. When Obama is asked about private security contractors, like the infamous Blackwater, he told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he would not remove these 140,000 private troops from Iraq. Adding it together Obama would leave as many as 225,000 troops and mercenaries in Iraq after his withdrawal is complete.

by Katie Fretland

Seven senators, including Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), sent a letter to President Bush today endorsing a limited diplomatic presence in Iran.

Durbin joins Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in support of opening an interests section in the country that has been at odds with the West over its nuclear weapons programs.

"We know that a hands-off approach has isolated us and strengthened Iran," Kerry said. "The administration's decision to reverse course and join direct talks with Tehran is the right one, however late. While the United States has remained on the sidelines and outsourced our diplomacy to Europe, Iran used that time to continue to master the nuclear fuel cycle and get closer to a nuclear weapons capability. Even if direct dialogue fails to reach an agreement, we will be armed with new leverage that strengthens our hand with Europe, Russia, and China to impose tougher sanctions and begin to reverse this dynamic."

Durbin said the United States should continue to work with its allies to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program, while reaching out to the Iranian people and expanding diplomacy in the region.

Iran has established a diplomatic mission at the United Nations and an interest section in Washington. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Tehran would consider a request from the U.S. government to create a diplomatic outpost in Iran.

The United States currently operates an interests section in Havana, Cuba, which represents the U.S. government and American citizens in Cuba, under the legal protection of the government of Switzerland.

Continue reading for the full text of the senators' letter:

by Mark Silva

Democrat Barack Obama's apparent advantage over Republican John McCain has held steady in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released today.

The relatively modest advantage for the junior senator from Illinois - who drew the support of 47 percent of those surveyed in this poll, compared with 41 percent for the senior senator from Arizona - is unchanged from a month ago, NBC News reports.

"We're starting to see a hardening of his support,'' NBC Political Director Chuck Todd said this morning on MSNBC.

The survey, conducted July 18-22, also found some "good news'' for both candidates, as Todd reports. More voters surveyed say McCain represents their values. While more surveyed say that Obama's positions are "in the mainstream.''

The survey largely was conducted before Obama departed for a tour of Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East and Europe which has drawn considerable media coverage, which could also have a short-term impact on public opinion.

(Cartoon published in at least two Arabic newspapers.)

by Frank James

Cartoons in the Arab world often depict Israel and Jews in anti-Semitic ways.

Now, with the world's attention on the U.S. presidential race, the same Arab cartoonists are interpolating Senators John McCain and Barack Obama into their anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and ant-Jewish cartoons.

The Anti-Defamation League has collected some of the cartoons in an alert it produced this week. Many of them make the New Yorker's infamous cartoon look pretty tame.

Many of the cartoons have essentially the same theme, that both candidates are in Israel's thrall.

Here's the meat of ADL's press release:

The American elections have provided an excuse for the Arab media to promulgate perverse, bigoted and age-old conspiracy theories that portray Israelis and Jews as controlling the candidates. Appearing in Arab and Muslim newspapers published in the Middle East and the Gulf countries, the cartoons and caricatures focus on four main themes which reflect a deeply rooted sentiment in the Arab world:

The Arab media use these ideas to feed into another common theme: that Jewish/Israeli control of American politics and America's desire to cater to Jewish/Israeli demands is the cause of the Arab suffering and oppression.

by Katie Fretland

John McCain will reach out to the residents of the mini Berlins today -- the cities named Berlin in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire -- with a new radio advertisement to coincide with opponent Barack Obama's speech in Berlin, Germany.

McCain has worked to attract some of the spotlight during Obama's highly-publicized trip overseas. The new ad will also air in the towns named Paris in Maine, Michigan and Missouri, when Obama travels to Paris, France.

The ad attacks Obama for his May 2007 vote against a $120 billion appropriation bill, mostly for war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. The legislation passed 80-14.

"But when our military needed necessary resources, Barack Obama failed to stand up," the ad states. "Obama said that nobody wanted to play chicken with our troops on the ground. But when it came time to act, he voted against critical resources: no to individual body armor, no to helicopters, no to ammunition, no to aircraft."

Obama previously supported a similar bill that was vetoed by the president. That bill contained language to begin a troop withdrawal by October 2007.

Obama issued a statement at that time criticizing Bush's veto.

"After he vetoed a plan that would have funded the troops and begun to bring them home, this bill represents more of his stubborn refusal to address his failed policy," Obama said. "We should not give the president a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path."

Our colleague Andrew Malcolm at Top of the Ticket has more on the RNC ad.

Continue reading for a transcript of the advertisement paid for by the Republican National Committee:

by Mike Dorning

BERLIN--Barack Obama arrived in Berlin this morning to deliver an outdoor speech later today that offers him the opportunity to demonstrate his capacity to represent American ideals to the international public.

Obama will speak at the Berlin Tiergarten's 226-foot high Victory Column, within sight of the city's landmark Brandenburg Gate, a majestic setting that evokes historic speeches Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan delivered in nearby locations. Obama is scheduled to speak at 7:15 pm local time, 12:15 pm Central time, with live coverage planned on cable news channels.

Supporters of Obama have leafleted the city to promote the event to the public, according to local press.

In a brief conversation with reporters during his flight this morning from Israel, the Illinois senator sought to downplay comparisons with the presidential addresses and tamp down expectations built up by speculation in the German media that as many as a million people may come to the Obama rally.

"They were presidents, I am a citizen," Obama told reporters, adding "We are sort of on the high wire all of the sudden. It's like, wait, how many does this accommodate?"

But Obama said he is "happy" with the speech, which he said was largely complete several days ago but is still being tweaked in places today. He said that despite the high bar set by delivering the speech in Berlin the location fit the themes he planned to address on the relationship between the United States and its European allies.

"Berlin is representative of the extraordinary success of the post-World War II effort to bring the continent together and bring the West together and then later to bring the East and the West together. And so I think it is a natural place to talk about," Obama said.

After his arrival, Obama met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Chancellery. As he stepped out of his white Suburban, a small crowd of people cheered and applauded. He waved and walked through the glass doors, greeting a line of people.

Obama and Merkel posed for photographers in a sun-filled second-floor room with a wide view of the Reichstag on one side and the Victory Column on the other.