"I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they've described," he said.

Not long after that, Donald Trump used an interview to restate his long, long-ago debunked claim that Obama was born in Kenya.

“That’s what he told the literary agent,” he told the Daily Beast. “That’s the way life works… He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said… He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia… Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

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The good news for the Obama team is that they’re well on their way to achieving this goal. Further data from an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this morning finds that voters by a 65 to 24 percent margin believe Romney would do more to advance the interests of wealthy Americans. Romney also wins by a big spread on the question of who would do more for financial institutions, 56 to 32 percent. At the same time, Obama enjoys a healthy 9-point advantage, 51 to 42 percent, on who will do more to help the middle class.

The problem for Obama: This isn’t translating into much of an overall lead. In the ABC/WaPo poll, he’s clinging to a 3-point edge, 49 to 46 percent, while the Real Clear Politics average of all polls puts his lead at just under 2 points. There are a lot of voters, in other words, who see Romney pretty much as the Obama campaign wants them to see him but who are still willing to support him anyway.

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This comes after weeks of intense controversy over whether Warren had advanced her academic career by claiming Native American ancestry based on being 1/32 Cherokee. As the story dragged on, members of her own party groaned at her handling of it, critics charged that she was being evasive, and the press speculated whether Democrats were about to endure a repeat of the Martha Coakley debacle.

The Cherokee story, according to the survey, has definitely dented the public’s consciousness; 72 percent of voters say they’re aware of it. But by a 49 to 28 percent margin, they also say that Warren is telling the truth about it, and by a 45 to 41 percent margin they say she didn’t benefit professionally from listing herself as Native American back in the 1990s.

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A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about.

In Arkansas, the other state to hold its primary yesterday, the results were only slightly less humbling to Obama, who defeated an actual human-being candidate -- a Tennessee lawyer named John Wolfe -- by a 58.4 to 41.6 percent spread, with more than a third of the state’s 75 counties siding with the challenger. Wolfe, if anyone asked him, was running against Obama from the left, on a progressive economic message. But to the average Arkansas voter, his name might just as well have been “not Obama”; he had no money, no campaign organization, and no name recognition, and he received scant media coverage.

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After refusing requests all day, the Newark mayor agreed late in the day to a live interview on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. By this point, Republicans had launched an online petition urging their supporters to “stand with Cory” against the Obama campaign’s “attacks on the free market.”

“It wasn’t until the GOP went across that line that I said, ‘Forget it. I’ve heard all I can stand and I can’t stand no more,’” Booker told Maddow when the interview started.

If you only watched Booker’s 12-minute performance last night, you’d probably be tempted to believe his claim of near-total innocence and even victimhood in an episode that overtook the presidential campaign Monday. This only makes sense; Booker can talk with the best of them. But in all of his earnest pleadings and verbose answers, he never actually confronted what landed him in hot water in the first place.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Booker seemed to call the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity record “nauseating” and to liken them to efforts by some on the right to make Jeremiah Wright an issue in the race. On Maddow’s show, he played off the “nauseating” line as a reference to super PAC-era negative campaigning in general and copped only to some sloppy phrasing.

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Booker had seemed to pronounce the Obama effort to highlight unflattering aspects of Romney’s private equity background “nauseating,” but in the video, he suggested he was making a broader statement about negative campaigning.

“I used the word ‘nauseating’ on ‘Meet the Press’ because that’s really how I feel when I see people in my city struggling with real issues and still feeling the challenges of this economy, and still looking for hope and opportunity and real specific plans,” Booker said. “I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue and calls to our lowest common denominator.”

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The political necessity of this was obvious: “Obamacare” itself doesn’t tend to poll that well, but some of its individual components do, and when voters are asked which party they trust more on healthcare, Democrats enjoy a clear advantage. So if the court does away with the law, it will be hard for Republicans to hit the campaign trail this fall without having some sort of plan that they can point to for dealing with the issue.

Of course, calling what GOP leaders leaked a “plan” is really stretching the term. As stories in the New York Times and Politico made clear, the intent seemed more to shield the party from Democratic attacks that it helped kill off provisions of the law that are actually popular:

If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.

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This is the mind-set that, according to a New York Times story from Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg, has a billionaire super PAC overseer mulling a $10 million anti-Obama ad blitz that’s designed to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”

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And now the same thing may be happening all over again, with Nebraska joining a growing list of unexpected 2012 Senate battlegrounds – at least for the moment.

The impetus is the surprise victory of Deb Fischer, a little-known state legislator, over two seasoned opponents in Tuesday’s Nebraska Republican Senate primary. Fischer’s candidacy seemed dead in the water until about a week ago, when she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. A last-second ad blitz from a super PAC controlled by the founder of Ameritrade added to her momentum, and Fischer ended up beating out state Attorney General Jon Bruning, who had been the favorite, by 5 points.

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To set the stage, the front-runner in the race is (and has been the entire way) Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s third-term attorney general. The 43-year-old Bruning has made some gestures to his party’s restive base, suing the Obama administration over its healthcare reform law and contraception mandate and likening welfare recipients to raccoons. But his polished demeanor and political resume – elected to the state Senate at age 27, a seamless rise to the AG’s office six years later, and now a Senate bid – make him seem more like an establishment man on the rise.

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But there’s a more interesting question at work here than whether he can hang on: Why would he even want to?

The impetus for the Times piece was the landslide victory of Richard Mourdock over Richard Lugar in an Indiana Republican primary last week, which refocused attention on the rising influence of Tea Party-style conservatism in the upper chamber. Mourdock, if he’s elected, will join a bloc of Republican senators whose governing approach mirrors that of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the Tea Party’s de facto leader on Capitol Hill.

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The biggest news came late yesterday afternoon, when what Harry Reid thought was going to be a routine exercise – approving a bill already passed by the Republican-controlled House to reauthorize the Export-Import bank – was ruined by surprise Republican objections, forcing the majority leader to file a cloture motion and delaying action on the bill at least until next Monday.

This is the 84th time in the current Congress that Reid has formally sought to bypass a Republican filibuster or filibuster threat, a continuation of a trend toward Senate obstructionism that has been building for decades – but that really took off when Republicans returned to minority status in 2007. In the Congress that began that year, Reid filed 139 cloture motions, and in the next one there were 137, numbers that dwarf anything seen since the procedure for cloture was developed in 1917.

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When they teamed up four years ago, Obama was the face of the new Democratic Party, one composed of college-educated professionals and young voters who held decidedly liberal cultural views. Biden’s addition to the ticket was partly a nod to the party’s blue-collar roots – specifically, to the white, working-class voters who had continued to line up behind Hillary Clinton all the way to the end of the 2008 primaries, even when it became clear Obama would be the winner. In Biden, a Scranton-born Catholic who once took heat for calling Obama “articulate and bright and clean,” it was hoped, these voters would find reassurance that the Democratic Party was still for them, too.

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Whatever the exact explanation, Lugar’s 36-year run in the upper chamber was ended on Tuesday night by his own party’s voters, who handed conservative challenger Richard Mourdock a 20-point landslide in Indiana’s Republican Senate primary.

The immediate effect is to create a general election Senate battleground that was on no one’s map until very recently. With Lugar as the nominee, Republicans would have been a lock to hold the seat in November. With Mourdock, the GOP remains favored to win, but because of his far-right views and the fact that he lacks Lugar’s cross-partisan personal popularity, there’s now at least a chance of a Democratic pickup.

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The Milwaukee mayor, who fell five points short against Walker in the 2010 election, is supported by most of Wisconsin’s big-name Democrats and has led in every poll conducted since he entered the race. The most recent survey actually shows his advantage over his chief rival, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, expanding to 17 points.

For Democrats, the promise of Barrett’s candidacy is that his pleasant manner and lack of sharp ideological edges will make it difficult for Walker to turn the tables and transform the June 5 vote into a referendum on the Democratic Party and its nominee. That Barrett is generally seen as more moderate than Falk and that he’s run without the support of Wisconsin’s most powerful labor unions could also make it tougher for Walker – who is armed with record-shattering financial resources – to attack him as an ideologue beholden to special interests.

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At least initially, some took the vice president’s pronouncement that he’s “absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual  men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights” as a trial balloon – a way for the White House to test public reaction and determine whether it’s safe for President Obama to join the pro-marriage equality chorus.

But the speed and force with which Obama’s camp downplayed Biden’s statement (and Biden’s own subsequent clarification that he, like Obama, is merely “evolving” on gay marriage) suggests it may just have been just another of the off-script moments to which the vice president is prone. There’s also a theory, proposed by TPM’s Josh Marshall, that the entire episode amounts to an elaborate plot by the White House to subtly shift Obama to a pro-gay marriage position without anyone really noticing.

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So it makes sense that President Obama will spend the next two days in the state, formally kicking off his reelection campaigning in Richmond on Saturday, just as it makes sense that Mitt Romney spent the last two days in the state. What’s revealing, though, is the company Romney was forced to keep.

In the highest-profile event of his Old Dominion swing, Romney was joined on Thursday by Bob McDonnell, the state’s governor, and Michele Bachmann, his one-time GOP foe. His alliance with both of them speaks to some serious general election obstacles that Romney faces in Virginia and in swing states across the country.

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“He’s a good, solid family man and so forth, he’s gone to the extreme right-wing positions on some very important issues in order to get the nomination,” the former president said. “What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different.”

This was interpreted as a straightforward expression, but Romney behavior this week suggests another, more devious possibility – that Carter was being a good Democrat and doing his part to undermine the presumptive GOP nominee’s message.

Twice this week, Romney has gone out of his way to make a scornful reference to Carter in an effort to tether him to Barack Obama. In Chantilly, Va., yesterday, Romney branded Obama “the most anti-small business president that I've seen probably since Carter.”

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For a while, it was beginning to feel like the presumptive GOP nominee might be getting the better of Barack Obama in their tiff over the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death.

After Obama authorized a campaign video that suggested Romney wouldn’t have given the go ahead for the mission that killed the al-Qaeda leader, Romney and an army of Republican leaders and commentators cranked up the righteous indignation, blasting Obama for politicizing what should have been a nationally unifying commemoration. When their outrage was amplified by neutral and even some decidedly non-Republican media voices, it seemed possible that Obama really had gone too far and that a backlash might be brewing.

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The president didn’t have to do anything last week to draw attention to the daring mission he authorized that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death. The one-year anniversary of the raid was approaching, and the milestone-obsessed media would surely be playing it up.

But Obama and his campaign went ahead anyway and released a video last Friday that featured a stirring tribute from Bill Clinton (“He took the harder and the more honorable path”) – and that used Mitt Romney’s own words to suggest bin Laden would still be alive if the presumptive GOP nominee had been in the White House.

Vice President Joe Biden was even more direct in a campaign speech hours before the video was released: “Thanks to President Obama, bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. You have to ask yourself: If Governor Romney had been president, could you have used the same slogan in reverse?”

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