One more sign congressional Republicans may be in for a rough ride this election season: Democrats are fielding strong candidates in GOP breadbasket districts, like the western Miami-Dade county redoubt of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Diaz-Balart cruised to victory in 2006 with nearly 59 percent of the vote, but he faces an energetic and savvy challenger in Democratic operative Joe Garcia, who is wasting no time in zinging the GOP incumbent as obsessed with Castro at the expense of bread-and-butter economic issues.

In the not-too-distant past, no Castro obsession was too strong for the rabidly anti-Fidel exile community in south Florida. But the 1960s-era generation of exiles is aging and their children and grandchildren don't always take the same rock-hard line toward Cuba.

Garcia himself has the street cred to call out Diaz-Balart on Cuba because he is a former director of the ardently anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation.

Click here for a taste of what Garcia's throwing at the Diaz-Balart -- and at his brother, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who occupies a neighboring seat and holds similar Cuban policy views.

Chuck Schumer, at a Crain's Breakfast in New York City, sounds a note of optimism about the viability of an Obama/Clinton ticket:

"At first I thought it wasn't but I do think it could be."

About voters: "They're worried, and they want somebody to come in and say I can help a little bit you with healthcare, and paying for college, and all these things, and a Democratic candidate is more likely to do it. Hillary and Barack have both run very strong and great races, and I think they'd be a strong ticket together."

It's possible that's what he really thinks. But a lot of things -- the difficulty of selling the first black and the first woman in the same year; the lack of national security credentials; the idea that Hillary would spend eight years with less power than she had as First Lady or Senator; the fundamental disagreement on health care; the risks of Bill floating on the outskirts of a ticket and an administration -- counsel against the idea.

So what else could Schumer be up to?

Maybe the idea that a little flattery, and the ability to turn down the v-p slot, is part of what it'll take to ease Clinton out of the race....

John Riley writes the Spin Cycle blog for Newsday

by Frank James

Here's some news that may help the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama get through what's expected to be a difficult couple of primaries tomorrow and next Tuesday in West Virginia and Kentucky, respectively. Gallup says he's pulling ahead of Sen. Hillary Clinton in its national polling for the first time in three weeks.

Among Democratic voters, Obama has a seven-point lead, 50 percent versus 43 percent, in its polling over Clinton, Gallup said. Here's a snippet.

Although Obama did not achieve an immediate bounce in national Democratic support after last week's primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it could be that the subsequent political punditry, proclaiming the Clinton campaign is effectively over, is affecting voters.

Not good for Clinton, certainly. But there was still a nugget of good news for Clinton which was bad news for Sen. John McCain, the all but official Republican nominee.

Obama leads McCain by four points, 47% to 43%. Clinton leads McCain by five points, 49% to 44%. Both leads represent the candidates' highest margins over McCain, to date, since Gallup began tracking the general election ballots in early March.

This is certainly a lifeline Clinton can use as she continues to hang in the race and hoping for Obama to stumble badly. It feeds into her argument that she has a better chance of beating McCain does than Obama does, though the difference between Obama and Clinton isn't statistically significant.

Faced with a scandal-soiled attorney general who won't go away, the Ohio Democratic Party is trying a 'if you can't beat Marc Dann, erase him' strategy.

Click here to get to the ODP web site. Then click on 'elected officials'.

Whoa. Where's Marc Dann?

There's a statement on the front page of the web site from top Democrats asking Dann to step down, but his bio listing is gone.

Here's some background on why Ohio Dems are so eager to see Dann disappear.

The Democrats attempted erasure recalls those old Kremlin group photos in which a commissar or field marshal who'd fallen from favor was airbrushed out of the pic.

Except in those cases, the pariah really was gone, to the gulag, the grave or, if he was lucky, to a gilded confinement at his dacha.

Dann's still around, vowing to ride out the heat from both parties. But it's hard to imagine an end game that works out favorably for him. One factor in his intransigence may be lack of another job. Word is that Dann has been calling around to various Ohio politicos looking for a place to land.