Let's take an emotional IQ test this morning.
Senator John McCain, the happiest presidential candidate, locked up the Republican nomination and will have few party members other than Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter sniping at him. His challenge is to continue acting "humbled'' and "honored'' to have won and to resist any straight talk regarding his feelings for his own party and almost every elected official in it.
Second happiest is Senator Hillary Clinton. Like that pilot buffeted by 150-mile-per-hour winds who righted his plane, Clinton is thrilled her campaign didn't crash and burn after losing 11 primaries in a row. That doesn't mean she has the Big Mo, but she did stop Senator Barack Obama's. She landed safely and is back in the game, even if to win it she faces the prospect of blowing up her party.
Least happy, if you don't count Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who has a lot of explaining to do for his boneheaded decision to put Michigan and Florida into a timeout, is Obama. He'd almost cut Clinton's lead in Ohio and Texas down to size when bad things started happening to his good campaign and a chastened press decided to harp on it.
Obama wasn't immediately candid about whether an adviser had privately told the Canadian consulate in Chicago that the candidate wasn't all that opposed to the North American Free Trade Agreement; it would have merely been an example of realpolitik if only he'd owned up to it right away. At the same moment, the corruption trial of an old acquaintance, Chicago businessman Tony Rezko, started this week.
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