Even as he seeks to grab control of the Republican Party state by state, Ron Paul is showing he has staying power on the Internet, the medium that helped launch his insurgent presidential campaign.

Paul announced this afternoon his new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," being released today, is No. 1 on Amazon.com's "Hot New Releases in Books" list.

Now will John McCain's campaign take the congressman's supporters seriously?

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

The Winston-Salem Journal reports that Fred Thompson, who for much of last year's presidential shadow campaign was the great conservative hope, will finally campaign in person with John McCain.

Thompson, like most of the rest of McCain's former opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, has endorsed McCain but, unlike the others, had not appeared with him on the campaign trail.

Thompson gave only a terse endorsement to McCain after dropping out of the race earlier this year, saying, "This is no longer about past preferences or differences. It is about what is best for our country, and for me that means that Republican should close ranks behind John McCain."

He'll have to say something more about McCain in this appearance — and it will be interesting to see how far he can go, given his sharp distinctions with McCain during the campaign, including charging that the senator had abandoned the Constitution and the Reagan coalition.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

As if Sen. John McCain's current poverty tour wasn't enough of a clue, his campaign manager Rick Davis made it explicit in a strategy memo yesterday: They see the road to the White House running straight through poor people's pockets.

"Our targeting and analysis of the 2008 political landscape puts voters who are on the lower economic brackets at the heart of either party's winning coalition," Davis said in the memo dissecting exit polling from Tuesday's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania.

Davis' conclusion is that the protracted Democratic race has exposed some serious fault lines, and while he appears to believe Sen. Barack Obama will still be Democrats' nominee, Obama is not very competitive among union households and poor voters. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton easily won among both of those demographics in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, reprising the results from Ohio's primary last month.

That matters, of course, because Ohio and Pennsylvania are two of the three states pundits predict will determine the election, along with Florida.

As for how McCain capitalizes on this year's poverty-powered election, that's not exactly clear from Davis's memo. He points out McCain is visiting poor areas and asking for votes, and says McCain next week will lay out a health care plan. But McCain is still in a difficult spot: He's angered enough Republican voters over his career that some won't turn out to vote for him, and he's got to make up ground in the middle. But he can't swing too far back to the old McCain without losing still more Republicans.

As McCain strategist Charlie Black told me for an article today on McCain's domestic brand identity, they've got to try to take conservative principles and prove to voters those principles are a better answer than Democrats' solutions.

That, more than likely, means attacking Democrats repeatedly over taxes and spending.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain has written the North Carolina Republican Party asking it to take down an ad showing Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, calling for God's condemnation of America in his now-famous pulpit sermon.

"The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement," McCain wrote to state party Chairwoman Linda Daves.

The ad is directed at the two Democrats running for their party's gubernatorial nomination, but with Obama and Wright taking up most of the oxygen in the ad, and with both Democrats linked to Obama in the ad, it's likely to affect Obama's chances in the May presidential primary far more than it affects the state Democrats.

The state GOP hasn't responded to e-mail or phone messages yet, but North Carolina Democrats say McCain is still on the hook because he should have acted sooner.

"News of this story has been buzzing for the past 24 hours. If McCain really wanted North Carolina Republicans to be worthy of the principles he believes, he could have picked up the phone and called Ms. Daves," said Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek.

The back-and-forth shows McCain's difficult position. Some Republicans clearly want him to go further than he has in attacking Obama, seeing an opportunity in the Democrat's associations. But McCain, among all the Republicans who sought their party's nomination this year, may be the least able to capitalize on Obama's gaffes.

But it increasingly appears McCain's campaign goal is to replace right-wing voters, who they don't expect to win, with independents and some Democrats, and McCain's clean-campaign approach is much more likely to be successful with them.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Lost in the shuffle of Democrats' bruising Pennsylvania primary was the fact that John McCain didn't even top 75 percent of the vote in Republicans' primary.

With only two other names on the ballot, Republicans' presumed presidential nominee was unable to pull off the commanding sort of showing that would have put to rest the talk among Republican voters about displeasure with their nominee.

McCain, with 99.44 percent of precincts reporting, has garnered 72.7 percent of the vote in the primary, which was open only to Republican voters. Despite having dropped out of the race and even campaigning for McCain, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won 11.4 percent of the vote. And Rep. Ron Paul, who is still running but has put his campaign into a lower gear, won 15.9 percent of Republicans in the primary.

Paul has said the McCain campaign has made no effort to try to win over his supporters, nearly 1 million of whom have voted for him in the Republican primaries and caucuses so far. This morning Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton said his candidate's showing proves Republican voters are still "hungry for leadership that will protect the traditions that made our country so great."

The McCain campaign has said it is on the same timeline for uniting the Republican Party as then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000. In that year, Mr. Bush won 73 percent of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania's primary, held April 4. His biggest challenger was McCain himself, who won 23 percent, despite having dropped out of the campaign weeks earlier.

But McCain was a far more imposing figure in 2000 than Paul and Huckabee were in 2008, and McCain has also had more time before Pennsylvania to consolidate his lead than Bush had in 2000. To continue to post less-than-dominant showings will only prolong talk that McCain has more work to do within his own party.

And to truly match Bush's 2000 performance may be out of the question for McCain. Out of 18.5 million votes cast in the primaries so far he has won 43.2 percent. By contrast, Bush finished 2000 with 62 percent of the Republican primary vote.

Update at 11:58 a.m.:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds says they're not worried about Pennsylvania's showing, since at this point they feel they've already pivoted into general election mode. He also said the exit polls from Pennsylvania suggested the McCain campaign strategy of finding votes in the political center will pay off.

"There are poll numbers that come out of Pennsylvania that indicate a strong likelihood John McCain will play strongly with Republicans and independents, but also will make a play for conservative Democrats," Bounds said.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain has sent a signal to conservatives that he understands what they're looking for when it comes to judicial nominations.

In a response letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, McCain said he wants to see three conservative nominations confirmed to the federal appellate courts by Memorial Day and would support Specter's effort to have the Senate Judiciary discharge the nominations of Peter D. Keisler, Robert Conrad and Steve Matthews. Republicans say all three of those nominations are being slow-walked by the committee. Discharging the nominations would get them to the Senate floor, where an up-or-down vote could be help.

McCain, in his letter to Specter, even twists the knife a bit with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, noting Keisler has been delayed two years, and pointing out he was rated "well qualified" by the American Bar Association — "and Chairman Leahy has previously referred to the ABA's approval as 'the gold standard by which judicial candidates are judged.' "

The letter is straightforward and uses numbers to show President Bush is faring worse in his final two years in office in total appellate judges confirmed than President Clinton fared in his final two years. The comparison is apt since both were facing Congresses controlled by the other party.

McCain (or whoever in his shop put the letter together — it came from his Senate office) has taken a substantive step toward showing he understands the importance of the courts to conservatives, and also understands what types of nominees the Republican political base would like to see.

Specter, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, also asked Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama their opinions on discharging the three judges, and they both said they would defer to Leahy to run the committee.

Clinton's answer is predictable, but as Curt Levey from Committee for Justice notes at ConfirmThem.com, Obama's response is intriguing since his campaign is based on trying to move past political divisions. If there's one area where pure partisan politics still controls, it's judicial nominations.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Republicans have hoped that Sen. John McCain's reputation as a maverick and his appeal to independents would help them in this year's congressional elections. Democrats are now putting that to the test.

House Democrats' campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, today fired off press releases against about three dozen House Republicans or Republican challengers asking them to choose between siding with or against McCain's comment this week that the economy made progress under President Bush.

The McCain campaign is saying it's an unfair charge taken out of context — most of that answer, on Bloomberg TV, was spent on the pain Americans are feeling economically — but the DCCC is trying to make McCain a problem for Republicans anyway.

Democrats have long feared McCain as the toughest Republican to beat, given his reputation as a maverick, and know that could help marginal Republican races in swing states.

The DCCC provided a list of 35 districts they are sending the releases to, but said that was not a complete list of their Republican targets this year.

Included are candidates ranging from perennial target Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut to challenger Tim Bee, seeking to replace Rep. Rick Renzi in Arizona's 1st 8th district, to Rep. Virgil Goode in Virginia's 5th district, usually thought of as a safe incumbent — he won with about 60 percent of the vote in 2004 and 2006.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

John McCain today sent out a fundraising e-mail pointing to a Hamas official's comments about preferring Sen. Barack Obama in this year's election — the latest in a series of fundraising e-mails trying to tap everyday events.

"We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad," McCain's deputy campaign manager writes in the plea for donations.

It follows McCain's use of Gen. David Petraeus's testimony last week for fundraising, and suggests McCain is trying to find a way to tap into donors who are also fans of President Bush's foreign policy. That Bush fundraising machine is still the dream for McCain's fundraising apparatus, and going after Obama's potential weak points on U.S.-Israel relations is one sure way of finding elusive common ground with them.

McCain can use the money. He will file his monthly fundraising report this weekend, though campaign officials told the Associated Press earlier this month they expected to top $15 million for the month of March. That's still way less than Obama's $40 million take.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

In honor of today's announcement by President Bush of principles for handling global warming, here's how one very funny kid envisioned it in his spoof nearly two years ago.

They funniest line: "I start my day and I think about the warming of the globe, and how we can get it warmer."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Just as Sen. John McCain appeared to be putting some distance between himself and President Bush — distancing himself from the president on China's hosting of the Olympics, calling for a major change in Bush's prescription drug program and harshly criticizing Wall Street CEOs — Bush goes and ruins it.

The president today is announcing his own global warming plan, erasing McCain's chief argument for how he's different from a third Bush term.

Here was McCain yesterday on MSNBC's "Hardball" program, when host Chris Matthews asked him how he would be different:

"What's an area of disagreement? Climate change. Climate change. I believe that climate change is real. I think we have to act."

I wrote an analysis last month arguing that if McCain is to be seen as a third Bush term, it's because Bush has embraced McCain more than vice versa. Today's announcement will only fuel that appearance.

Whether McCain's climate change policy was right or wrong, he had counted on it to help win over some independent voters fed up with Bush but not sold on Democrats either. Now he'll either have to run further to the left to try to outmaneuver Bush, or else have to accept that on this issue Bush has once again tacked toward him.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Watching John McCain try to capitalize on Sen. Barack Obama's "bitter" comments last week, one can't help but wonder how much better Mike Huckabee would have done.

With Huckabee's pastor's background and his ability to deliver the devastating one-liner, you have to imagine Obama would be sweating right now if he were facing the former Arkansas governor.

Huckabee could say he doesn't know what motivates Obama's church-going, but as former pastor himself he knows bitterness is not what filled the pews at his church. He could say having come from humble beginnings in Hope, Ark., he knows about small-town Americans and understands it's not bitterness but love of hunting, or self-defense, or freedom, that makes them appreciate the Second Amendment.

Luckily for Obama, if he wins Democrats' nomination he will face McCain, who has fumbled for a line of attack to capitalize on Obama's gaffe.

This was his explanation this morning to newspaper executives:

"I think those comments are elitist. I think that anybody who disparages people who are hardworking, honest, dedicated people who have cherished the Second Amendment and the right to hunt and the right to observe that — and their values and their culture that they value and that they've grown up with, and sometimes in the case of generations and saying that's because they're unhappy with their economic conditions — I think that's a fundamental contradiction of what I believe America's all about, that I tried to describe in my remarks."

That underscores something that's become clear — out of all the candidates who ran for the Republican nomination, McCain may be the least ready to capitalize on his opponents' gaffes, excepting when they stumble on foreign policy.

That may turn out to be a good thing for the political debate. McCain has said he wants to keep it a serious policy discussion among friends, not a bitter exchange of insults. But Obama's comments strike me as the sort of thing McCain should want to have a serious discussion on. Those comments give insight into the man — equating belief in God with someone's gun-rights position, or with "anti-immigrant" or "anti-trade" sentiment, sort of tends to tell you how he views religion.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain, a long-time board member of Project Vote Smart, was kicked off yesterday for failing to provide information about where he stands on key issues.

Project Vote Smart, which aims to try to get past the sound bites to find out where candidates stand on issues, administers the Political Courage Test to pin folks down on exactly where they stand.

McCain, who's been a member of the organization's board for years, had always been good about filling out the survey — until this year, when his presidential campaign has failed to respond to repeated overtures over nearly a year.

Richard Kimball, the president of PVS who considers himself a friend of McCain's, and, incidentally, was the man who McCain defeated in his first run for the U.S. Senate in 1986, said the board voted weeks ago to give McCain one last chance to respond and, if he didn't, he would automatically be kicked off.

That deadline passed yesterday, with no response from McCain.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have also refused to submit their responses, but Kimball told us today it was a bit "embarrassing" for PVS that McCain, one of their own board members, refused.

As Mother Jones reports, board members have been ousted before for their lack of political courage, including Sen. Bill Bradley, who served on the board until refusing to submit to the test during his 2000 presidential bid.

The four-page test this year for presidential candidates asks about guns, health care, immigration, national security, education, abortion and many others. Here's the question on "social issues":

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will campaign solo in Pennsylvania tomorrow for Sen. John McCain, and the question everyone has to be wondering is whether this is a tryout for the vice presidential nomination.

Romney lost to McCain in the race for the Republican nomination, but has since made it clear he'd love to still be on the ticket with McCain.

The two men have already campaigned together in Utah, but tomorrow night's dinner, with the Lancaster County Republican Committee, gives Romney a chance to show how he can do flying solo on behalf of McCain. That, of course, is exactly the role of a vice presidential nominee, and for that matter of a vice president.

Romney moved from being the harshest critic of McCain to being one of his chief cheerleaders. But as my colleague, Ralph Z. Hallow, reported last week, social conservatives are warning McCain he should look elsewhere for his Number Two.

It will be interesting to see who else gets a similar invitation to be an official McCain surrogate — for example, Mike Huckabee, the darling of religious conservative voters, who McCain will need to tap into.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

5:50 p.m., April 8

Sen. John McCain has just sent out a fundraising e-mail based on today's testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

"Today, I had the privilege to hear from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on the current state of the war in Iraq and the progress that has been made there. We owe these two patriotic Americans a debt of gratitude for their selfless service to our country," he says in the e-mail letter.

McCain tells supporters to reject the "reckless and dangerous" call from his potential Democratic opponents, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, to withdraw troops. He also asks supporters to sign a "support our troops & their mission" petition, and includes a button asking for campaign donations.

All three of the candidates had a chance to question the architects of the Bush administration Iraq strategy, and they and the other senators used the appearances to score political points, but McCain has taken it a step further by fundraising off of it.

Here's the bottom of the letter, with the fundraising button included:

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

It's not necessarily the last authoritative word, but Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose job includes running the immigration services, said today that Sen. John McCain's birth in the Panama Canal zone does qualify him to be president.

"My assumption and understanding is that if you are born of American parents, you are naturally — a natural-born American citizen," Chertoff told the Senate Judiciary Committee under questioning by committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat.

Leahy said there have been some calls for Congress to pass a special law making it clear those in McCain's situation would qualify. The question has come up in the past, and while most experts say they think the Constitution allows his candidacy, it's still an unsettled area of law.

When I was in South Carolina covering this year's Republican primary I was struck by how many supporters of Sen. John McCain thought he would be the toughest candidate on immigration, including one military veteran who said it was the most important issue to him, and said he figured McCain was the candidate who would throw all illegal immigrants out.

McCain, of course, has never been identified with that position. In fact, he was the chief champion, along with Sen. Ted Kennedy, of the bill to legalize almost all of them, putting them on a path to citizenship.

Now comes the Center for Immigration Studies, which funded a poll that finds that South Carolina veteran's misperception is shared by a lot of voters.

According to the poll of 546 Republican primary voters, only 34 percent of McCain's supporters identified him with the position of allowing illegal immigrants to stay and be put on a path to citizenship. Meanwhile, 35 percent said his approach was to "enforce the law causing illegals to go home," known as the attrition plan.

But Republicans were also not well-informed about other candidates. More than one-in-four of Rep. Ron Paul's supporters said he wanted to offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship — a position in stark contrast to his actual get-tough stance.

Overall, a strong majority of Republican voters — 56 percent — said they want an attrition solution to the problem, while just 28 percent say the answer is to grant citizenship rights.

On the Democratic side the poll found 52 percent of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters knew he backed the citizenship rights plan, while 42 percent of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters knew that she did.

That still leaves a huge chunk of voters that either misperceived their candidate's stance or didn't know. Given the far lower number of Democrats who say immigration is a top voting issue, that's not surprising. But for Republicans, who say the issue does matter, it is a shock.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

It's a problem that plagues most high-profile politicians, who are usually wealthy enough to send their children to expensive private schools. They find themselves having to explain their public education policies, even as their own children have usually escaped the problems students face in public schools.

In this case, it's snagged the high-profile politician himself — Sen. John McCain, who today returned to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, from which he graduated.

The high school, which occupies amazing real estate in Alexandria, charges $38,200 for the current school year, including tuition and boarding, but not including $700 for books and a recommended monthly allowance to students of $200 per month for laundry and local transportation.

McCain said his own experience at the school is a reason why he supports school choice: "If a failing school won't change, it shouldn't be beyond the reach of students to change their schools. Parents should be able to send their children to the school that best suits their needs just as Cindy and I have been able to do, whether it is a public, private or parochial school."

But the Democratic Party is having some fun at McCain's expense, arguing his own voucher program he sponsored in an amendment in 1999 would only have allocated $2,000 per student per year.

Of course both Hillary Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, and Barack Obama's children, have attended private schools. The Clintons' decision to send Chelsea to Sidwell Friends while Bill was president drew snickers, though Mrs. Clinton says it was to protect her from the press. Obama says the University of Chicago Lab School was the best option for his children because he taught there and it was close to their house.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

There's plenty of good news for Sen. John McCain in the latest polls out early this week, including some that show him competitive with Democrats in fairly blue states such as Washington, New Jersey and Michigan.

But there are some worrying signs as well, including this from our latest Fox 5-The Washington Times-Rasmussen Reports poll: Just half of self-identified Republicans think McCain, their presidential nominee in waiting, has the best plan for the economy.

The poll, of 1,000 adults and taken March 26-27, found 11 percent of Republicans thought Hillary Clinton the best on the economy, and another 8 percent picked Barack Obama, while the rest said either Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, or none of them are right on the issue.

Democrats were more satisfied with their party's choices, with Clinton grabbing 34 percent and Obama grabbing 32 percent. Among independents, Obama fared best, with a quarter of respondents.

Here's our story with results from other questions in the poll.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times