Campaign Roundup

Barack Obama's speech on race still stirs up pundits. Washington Post's Howard Kurtz summarizes media reaction. Slate.com gives a typical response: "One of the most important speeches about race many of us have ever heard … anything but soaring, empty rhetoric." Charles Krauthammer calls the speech a "brilliant fraud" and says Obama dodges the most important question --- Jeremiah Wright, "a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend." On The New Republic's Plank, James Kirchick agrees.

Obama also wins an endorsement from former presidential candidate Bill Richardson, a candidate Atlantic blogger Graeme Wood calls unlucky: "This man is hexed." The Trail gives five ways the endorsement will boost Obama.

You can now read 11,000 pages detailing Hillary Clinton's official schedule as First Lady. Weekly Standard blogger Samantha Sault says don't bother: There's not much there we didn't know before. The Guardian says what's missing is more interesting than what's there.

John McCain has broken the public spending cap by spending $58.4 million on his campaign. The Trail looks at the legal technicalities of this. He also brought down some ridicule when he said Shiite Irans were aiding Sunni Iraqi Al Qaeda operatives. MotherJones.com wonders if McCain is just ignorant. Weekly Standard says he's actually right about Iran.

The State Department was embarrassed this week when three employees snooped through presidential candidates' passport files. The New York Times calls for a Congressional inquiry, saying the Bush administration, "whose credibility on ethical matters is zero, cannot be trusted to investigate on its own." On Pajama Media, Michael Weiss rounds up bloggers' opinions.