Other Times staffers will fill in here while I'm away.

April 2007 -- Congressman Adam Smith says he backs Barack Obama; formal endorsement came in July.

June 21 - Congressman Jay Inslee endorses Hillary Clinton

Sept. 4 -- King County Executive Ron Sims endorses Clinton

Oct. 8 -- Former Gov. Gary Locke endorses Clinton

Dec. 31 2007 -- Sen. Maria Cantwell endorses Clinton

Jan. 30, 2008 -- Sen. Patty Murray endorses Clinton

Feb. 7 -- Congressman Norm Dicks endorses Clinton

Feb. 8 -- Gov. Chris Gregoire endorses Obama

Feb. 15 - Congressman Brian Baird endorses Obama

May 8 - Congressman Rick Larsen endorses Obama

May 15 - Congressman Jim McDermott endorses Obama

McDermott is the latest move among neutral superdelegates to back Obama as the primary season begins to wind down.

The full release after the jump.

McCain said he was wary of subsidies, and injected this parenthetical: “I have to give you straight talk.”

It sounded to me like, “I have to give you Straight Talk™, now less filling and even straighter and talkier. Available only from John McCain. Past results not a predictor of future performance. Ask your doctor if Straight Talk™ is right for you. Do not operate heavy machinery after a full dose of Straight Talk.™, "

But it was straight talk. And McCain’s campaign stop at a remote watershed was remarkable for something that should not be remarkable in politics. It was not pre-programmed; it was not a panel of sycophants carefully vetted to avoid dissension; and no one asked any question along the line of, “Senator, when did you first decide to be an undying champion of the environment?”

The panelists will be Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland; Bruce Williams, chairman and CEO of HomeStreet Bank and vice chairman of Cascade Land Conservancy,; Jim DiPeso, policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection; REI CEO Sally Jewell; West Mathison, a fifth-generation farmer with Stemilt Growers, Inc.; Chris Bayley, the former Republican King County prosecutor and chairman of Stewardship Partners; Eagle Scout and high school senior Will Mentor; and Mercer Island City Councilman Steve Litzow Litzglow. Former Gov. Dan Evans will moderate.

This is a City of Seattle facility. It’s a nice, rustic, set of buildings above the river.

McCain is also scheduled to hold a media availability after the panel discussion.

There are a host of local Republicans in the small auditorium, including former Sen. Slade Gorton, GOP state Chairman Luke Esser, vice chairwoman Freddi Simpson, Sen. Cheryl Pfulg, and former state Rep. Toby Nixon.

MORE: With a light, cool, rain falling, Evans joked that “we’re looking forward to global warming.”

MORE: Jewell said that members of REI include people from the far left and the far right, but said “the one thing that they all appreciate, I think, is a healthy environment.”

She thanked McCain for his comments yesterday on climate change, and pointed out Gorton to say that he helped secure the public lands around this area. Jewell also mentioned former Democratic Gov. Gary Locke and said bipartisan work is necessary to continue to protect the environment.

(By the way, Evans’ REI number is 1819.)

“I’m not new to this issue. But I’m always learning about this issue,” McCain said. He said that when he first ran for president in 2000, young people would ask him about climate change, but he was then far from an expert.

“I will freely admit … I began to learn and I went back to the Senate and as chairman of the commerce committee had many hearings on this issue, and I traveled. I traveled around the globe, usually at your expense.”

In brief opening remarks, McCain said that fighting climate change and pushing for improvements to the environment are good for the economy.

“Everyone is talking about how harmful it is,” he said. “Look at what’s out there.”

He said that the wind turbine company he visited in Portland yesterday is employing thousands of people and “are contributing to probably as clean a technology as you’ll ever find. … I just firmly and steadfastly reject the notion that somehow this is something that will be harmful to our economy.”

MORE: Jewell said that REI has a goal to be “climate neutral.” She said that is very difficult, but very important to REI members. It involves a difficult balance.

All businesses, by nature, are taking from the planet right now. So how do we reconcile sending out catalogs while we’re hiking in the trees?

She said that businesses and private enterprise “have to play a very, very significant role” in combating global warming.

McCain asked her, “What do you want me to do?”

She said REI is converting 10 stores to solar this year, “in sunnier markets than the one you’re presently sitting in.” She said that some states, but not the federal government, have tax incentives that now make converting to solar financially viable.

Jewell said:

There isn’t anything significant that helps us make the right decisions.

McCain responded:

I’m a little wary of - I have to give you straight talk - about government subsidies. We just saw the impact, I think, of the subsidies for ethanol. I opposed the subsidies for ethanol because I thought it would distort the market. … When government jumps in and distorts the market then there are unintended consequences as well as intended consequences.

He said that happened after the gas crisis in the 1970s. He said there were “too many incentives given to the solar industry” and “we turned out to have some pretty shoddy material.”

MORE: Williams questioned McCain’s call for more nuclear energy. He said that Washington state is still dealing with nuclear waste issues at Hanford. He said:

We’d like to see that taken care of before we make more of it.

McCain said he understands the controversy over nuclear waste at Hanford and knows there is much more to be done there.

All I’m saying is, if other countries are able to make use of nuclear power and address the issue of spent nuclear fuel, then I don’t know why the United States of America can’t.

Again, we’ve sailed ships around the world for 60 years, some of them have come into this state, and we’ve never had a problem. We’ve never had a nuclear accident. …

We ought to be able, as a nation, to address the issue of transportation of the spent nuclear fuel, the storage of it, whether it’ll be reprocessed.

McCain said that if new nuclear power plants are built then no new coal-fired plants will have to take their place. “I’m all for clean coal,” he said, but added that the technology is still too expensive to be viable.

Also around the table will be Republican Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland, REI CEO Sally Jewell
and others. Jewell’s presence -- see a profile of her here -- shows that at least not all the participants are Republicans. State and federal campaign finance records show she primarily gives to Democrats.

She has donated to Sen. Maria Cantwell, congressmen Brian Baird and Jay Inslee and congressional candidate Darcy Burner. She also has given at least $2,000 to Gov. Chris Gregoire, as well as $100 in 2004 to Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi.

Munro did not have the full list of participants. But, he said

This is not designed to be a bunch of yes people. It’s designed to say, ‘We’ve made a lot of progress, but what more should we be doing.’

McCain’s northwest campaign swing, with a stop yesterday in Portland to deliver a global warming speech, is also designed to distance the Republican candidate from President Bush’s environmental record, as well as an attempt to draw a distinction with the Democratic presidential candidates.

McCain said in Portland yesterday:

I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. … I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, a McCain senior policy advisor, later used a conference call with reporters to end any question about whether McCain meant to criticize Bush’s record. Holtz-Eakin said McCain’s proposal for a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases marked the “beginning of the end of the Bush administration’s inaction on climate change.”

Holtz-Eakin described the plan as a middle-ground between what interest groups on the left and right would prefer. He said the timetable for reducing carbon emissions and the approach to do that is not a “litmus test” to appeal to the environmental community or “inaction chosen to appeal” to business interests.

Stories in the New York Times and Washington Post lead with the McCain/Bush angle.

But McCain is also talking about the environment this week to try to fill a gap he sees in the presidential campaign.

“Our feeling is the Democrats aren’t talking about the environment at all,” Munro said. “It never seems to get mentioned. There’s no debate.”

But guess what? Not everyone thinks it’s funny. Some Democrats have apparently lost their sense of humor in the final days of their nomination fight. Check out the comments at this post on firedoglake.

Environmentalists began to respond to the Republican's energy proposal, even before the speech was delivered. In fact, we got this copy of the speech from someone at the Sierra Club even before we got it from the campaign.

Here's AP's take on the speech.

McCain will deliver the speech at a Portland company, Vestas Wind Technology. He tries for a much more inclusive approach than many Republican candidates do when campaigning in the west.

When we debate energy bills in Washington, it should be more than a competition among industries for special favors, subsidies, and tax breaks. In the Congress, we need to send the special interests on their way - without their favors and subsidies. We need to draw on the best ideas of both parties, and on all the resources a free market can provide. We need to keep our eyes on big goals in energy policy, the serious dangers, and the common interests of the American people. ...

As a program under the Clean Air Act, the cap-and-trade system achieved enormous success in ridding the air of acid rain. And the same approach that brought a decline in sulfur dioxide emissions can have an equally dramatic and permanent effect on carbon emissions. Instantly, automakers, coal companies, power plants, and every other enterprise in America would have an incentive to reduce carbon emissions, because when they go under those limits they can sell the balance of permitted emissions for cash. As never before, the market would reward any person or company that seeks to invent, improve, or acquire alternatives to carbon-based energy. It is very hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, small businesses and environmentalists all working to the same good purpose. But such cooperation is actually possible in the case of climate change, and this reform will set it in motion.

McCain, though, also will call for more nuclear-generated energy.

It doesn’t take a leap in logic to conclude that if we want to arrest global warming, then nuclear energy is a powerful ally in that cause.

In a cap-and-trade energy economy, the cost of building new reactors will be less prohibitive. The incentives to invest in a mature, zero-emissions technology will be stronger. New research and innovation will help the industry to overcome the well known drawbacks to nuclear power, such as the transport and storage of waste. And our government can help in these efforts. We can support research to extend the use of existing plants.

The League of Conservation Voters said in a statement this morning:

To his credit, Senator McCain wants to do something serious about global warming, but his proposal falls far short of what the science says we need to do today.

He has not substantively improved his plan over the bill he introduced years ago - legislation that the science now shows is out of date.

He is right to call for investments in new alternative forms of energy but it is troubling that he continues to support taxpayer subsidies for a mature industry like nuclear which has yet to resolve its waste disposal problem.

McCain will be in Bellevue and North Bend tomorrow.

The joint fundraising committee formed for the Hyatt Regency event is made up of the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican parties of Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

State Republican Chairman Luke Esser told me:

We’re not guaranteed to get anything. I wish it was the case we were guaranteed something. The way I like it to see it is we are still in the stages of proving to the McCain campaign that we will be a battleground state in 2008. I think the other states on the list have already proven that. I think we still can.

Esser said he also hopes that some of the money that goes to the RNC and the McCain campaign will end up being spent here.

I’m thinking this won’t be the last fundraising visit by John McCain and I hope we’ll get some money into our federal accounts at the state party if we do our work.

Events at the fundraiser run from $1,000 admission to a general reception to a Victory Dinner that will cost $33,100 per person. You can see all the details, including the proposed split of receipts
here.

At this point the money may not be as important as the pyschological hit of having national Republican leaders make it so clear they don't view Washington as an '08 battleground.

Well Jed Lewison has a pretty good explanation of the phenomenon. The one-time aide to Sen. Maria Cantwell pushed himself away from the Vegas poker tables long enough to send me an explanation of the role of the “McCain Meddlers.”

From the exit poll, 1 in 8 Indiana Clinton voters and 1 in 6 North Carolina Indiana voters will not vote for Clinton even if she wins the nomination. These are the “McCain meddlers.”

If you factor them out (also subtracting the McCain meddlers who supported Obama), Obama wins Indiana by 3 and North Carolina by 22.

So what Lewison is saying is that no one should draw too much from the fact that Clinton supporters say they won’t back Obama, because a chunk of them aren’t really Democratic supporters.
And as he writes at The Jed Report:

By the books, there's no taking away Clinton's Indiana victory, but it is worth remember that it was only made possible by voters who have no intention of voting for a Democrat in the fall.

He explains his methodology here.

But no one seems to know for sure where Foley stands. Some sites that track superdelegates show him as a Clinton backer. (He was U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Clinton.) But other sites and news organizations show Foley as uncommitted.

Has anyone seen anything directly from Foley on this question?

Pelz has been disappointed that a few local Democratic organizations balked at endorsing candidates.

The nominating conventions are the parties’ response to the first-ever top-two primary scheduled for August. In that election, they party has no way to identify its preferred candidate and the top two vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the November ballot. Candidates endorsed by party organizations can show that in the voter’s pamphlet, but not on the ballot.

Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser said the GOP state committee shares Pelz’ concern about the party having a say in who is nominated. But, he told me yesterday, some felt uncomfortable requiring county and legislative district organizations to nominate a favored candidate.

It can be a little bit challenging to extraordinarily painful for a grassroots organization to go through selecting among different Republican candidates.

That’s particularly true in a heavily Republican district where the November ballot would be likely to include two party members facing off. The party has at least two eastern Washington legislative districts with multiple Republicans running in primaries.

The 117-member State Committee met Saturday to approve the nominating rules. The committee also voted to endorse the three incumbent Republican statewide officials and the three Republicans in the state’s Congressional delegation.

In addition, gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi and state treasurer candidate Allan Martin were endorsed.

Democratic leaders have pushed nominating conventions both as a way to give the party it’s say in the primaries, but also as part of a legal strategy as challenges continue against the top-two primary. Esser said he shares those concerns.

That does make sense. One of the reasons that we went ahead with the nominating process on fairly short notice is to recognize that we’re in the middle of a lawsuit and we needed to send a message that we take this very seriously, and we are concerned about confusion between the officially endorsed Republican candidates and other Republican candidates.

Esser said that allowing the locals to decide whether to hold nominating conventions should not hurt the party’s standing in the legal fight against the primary.

Larsen has been neutral in the race between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. He's holding a conference call with reporters right now. Larsen said:

This week Sen. Obama has proven that he is tough and resilient. He has shown that he can take a pounding but come back and communicate with the public to deliver his message of hope and change.

He said that he's been "particulary impressed by Senator Obama's truth-telling on the proposed gas tax holiday." Clinton supported a temporary suspension of the gas tax, but Obama called that pandering. Larsen said a tax holiday would "make little or no difference for Americans paying too much at the pump."

Larsen said that “as great as it sounds,” the gas tax holiday would save drivers about 31 cents a day, but take billions away from transportation projects across the country.

By definition, to me, it really looked like someone trying to create voters where votes didn’t exist. … It says to me that at least Senator Obama had the fortitude to call this gas tax holiday what it is, a gimmick.

Larsen said that early in the primary race he was leaning toward endorsing Clinton, and had also thought about endorsing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Still left uncommitted among Washington’s superdelegates are state Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz and Vice Chairwoman Eileen Macoll; Democratic National Committee members Ed Cote, Sharon Mast and David McDonald; and Congressman Jim McDermott.

McDermott is the last neutral superdelegate among the state’s elected Democrats.

As recently as April 23, Larsen was saying he had no plans to choose sides before all states had a chance to vote in primaries or caucuses. He said then:

I haven't changed my view at all that we should let the states play themselves out.

Larsen said today that he, as well as other superdelegates, were impressed by Obama’s performance in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. It was, he said using a Clinton phrase, a “game-changer” and it “put a lot of uncommitted delegates into head-scratching mode” about what to do.

He met with Obama today in D.C. about an hour before his 2 p.m. conference all began. Larsen had already decided to endorse Obama, but he wanted to talk to the candidate about the state of the race and to raise a few Washington state issues, including the Boeing tanker deal.

Politico has a great national superdelegate tracker here.

There are a total of 796 superdelegates, including 17 in Washington. That's about 20 percent of the total delegates. In Washington, the superdelegates backing Clinton are U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Congressmen Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee, former House Speaker Tom Foley, and King County Executive Ron Sims.

Those backing Obama are Congressmen Adam Smith and Brian Baird, Gov. Chris Gregoire, and DNC member Pat Notter.

Larsen has been critical of the power the party gives to superdelegates.

I’m still no fan of the superdelegate process. That doesn’t mean I’m not a superdelegate, I still am. And it is more and more clear that the superdelegates are going to decide the nomination. That said, we’re not going to be doing it in a … smoke-filled back room. … Superdelegates are going to come out one by one and make their decision.

Here’s what Clinton said, in what is certainly the most-discussed story of the day:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Eli asks at The Slog:

Is Clinton really staying in the race to become the candidate of that portion of white, Democratic America that won’t for the black guy?

Clinton strategists held a conference call yesterday to talk about the Indiana and North Carolina results. Geoff Garin talked about the role race played. Says Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo:

Put in the context of the Hillary campaign's chief argument that she's the more electable Dem, Garin's overall implication here is that her success among white voters in North Carolina yesterday is "progress" in the sense that it strengthens her case for electability.

In other words, it's an explicit, and unabashed, linking of her claim of electability to her success among whites.

There is something jarring about hearing Clinton talk about her appeal among whites. And that likely has more to do with it coming out of the mouth of the candidate than the reality that campaigns analyze the electorate along racial lines. That's not news.

As the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato told USA Today:

Clinton's comment was a "poorly worded" variation on the way analysts have been "slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms."

But there is another trend in recent exit polls that has me wondering if race is playing an unstated role among Clinton supporters. From CNN:

According to the exit polls, half of Clinton's supporters in Indiana would not vote for Obama in a general election match up with John McCain. A third of Clinton voters said they would pick McCain over Obama, while 17 percent said they would not vote at all. Just 48 percent of Clinton supporters said they would back Obama in November.

Obama gets even less support from Clinton backers in North Carolina. There, only 45 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama over McCain. Thirty-eight percent said they would vote for McCain while 12 percent said they would not vote.

Those percentages are higher than those that say race played a role in their decision to support Clinton over Obama. But voters would be reluctant to tell a pollster directly that they used race as a deciding factor. But if so many backers of the white candidate say they would refuse to back the black candidate, one has to wonder if what is being unsaid.

Obama voters appear to be more willing to support Clinton in November. In Indiana, 59 percent of Obama backers said they'd vote for Clinton, and 70 percent of Obama backers in North Carolina said they'd support the New York Democrat.

Throughout the primary season, I figured that just the opposite would be true. Clinton supporters were more traditional Democrats and if their candidate wasn’t the nominee they would be likely to support Obama, even if they thought he was less prepared than their first choice. Obama supporters, I thought, may just decide to stay home if their guy didn’t win because many are new to the party and to politics and much more drawn by the phenomenon surrounding Obama.

I’m obviously wrong about that. But it’s not at all clear yet why Clinton supporters are so reluctant to switch their allegiance to Obama.

UPDATE: A smart guy I know e-mailed to say that race is certainly part of the answer to why those Clinton supporters say they won’t vote for Obama come November.

But he also suggests that part of that is the sour feeling some of them have as Clinton’s chances slip away. He said some of those people feel like a beleaguered minority - and acknowledged the irony of that - but that their frustration will eventually dissipate and many will come around to back Obama.

That makes sense to me. What do you think?

“It's full-speed on to the White House."

But this morning’s headlines tell a far different story.

• Clinton Aides Doubtful About Future
• For Clinton, Options Seem to Dwindle
• Pundits Declare the Race Over
• 'The night the music died' - and the general election began
• Clinton’s Longevity in Jeopardy After Indiana Squeaker
• OBAMA VS MCCAIN
• Reality Has Well-Known Obama Bias

Clinton won Indiana, but she lost the punditocracy. She’s even lost Drudge, who the Clinton campaign has been working hard to massage. He says simply under a photo of Obama and his wife, Michelle, walking hand-in-hand,

THE NOMINEE

But she’ll always have Rush. Given the close finish in Indiana, it is certainly possible that Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos helped Clinton eke out her win.

Operation Chaos Field Reports: Chaos Reigns Across Fruited Plain!

I have also been receiving field reports via e-mail today, both at my website e-mail address and the ElRushbo@eibnet.com address, from people, commandos, operatives reporting that they have followed orders and fulfilled their duty. Nobody's been challenged. In fact, the Indiana voters all say that they have not been challenged, and they were hoping to be. They had themselves steeled and ready for it, many of them have shown up in tie-dyes, flip-flops, holding their heads up, looking down at their noses like they're liberals, effete snobs, showing up in battered pickup trucks and this sort of thing.

Operation chaos is also a great marketing tool for Rush. I'm not sure what those T-shirts will be worth if Clinton drops out.