With polls showing Hillary Clinton holding a formidable lead over all other potential candidates for president in 2016, a press conference to promote the idea of a woman president seems a little behind the news, a treasured dream catching up with a new reality, or perhaps a stalking horse for Clinton.

Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, which raises money and works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, said she has no inside knowledge of what Clinton is likely to do, but there is widespread acceptance of a woman as president, and 72 percent of voters surveyed think it’s likely to happen in 2016.   While Clinton gets mentioned most, there’s no guarantee she will run, which is why Emily’s List wants to “ignite the conversation” around an idea whose time has come, and build a movement that Clinton or another in the sisterhood can inherit.  

Ellen Malcolm, who founded Emily’s List in her basement 28 years ago, looked on like a proud parent as pollsters unveiled the latest numbers showing overwhelming support among voters across gender and party lines for a “generally well-qualified woman.” Those numbers were always strong, says Malcolm, but when voters were asked about their friends and neighbors supporting a woman, they weren’t so sure. These days, there’s no hesitation, the country is ready. “What a waltz!” Malcolm exclaims. Twenty years ago, no pollster would have predicted the dramatic shift in attitudes toward a woman president, or marriage equality, or even immigration, that we see today among the general public, says pollster Lisa Grove, who adds one caveat: voters still think it’s harder for a woman than a man to get elected president.

The National Rifle Association is not known as a home for academics, but on the opening day of the NRA’s 142nd Annual Meetings and Exhibitions, the day’s brightest political star walked the stage like a constitutional law professor. Before he was elected as the junior senator from Texas last November, Ted Cruz was, in fact, a law professor at the University of Texas from 2004 to 2009. Cruz received a hometown hero’s welcome in Houston on Friday from a crowd of several thousand at the political event hosted each year by the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), the organization’s political lobby.

There is nothing nonpolitical about the NRA-ILA, and the Leadership Forum functions as much as a rally for NRA members as a beauty pageant for politicians looking to curry favor with one of Washington’s most feared, loathed, and powerful political organizations. Within minutes of the hushed harmony of roughly 5,000 patriotic Americans pledging allegiance to their flag, NRA President David Keene said he knew the crowd had followed “everything that happened in the Senate last month.” Keene then introduced the ILA’s executive director, Chris Cox, as the man instrumental in defeating the background-check bill that failed to pass the Senate on April 17.

As the rally emcee, Cox articulated a series of arguments that speakers including NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, and Sarah Palin repeated throughout the day. Namely, that the NRA is an organization that is funded by and in the service of law-abiding gun owners, and that they are an innocent bystander in the fight over gun control.

While a high school student at Honolulu’s elite Punahou School, Barack Obama was a high-flying member of a pot-smoking, party-hearty crew that called itself “the Choom Gang.” As biographer David Maraniss revealed in last year’s Barack Obama: The Story the future president “had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

In his current trip to meet with Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto, Obama will once again be talking about illegal drugs and interceptions—and he will almost certainly continue his long habit of bogarting other people’s joints. As CNN summarizes it, one of the “key issues” of the trip is to strengthen efforts to stop the flow of pot, cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs from Mexico into the United States.

Despite thinly sourced stories by Obama boosters that the president in his second term “will pivot to the drug war” that he privately considers a “failure,” there’s every reason to believe any new initiatives coming out of this Mexico trip will disappoint the liberals, libertarians, and smattering of conservatives who took Barack Obama seriously when he questioned longstanding drug policies.

During a news conference earlier this week, President Obama was asked about the mass hunger strike at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. The president said it does not surprise him “that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” and it’s why he still believes “that we’ve got to close” it down. Obama ordered Guantánamo shuttered as one of his first acts in office, but more than four years later it is open. The president blamed Congress for the failure to deliver on his pledge. “I’m going to go back at this” and “reengage with Congress,” Obama vowed.

Congressional restrictions have made it more difficult to transfer or relocate Guantánamo detainees. But congressional opposition is not the only reason Guantánamo’s cells are occupied. Closing Guantánamo has always been a tricky proposition—one that is far more difficult than the president’s rhetoric implies.

Consider the findings of Obama’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the files on the 240 detainees held as of January 2009. The task force’s final report, issued in January 2010, outlined the various national security challenges closing Guantánamo entails. Indeed, the report goes a long way toward explaining why 166 detainees remain in their cells to this day.

There’s chutzpah, and then there’s rank hypocrisy.

The RNC released a slick but cynical Web ad this week commemorating the first 100 days of President Obama’s second term. Politics ain’t beanbag, and no one expected their assessment would be sunshine and light. But there’s a particularly low place for folks who block and then blame—in this case, intimating with mock sadness that the president is legislatively impotent for failing to pass universal background checks in the wake of the Sandy Hook slaughter.

Reality check: 41 Republican senators (and five Democrats) voted against the bipartisan compromise bill crafted by Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Manchin. And among Republicans controlling the House, the modest background check bill—supported by 90 percent of Americans—was considered DOA. 

There is a malaise in Washington that’s spreading across the country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, “Americans [do] not give Mr. Obama high marks for his handling of issues”—even though they largely, at times overwhelmingly, agree with his positions on background checks for gun sales and a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to rein in the federal deficit.

The disconnect is sharp; the frustration, the sense of ennui palpable from Capitol Hill to California. You could fairly call it the Obama malaise, but it’s not his fault. It’s his very existence, his presence in the Oval Office, that fuels a nihilistic opposition, driving obstruction and seeding an increasingly disillusioned national mood.

That mood is distinctly different from the malaise that prompted Jimmy Carter to his self-pitying crisis-of-confidence speech in the summer of 1979. The crisis he identified then was not merely doubt about national leadership, but something “deeper, deeper”—a “loss of faith” on the part of the American people. He seemed to be saying that they had let the country, and him, down. He urged his fellow citizens “to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying”—to stop whining and to “say something good” about America.

He added the words in one of the later drafts. The announcement speech had been missing something, a direct response to the creeping cynicism of the previous decade. Why would this time be any different? What was so special about this political novice, that he thought he could solve all of these intractable problems on his own?

“That is why this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

Much has been written over the last few weeks about the limits of presidential power. Some smart observers have pointed out that these limits are not new; that historically they have had less to do with the personalities of our leaders than the structure of our democracy. The founders, reluctant to entrust any executive with the kind of authority that was so abused by the king they revolted against, created a separation of powers between co-equal branches of government.

In an impressive display of restraint, the gals at EMILY’s List did not mention the name Hillary Clinton until a full five minutes into Thursday morning’s kick-off of their new campaign to put a woman in the White House. That was the point at which Stephanie Schriock, the Dem-friendly group’s president, paused in her spiel about how fired up voters are to elect a woman to the highest office to coyly acknowledge that “one name seems to be getting mentioned more than others.” This sent the overwhelmingly female crowd packed into the Fourth Estate Room of the National Press Club into a fit of knowing chuckles. 

Truth be told, no one at the rollout of “Madam President” needed to utter Hillary’s name at all. Even as Schriock stressed that the effort is not about any particular woman and lauded those filling the Democratic party’s “deep bench” (“Kathleen Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, Christine Gregoire, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand…”), pretty much everyone in the room—OK, pretty much everyone in politics—grasps that 2016 is all about Hillary. Either she’ll run and suck up all the light and oxygen in the race, or she won’t run, leaving both the Dems and the Beltway chattering class to spend the rest of the race endlessly musing about how things would be different “if only.”

It was firmly within this all-about-Hillary construct that all of the cheerleading and data points from the Thursday press conference were received.  Most notably, as part of their presentation on the empirical evidence that Americans are itching for a female commander-in-chief, pollsters Jeffrey Liszt and Lisa Grove shared that, in a recent survey of voters in battleground states, a whopping 72% “believe that it is likely that our next president will be a woman.” This information, of course, makes sense only in a political landscape featuring Hillary. It may be that nearly three-quarters of voters are ready (perhaps even eager) to elevate a generic woman to the Big Chair. But, absent Hillary, no way 72% of any group would consider such an outcome likely in the very next election.

Two senators who voted in favor of gun control last month are being rewarded in the polls, new data shows.

New figures from Public Policy Polling find voters more likely to support Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) after they voted ‘yes’ on tightening background checks. These numbers are especially notable because both Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2014 in red states.

On the flip side, as we showed here on Tuesday, approval ratings for several senators in both parties who voted against the measure—ultimately defeating it—have taken a noticeable dip. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Mark Begich (D-AK) were among the most bruised, according to the numbers.

How stupid does the Senate background-check vote look now, I ask the pundits and others who thought it was dumb politics for Obama and the Democrats to push for a vote that they obviously knew they were going to lose. I’d say not very stupid at all. The nosedive taken in the polls by a number of senators who voted against the bill, most of them in red states, makes public sentiment here crystal clear. And now, for the first time since arguably right after the Reagan assassination attempt—a damn long time, in other words—legislators in Washington are feeling political heat on guns that isn’t coming from the NRA. This bill will come back to the Senate, maybe before the August recess, and it already seems possible and maybe even likely to have 60 votes next time.

You’ve seen the poll results showing at least five senators who voted against the Manchin-Toomey bill losing significant support. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire is the only one of the five from a blue state, so it’s probably not surprising that she lost the most, 15 points. But Lisa Murkowski in Alaska lost about as much in net terms. Alaska’s other senator, Democrat Mark Begich, lost about half that. Republicans Rob Portman of Ohio and Jeff Flake of Arizona also tumbled.

Egad. Could it possibly be that those pre-vote polls of all these states by Mayor Bloomberg’s group were ... right? All the clever people pooh-poohed them, because, well, they were done by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and because it just seemed impossible that 70 percent of people from a red state could support the bill. But the polls were evidently right, or at least a lot closer to right than the brilliant minds who laughed at Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey and Harry Reid.

According to The New York Times, key Senate Republicans threaten to sink the entire immigration reform initiative if it includes a provision allowing gay American citizens to bring their life partners into the country. “It’s a deal-breaker for most Republicans,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told the Times. In a radio interview (quoted by the Times), Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is considered reform’s indispensable Republican, was blunt: “If that issue is injected into this bill, this bill will fail. It will not have the support. It will not have my support.”

Really? Republicans will deep-six the entire effort and demolish themselves with Latino voters, business interests, and young people to prevent gay people from having someone to take care of them?

Even to write those words is to wonder whether they can possibly be true. Surely Republicans know that, according to many polls, support for same-sex marriage has tipped above the majority level and is rising. Perhaps some also know that, according to a recent Huffington Post poll, partner immigration enjoys solid 7-percentage-point support. They certainly know that, from a political point of view, the perception among younger voters that a pro-Republican vote is an anti-gay vote is toxic to the GOP brand.

Three weeks after he was elected to the Senate, Ted Cruz delivered a speech in a dimly lit downtown Washington hotel ballroom addressing the thumping his party had sustained at the ballot box, particularly at the hands of Hispanic voters.

“The issue is not, as the media would suggest, 100 percent about immigration,” the Texas senator told the banquet of conservatives, deriding the press corps’s “obsessive” focus on that issue.

“I think Republicans need to remain a party that supports securing the border and stopping illegal immigration and at the same time welcomes and celebrates, champions legal immigration,” he continued, to thunderclaps from the favorable audience. “It ain’t the answer just to suddenly talk about immigration and forget everything else. I’m going to suggest instead a different path.”

While our nation closes the chapters on larger wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our intel-warriors remain engaged there and in other hostile areas throughout the world. U.S. Special Operations Forces are deployed in more than 75 countries. Intelligence officers are posted worldwide. Many of our leaders and pundits complain about the weariness and wariness of war, but the nature of conflict has changed. We face persistent, resilient, diffused, networked nonstate enemies with growing asymmetric power who operate across the globe and challenge our security—and our reference points for combat.

Some leaders wonder if we are at war beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are, but in a different way. Our conflicts are similar to managing deadly outbreaks of disease, with clear, conclusive victories seldom known or celebrated. They are also marked by repeated, specific, micro-interventions. Such missions are characterized by small, speedy, stealthy, and specialized operations that require extraordinary judgment and include decisions about lethal force.

A critical aspect of this new way of war is the U.S. government’s policy of capturing or killing our nation’s nonstate enemies, particularly al Qaeda and affiliated groups. In a debate generating a sharp divergence of views, complicated by Westphalian nation-state paradigms of power and Cold War bureaucratic structures, our leaders struggle to chart a path that our intel-warriors and all our citizens can understand and follow.

A hunter and lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, Democrat Joe Manchin won his Senate seat after airing an ad that showed him firing a rifle and shooting a hole in the cap-and-trade bill backed by President Obama. Now the West Virginia senator is the point man on Capitol Hill for reviving legislation on background checks for gun buyers that lawmakers killed just three weeks ago. With polls showing the public turning on some Republican senators who voted against the popular bill, Manchin’s crusade for a second wave of gun legislation could succeed.

“This isn’t gun control, this is gun sense,” Manchin said Saturday at a forum in Washington, where he shared the stage with liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “I’m a gun owner, I come from a gun culture. If I couldn’t bring some credibility to that issue, why am I here?” His goal, he said, is to have another vote in the Senate before the August recess. “We’re going to pass this thing,” he said. “Don’t give up.”

It’s highly unusual after a crushing defeat to ask for a redo and expect that the outcome will be any different in three or four months, but there is reason to take Manchin seriously. Polls taken before the Senate vote showed that more than 90 percent of voters support background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, and some of those voters have evidently soured on the senators who helped bring the bill down. Conversely, vulnerable Democrats in red states who voted for the bill, like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Kay Hagan in North Carolina, are experiencing no ill effects.