Troop levels in Iraq would remain nearly the same through 2008 as at any time during five years of war, senior officials said.

Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?

By ROBIN TONER

Barack Obama’s candidacy challenges the idea that a majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right.

Gen. Petraeus plans to tell Congress in April that the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq that began late last year will continue until the end of July.

The debate is not over where Clinton and Obama would lead the country. It's over the tactics they are using against each other, whether it's hopeless for Hillary and whether she should stay in the race.

This is what happens when you've got seven weeks between primaries and an increasingly bitter contest.

The question now is whether all this sniping is hurting both candidates or whether it will all be forgotten by October. McCain and Romney were getting pretty personal a couple of months ago, and no one thinks about that now.

And just as the campaign is increasingly about itself, so too is the coverage, after that Politico piece I excerpted yesterday saying that journalists should stop the pretense and admit that Hillary is toast.

"The authors present it as a novel, even brave, conclusion. It's not," says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder. "Any regular visitor to Chuck Todd's commentary in First Read, any viewer of David Chalian's political commentary on ABC News now, anyone who has studied John King's futuristic charts and graphs on CNN, anyone who has listened to the major commentators -- Russert, Greenfield, Stephanopoulos, on the evening news -- anyone who has read a story by Adam Nagourney on the presidential race, anyone who has listened to or read Jonathan Alter, and I dare say, regular readers of this blog -- have known since before the March 3 primaries that the mathematics of the delegate selection process pose a near-prohibitively difficult challenge for Sen. Clinton. And many in the Clinton world know this. Indeed, the authors quote an anonymous senior Clinton adviser as saying there's only a 10 percent chance that she can win . . ."

CQ's Craig Crawford embraces an idea I hadn't heard before: "The early June superdelegate 'mini-convention' seems to be the most fair, reasonable and obtainable solution on the table. The idea is to have superdelegates meet right after the primaries conclude and settle this feud between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton by casting their votes and putting someone over the top."

Will there be boozy parties? And would both candidates agree to such a thing?

"Various media sorts have either called on her to pull out or pronounced her campaign over. I disagree. It's not our place to tell her when to pull the plug on her candidacy--and there still are scenarios by which she can win the nomination. But those scenarios depend on schadenfreude, on the hope that Obama will prove to be massively unworthy . . . that the Wright revelations will prove the first of many, that white people will abandon him and young people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere will stay home, that Obama himself will lose his cool, say something stupid (A likely story, given his cool so far!)."

At Slate, Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick say Hillary should give an Obama-like speech on gender, and they supply some of the rhetoric:

"Bill, darling. I can respect the heck out of your political achievements even as I berate you for demeaning marriage."

Is John McCain--cue scary music--hiding his secret Democratic flirtation? The NYT revives the issue:

"What Mr. McCain almost never mentions are two extraordinary moments in his political past that are at odds with the candidate of the present: His discussions in 2001 with Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, and his conversations in 2004 with Senator John Kerry about becoming Mr. Kerry's running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket."

More than 20 companies today offer "personalized genomics" tests that promise to help clients discern from their DNA what diseases they are likely to get, whether they are shy or adventurous, even their propensity to become addicted to drugs. A growing number bypass doctors and deal directly with consumers.

Four thousand dead service members in Iraq? Does any reader of this column believe that Bush, Clinton or Obama has lost a single hour of sleep thinking about those troops and their families?

I suspect that pathetic can't-get-a-date-so-I'll-protest-the-war guy on the street corner down here in the DC suburbs felt a more-genuine concern than any of the above.

"The willing suspension of disbelief"   [Andy McCarthy]

Do you think General Petraeus may have allowed himself a teensy-weensy smile when he heard about Hil's Bosnia whopper?

The United Kingdom has been ranked as one of the most stable and prosperous countries in the world, beating the United States, France and even Switzerland in a global assessment of every nation’s achievements and standards.

A one-year investigation and analysis of 235 countries and dependent territories has put the UK joint seventh in the premier league of nations. The top ten comprise also the Vatican, Sweden, Luxembourg, Monaco, Gibraltar, San Marino, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands and the Irish Republic.

The US lies 22nd and Switzerland, normally associated with wealth and untouchable stability, is rated 17th, losing points in the assessment of its social achievements.

The bottom ten, surprisingly, do not include Iraq. They are listed as Gaza and the West Bank, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

The UK received high marks despite the deployment of combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the suicide bombings in London on July 7, 2005, the continuing threat from home-grown terrorists and the collapse of the Northern Rock bank.

The global check on every country recognised as an individual state or territory by the United Nations was carried out by Jane’s Information Group and is published today.

Christian Le Mière, managing editor of Jane’s Country Risk, which compiled the ratings, said: “The UK is a very stable country. But the top 20 or 30 countries are all stable. There are terrorist groups in the UK but there are effective security forces to deal with them. We took the July 7 bombings into account but the UK still came out very well.”

He acknowledged that it was a little unfair to put the Vatican at the top because it did not face the sort of threats and economic pressures of other countries. But under the rating system, which took into account each nation’s political structures, social and economic trends, military and security risks and external relations, the Vatican state scored an average of 99 out of 100. Sweden and Luxembourg were also rated 99, with the UK not far off, with an average of 97, but scoring 100 for its politics, economics and external relations.

Mr. Le Mière said that the US had fallen down the scale, although it still scored an average of 93 out of 100, partly because of the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans and the threat to the population posed by the flow of drugs from across the Mexican border.

Clinton also implied she might try to poach delegates already pledged to Obama, telling the Philadelphia Daily News that "pledged delegates in most states are not pledged ... there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They're just like superdelegates."

The Clinton campaign tried to play down that exchange after Obama supporters cried foul. Spokesman Phil Singer said she was simply repeating DNC rules on delegates and warned against "reading anything into" her remarks.

"Simply stating a fact, I don't think is cause for hysteria," he said.