The Note: Winner's Spoil

August 11, 2008 -- It's supposed to be Sen. Barack Obama's moment on the podium -- so why are the cameras trained on those who captured the silver and the bronze?

To the winner goes the spoils -- and this is fresh: With Denver approaching, and party unity elusive anyway, Obama's drama now includes the accumulated baggage of his failed opponents. (Surely he didn't think he could escape them in Hawaii. . . . )

Former Clinton strategist Mark Penn's words will live longer than his career in presidential politics: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values," Penn wrote in an e-mail he thought was private, recording the words Republicans won't have to utter, per the bombshell scoop by The Atlantic's Joshua Green.

"Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches, and the values. He doesn't," Penn wrote. "His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited."

(You may recall, as Politico's Jonathan Martin reminds us, McCain's now-abandoned tagline: "John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for.")

Then there's John Edwards -- confirming his narcissism in spectacular fashion, and doing Obama the courtesy of acknowledging his affair and lying in time to make sure he won't be within a few hundred miles of Denver in two weeks.

But not necessarily making all the questions go away: There won't be a paternity test, yet Edwards still has a timeline problem:

"Some people close to the woman involved, Rielle Hunter, say they believe Edwards is still not telling the whole truth -- in particular, on the key point of whether campaign money was used to give Edwards' mistress a job," ABC's Brian Ross reported on "Good Morning America" Monday. "With no previous filmmaking experience, Hunter was paid $114,000 by Edwards' political action committee to produce a series of films for the Internet, that included many scenes of the two in flirtatious banter."

Said Hunter friend Pigeon O'Brien: "The affair began long, long, long before she was hired to work for the campaign -- almost half a year before she was hired to work on those videos."

And here are the Edwards and Clinton storylines crashing together: If Edwards had come clean (or been caught outright) last year, "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson tells ABC's Brian Ross and Jake Tapper.

(Where does this notion take disappointed Clinton supporters in the run-up to Denver?)

"My instinct tells me that she probably would have done better had Sen. Edwards not been on the ballot in Iowa, but that wasn't the circumstances at the time," James Carville told Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America" Monday.

"It would have been an awful big mess had [Edwards] been the nominee," Carville added, understating it.

This week will belong to Sen. John McCain -- if he can indeed own it. He's got the field to himself (and Mr. Putin is planning a game that's made for him). Now his team needs to show it can run one play at a time.

"Mr. McCain's campaign promised to take full advantage this week of Mr. Obama's absence -- for starters, Mr. McCain was scathing about his rival in his weekend radio address -- but up close and personal, Mr. McCain sounded as though he would not mind some August beach time himself," Elisabeth Bumiller writes in The New York Times.

Obama is ready for combat, even from the beach. His campaign launches a new ad Monday morning turning the "celebrity" theme on its head (with clips from "SNL" and talk shows, and "Washington" equaling "George W. Bush" for the sake of the visuals).

"Lurching to the right, then the left, the old Washington dance, whatever it takes," says the ad (which -- unlike McCain's latest attack spots, isn't part of the Olympic rotation). "John McCain. A Washington celebrity playing the same old Washington games."

Said Gov. Bill Richardson, to ABC's Jake Tapper on "This Week" Sunday: "Senator McCain is the Washington celebrity here."

We will learn this week whether McCain possesses the ability to drive a message. That depends, in part, on whether any campaign apparatus can survive the White Tornado.

"Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain's disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign's message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama," Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg write in the Sunday New York Times.

"For now, Mr. McCain's executive style looms as a potential obstacle to his hopes of getting to the White House," they continue. "His campaign has been rocked by personnel changes and often well-publicized differences. And for all the efforts to maintain discipline, he continues to be plagued by misstatements and apparent gaffes as he at times bucks what his own campaign is trying to do."

Can McCain survive his own makeover? "Democrats, sensing a weakness, have started to chant that this year's John McCain is not the voluble insurgent who terrorized his party's establishment eight years ago," Nicholas Riccardi and Maeve Reston write in the Los Angeles Times.

"This debate over McCain's maverick-ness reflects a new challenge in his second bid for the presidency: the dilution of the McCain brand," they continue. "To win the GOP primary this year, McCain embraced party dogma in ways big and small, from switching his opposition to President Bush's tax cuts, which he had criticized as skewed to the rich, to making amends with religious leaders he once denounced as 'agents of intolerance.' "

Then there's hostilities in Georgia -- a corner of the world McCain knows well, involving a world leader he's long had a skeptical eye one. (McCain makes a 9 am ET "statement to the press" Monday in Pennsylvania -- starting the week off on his own terms.)

"The violence between Russia and Georgia quickly thrust foreign policy into the U.S. presidential election, with John McCain standing to benefit and Barack Obama facing a more perilous situation," Laura Meckler reports in The Wall Street Journal. "The candidates' responses to the crisis were initially very different in tone. Sen. McCain forcefully blamed Russia, a country he has taken a hard stand on in the past. . . . Sen. Obama's initial response was more measured, not blaming either side."

"McCain has called Russia's Vladimir Putin many things, few of them good. He's called Putin 'a totalitarian dictator' and famously said he looked into his eyes and saw three letters 'K, G and B,' " ABC's John Hendren reports. "And when hostilities erupted along the Georgia-Russia border, McCain was characteristically bold and quick to act."

Hendren continues: "Obama also condemned the Russian invasion. But he cast a wider net for advice -- including Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and his foreign policy advisors. When he spoke, he was characteristically circumspect."

"It has been a rough few weeks for McCain on the foreign policy front -- paging Dr. Maliki -- but he appears to have been ahead of the curve in his assessment that Moscow was the bad actor here," Politico's Jonathan Martin reports. "McCain aides feel encouraged that their candidate appeared to get it right first, and they are now working to remind reporters that he's long been wary of Putin's Russia."

"John McCain's presidential campaign and his supporters are pressing the argument that the escalating conflict in Georgia verifies the Republican's foreign policy judgment and gives him a boost against his Democratic opponent Barack Obama," The Hill's Walter Alarkon reports.