Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sent out a strong memo to undecided superdelegates via CNN on Thursday: Make up your minds — sooner rather than later.

“I need them to say who they’re for, starting now,” Mr. Dean told CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

...the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

Obama also made a pair of grand and cynical promises that are the sign of someone who is thinking more about campaigning than governing.

...he rigidly locked himself into a policy that will not be fully implemented for another three years.

If Obama is elected, he will either go back on this pledge — in which case he would destroy his credibility — or he will risk genocide in the region and a viciously polarizing political war at home.

...the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values.

... When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now.

"What is your strategy to beat the Republicans in November?" the woman asked Obama.

"That was the rollout of the Republican campaign against me," Obama responded. "That is what they will do. They will try to focus on all these issues." He said he would answer the attacks "sharply and crisply" and seek to turn the debate from "tit-for-tat silliness" to serious issues such as the economy and Iraq. "If Republicans come at me, I will come right back at them," Obama asserted, to loud cheers.

Obama and his team appeared taken aback by some of the negative reviews of his performance in the 90-minute debate in Philadelphia...  In their estimation, he had more than held his own...

It might seem a tad ironic for multimillionaires such as Clinton and Limbaugh to be calling anyone "elitist," but "elitism" isn't really about money. Donald Trump has money, but few think "elitist" when thinking of Trump. Elitism is instead an attitude, a demeanor, a vocabulary, a self-possessed air. It suggests condescension and contempt, a lack of empathy, an arrogant aloofness.

Admittedly, it's a fine line. It's okay to be perceived as smart (Bill Clinton) but it's not okay to be perceived as bookish and intellectual (Adlai Stevenson). And it's okay to be elite. Olympic athletes are elite, as are Marines and Navy SEALs. But it's not okay to be insufferably proud of your elite skills, which is just obnoxious.

Just as people can seem elitist, places can, too. Obama had the misfortune to make his "bitter" comment at a fundraiser in San Francisco, a city often derided as a bastion of ultraliberalism, which conservatives have long used as a synonym for elitism. No matter that the facts don't support the slur (do they ever?). Most people in San Francisco live in rented apartments (not elitist), and many of its residents are impoverished immigrants. Los Angeles gets the same bum rap, mainly because it's home to some wealthy and blabby celebrities. Some liberal college towns are caricatured as elitist (Cambridge, Berkeley) but other liberal college towns (Madison, Austin) are not.

Even so, there isn't much in Obama's background that suggests the word will stick, says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. She runs through Obama's basic bio -- his father abandoned the family when Obama was 2; he was raised by a single mother who, at times, struggled financially; he worked his way through law school...

Drew Westen, a clinical psychologist and political consultant in Atlanta...offers one key amendment: The accusation of elitism plays into a larger narrative spun by his opponents -- that Obama is different. Some voters, Westen says, will assimilate the word along with other false notions, such as that Obama is secretly a Muslim, that he doesn't wear a flag pin because he's unpatriotic, that his pastor is unpatriotic, "that he isn't one of us."

Westen suggests not letting it go. Obama should fight back swiftly and often, he says, by offering the "counter-narrative" that is his autobiography: "Let people know that he's just like them."

The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. Now North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities.

The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.

There are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change.

Preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent. Iraq was defanged by the 1981 Israeli airstrike, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which uncovered Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear programs) and finally by the 2003 invasion, which ended the Hussein dynasty, père et deux fils.

A collateral effect of the Iraq war was Libya's nuclear disarmament. Seeing Hussein's fate, Moammar Gaddafi declared and dismantled his nuclear program. And if November's National Intelligence Estimate is to be believed, the Iraq invasion even induced Iran to temporarily suspend weaponization and enrichment.

But the cost of preemption is simply too high. No one is going to renew the Korean War with an attack on Pyongyang. And the prospects of an attack on Iran's facilities are now vanishingly small. What to do?

Deterrence. It worked in the two-player Cold War. Will it work against multiple rogues? It seems quite suitable for North Korea, whose regime, far from being suicidal, is obsessed with survival.

Iran is a different proposition. With its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you've got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble.

Two ways: Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction.

But there is an adjunct to deterrence: missile defense. Against a huge Soviet arsenal, this was useless. Against small powers with small arsenals, i.e., North Korea and Iran, it becomes extremely effective in conjunction with deterrence.

For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through-- and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world's first Islamic republic to a cinder.

He should have pressed instead for more explanation of Clinton's proposal to counter the Iranian government's nuclear ambitions with a broad shield of U.S. nuclear deterrence -- protecting not just Israel but other countries in the region as well, such as Saudi Arabia. This strikes me as the kind of big, complicated idea that someone should have asked Clinton to explain further. That didn't happen, though.

In the looking-glass world of nuclear weapons theory, a U.S. pledge to nuke Iran if it ever nuked Israel could make officials in both countries breathe easier. One potential benefit would be to lessen the possibility that Israeli leaders, fearing an Iranian attack that might eliminate Israel's ability to retaliate, would order a preemptive strike.

But is it wise to specify America's reaction to a threat that does not yet exist? Iran, after all, is years away from being able to build, let alone deploy, a nuclear bomb.

It also qualified as news that when asked about soaring gasoline prices, Clinton vowed to investigate what she believes is "manipulation" of the market. She added that she would recommend releasing some oil from the nation's strategic reserve. Surely she understands that the price of oil is set globally and reflects such factors as soaring demand from China and the weakness of the dollar. What does her proposed remedy have to do with the price consumers pay at the gas pump?

"Senator Obama has repeatedly rejected and denounced the actions of Hamas, a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of many innocents, that is dedicated to Israel's destruction," Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

Sen. Obama was briefly put on the spot with a question about still another of his shady friends in Chicago, but he was allowed to dance away without the obvious follow-up. What was the extent of his friendship with Bill Ayers, an ex-con and unrepentant member of a ring of cop-killers from the '60s? This could have been a fastball but was only a floater, and the Illinois Kid sent it back sharply for a Texas Leaguer. "The notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing someone in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, that somehow that reflects on my values, is crazy."

But that's not quite the point of the question. The senator knew that Bill Ayers was more than "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood" and was once a member of the Weathermen when they served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a small but radical Chicago foundation of suspicious provenance. At the behest of the unrepentant Bill Ayers — who boasts that he and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, who both served time after years on the run, didn't do enough to plant bombs to kill innocents when they had the chance — the foundation awarded $6,000 to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church "in recognition of Barack Obama's contributions." Messrs. Obama and Ayers voted to award a generous grant to the Arab-American Action Network, to finance "actions" (not otherwise specified).

This was all very innocent in Mr. Obama's telling of his association with Bill Ayers, much like his association with the Rev. Mr. Wright. Serendipity follows Barack Obama everywhere. The senator was never there when Mr. Wright was riding off on one of his racist rants. He overslept that morning, even missed Sunday school, or dozed through the sermon, or was daydreaming, or preoccupied with trying to scratch an itch unobserved by others in his pew, or something. It's always something.

The more we learn about Barack Obama the more interesting he becomes, as Hillary often hints but knows better than to be specific. The skeletons will march out of the closet later, long after the corpse of the primary campaign is laid to rest and Hillary is relegated to the mourners' chorus. She answered "yes, yes, yes" when an interlocutor asked whether she thought Barack Obama could win in November. But her eyes and her demeanor said "no, no, no." Not if she can help it.

Sen. Obama seems honestly surprised by the furor his the-poor-cling-to-God-and-guns remarks elicited, and if one considers his background—intense marginalization followed by the establishment's embrace—this is understandable. He was only caught speaking the secret language of America's elite, and what he said was not meant as a putdown. It was an explanation aimed at ameliorating the elites' anger toward and impatience with normal people. It's a way of explaining them, of saying, "You have to remember they're not comfortable and educated like us, they're vulnerable and so we must try to understand them and feel sympathy for and solidarity with them." You could say this at any high-class dinner party in America and not cause a ruffle. But America is not a high-class dinner party.

Wired's David Axe makes Canberra's case

The F-22's long range and twin engines make it a good choice for replacing aged Australia's F-111s and F/A-18s. ... The F-22s would top off what amounts to the biggest rearmament in decades for the island nation.

It is an article of faith with the Democrats that they must fool Americans by simulating agreement with normal people. The winner of the Democratic primary is always the candidate who does the best impersonation of an American.

But then, after all their hard work making believe they're into NASCAR and God, some Democrat invariably slips and lets us know it's all a big fake-out. They're like a gay guy trying to act straight who accidentally refers to Brad Pitt as "yummy!"