Senior Obama advisor David Axelrod and Communications Director Robert Gibbs hosted a conference call with reporters Sunday, while the senator himself spent the day with his family. The intent of the call was to focus on Senator Clinton’s lack of transparency. Gibbs outlined four questions directed towards Senator Clinton:

1.    Will the Clinton campaign release their full tax returns, including schedules?
2.    Will Senator Clinton release all of her earmark requests?                                                                  3.    Will the Clinton campaign release the names of all donors to the Clinton foundation and to the Clinton library, and if not, why?
4.    Will the Clinton campaign instruct the Clinton Library to release all of their records?

“The Clinton campaign has made a premium out of making sure that candidates are vetted, that transparency is full, and their failure to continue to answer these questions simply brings us another series of questions, which is what is Senator Clinton hiding and what is lurking in those documents that she believes voters don’t have a right to know?” Gibbs asked.

But during the question and answer period of the call, the reporters switched gears, focusing the latest hot topic in the Democratic race - Obama’s relationship with the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Axelrod stressed Obama had  been forthright on the controversy and had condemned Wright’s statements, pointing out this was a personally difficult time for Senator Obama. “As you know Reverend Wright married him, introduced him, as [Obama] said, to the church, brought him into the church, into Christianity, baptized his children. So this is a painful thing for him because he condemns the things that Rev. Wright said, but he also knows him as a person, so it’s a difficult matter for him.”

When asked if the story would damage the campaign, Axelrod observed, “Reverend Wright is gone from the church now; he’s no longer the pastor of the church and I think people will hear Senator Obama on this issue, and…they understand that these do not represent his views, and they don’t represent the sum total of what Rev Wright has done over the years or their relationship. I think that this will pass, but we understand there’s a lot of interest in it now.”

Axelrod then asked Gibbs, “Robert, do you have anything to add?” Gibbs replied, “No, I think that covers it.”

On the daily conference call for reporters, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson responded to the Obama campaign’s demand for Senator Clinton’s tax returns with a heated call for Obama to practice what he’s preaching — saying “if they want to talk about disclosure, let’s talk about it.”

“Before we talk about taxes, I would ask the Obama campaign if he or they are prepared to release all of his taxes when he was in elected office. So far the answer to that has been no,” he said. The campaign plans to release the Clintons’ tax returns since 2000 “on or about April 15th,” while Obama has released returns only for 2006; by way of contrast, Wolfson said the American people already have 20 years of Clinton financial statements in the public domain.

He also questioned Obama’s failure to release documents from his years in the Illinois state senate — as well as his explanation that those records don’t exist. “Let’s talk about state senate records,” he said. “I would ask the Obama campaign, are you prepared to release all your earmark requests when you were in the state Senate?”

Pointing out that the National Archives has said that Sen Clinton’s schedules from her time in the White House will soon be released, Wolfson said “Senator Obama can put out his schedules in the state Senate at any time, he hasn’t done so. He claims no records exist from his state Senator days.”

“If we want to go down this road, there are questions that ought to be posed to the Obama campaign that they have heretofore refused to answer.”

Senior Strategist Mark Penn subtly admonished reporters for not digging deepy enough into Obama’s unreleased documents. “One would think the demand would not be for some additional information when we’ve already done senate disclosures, but of this important set of information about Senator Obama that could be critical for the voters in these last 12 jurisdictions making their decisions,” he said, arguing that the time to release those documents is now, not later.

For full (but mercifully brief) notes on the hour-long call, keep reading below.

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Obama Campaign Manager, David Plouffe estimates his candidate has a 136 pledged delegate lead after yesterday’s Potomac Primary wins. The Obama campaign has now won 21 contests (including 12 primaries) and, according to the campaign, has a 700,000 vote lead in terms of popular votes cast. “We couldn’t be in a stronger position right now, and the last really five days, we believe, will be looked at back at as a very decisive period in the nomination contest,” he declared. “We think it really put us on the path to the nomination.”

On a conference call with reporters, Plouffe said his candidate has the advantage. “We believe it’s next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close that pledged delegate count. The only way she could do it is winning most of the rest of the contests by 25 - 30 points. And we see not a single contest on the calendar left where we’d expect her to win by those kind of margins.” He later explained that they expect to benefit from a more relaxed primary schedule because “we believe anytime Senator Obama is able to spend time with voters in states, we have profited from that.”

The only way Senator Clinton could overcome this gap, Plouffe said, is if she wins both Texas and Ohio by “blowout” proportions - meaning a 20 point margin or greater as to win a large proportion of the delegates at stake. But Team Obama doesn’t expect that to happen - in fact, they plan on amassing more delegates themselves in both states. “At this point, even the most creative math, really does not get her ever back even in terms of pledged delegates,” Plouffe said, saying it would be “highly unlikely” that their pledged delegate lead will be eroded.

So does this mean victory or will superdelegates decide the Party’s nominee? “We believed all along that the pledged delegate leader will be the Democratic nominee of the party,” Plouffe stated. “I think there’s a growing chorus of concern out there that people do not think that superdelegates should overturn the result of the contests, so we have closed the gap with superdelegates, we’re continuing to try and attract support and we’ll continue to do that. But I think at the end of the day, if we head into June and we’ve won more states, more importantly we have a pledged delegate lead, you know at the end of the day, I think it’s much more likely than not that the superdelegates ratify that outcome,” Plouffe said.

The Obama campaign put on a hastily arranged conference call today, hosted by campaign manager David Plouffe and director of delegate selection, Jeff Berman, to claim victory on Nevada’s delegate count.

Plouffe said Senator Obama chipped away at Senator Clinton’s huge lead and closed strong to come within just several percentage points of winning the caucus. Instead, they settled for a win in the all-important delegate count - Nevada has 25 delegates who vote for a nominee at the convention. After multiple news outlets called the race for Clinton, the Associated Press reported that Senator Clinton won 13 of those delegates while Obama took 12.

Not according to team Obama. It was, in fact, the opposite, according to their math. They explained that Obama won the district with odd numbers of delegates while where Hillary won, the numbers of delegates were even, so the delegates were split evenly. The campaign explained that the state Democratic Party gave incomplete information to the news outlet. An Associated Press reporter on the call piped up during the question and answer period of the call to say the campaign “might be right.”

Plouffe stated that the campaign will have “20 lifetimes” between now and the end of February and ” it does seem like we are headed for a long and protracted fight here.” That campaign, he said, will increasingly turn into a contest for delegates. To rub it in a bit, the campaign announced their conference call today with a quote from Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson, who spoke to the Washington Post three days ago. “This is a race for delegates. It is not a battle for individual states. As David knows, we are well past the time when any state will have a disproportionate influence on the nominating process.” The “David” Wolfson was referring to, of course, was Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

The Nevada State Democratic Party put out a statement of their own. “No national convention delegates were awarded. The calculations of national convention delegates being circulated are based upon an assumption that delegate preferences will remain the same between now and April 2008. We look forward to our county and state conventions where we will choose the delegates for the nominee that Nevadans support.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press updated their story, which was forwarded to reporters by the Obama campaign. The first line: “Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama split the spoils in the Nevada caucuses Saturday night, a race marred by late charges of dirty politics.”

Senator Hillary Clinton continued to question Senator Barack Obama’s positions on the War in Iraq. On Meet the Press today, Clinton stated that Obama four years ago said he wasn’t sure how he would have voted in 2002 if he had been in the Senate. Clinton reminded host Tim Russert that when he asked Obama about it, Obama responded that he didn’t want to hurt then nominees John Kerry and John Edwards.

This, Clinton argued, was a “political explanation” and she said, “If he was against the war, he should have spoken out in 2004, he should have followed his speech, which is that he would not vote for funding in 2005, 2006, and 2007.” Clinton went on to say that this was “inconsistent” and pointed out that “there were others

The Obama campaign responded, in part, by setting up a conference call with foreign policy advisor, Dr. Susan Rice and Senate Majority Whip and Obama Campaign Co-Chair, Senator Dick Durbin. On the call, Durbin said he was “troubled” by recent allegations that Senator Obama’s views on the Iraq war have been inconsistent and that the Clinton campaign must be “getting bad information.” These types of accusations, Durbin said, are not good for this campaign, for the election, or for the Democratic Party.

When asked by a reporter why he thought the Clinton campaign was aggressively going after Senator Obama’s position on the Iraq War, Durbin admitted he was speculating, but said it is common for candidates to go after their opponent’s “positions of strength.” That position for Obama, Durbin said, is his “early and consistent” opposition to this war, so that’s why the Clinton’s have called it into question.

Durbin likened this to the strategy used by the 2004 527 Group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who called into question Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. If team Clinton can call into question Obama’s war positions, they could then “open up” many other issues.

UPDATE: In a press availability today, Senator Obama was asked if he thought the Clinton camp was swift boating his campaign. “Look, they have decided to run a relentlessly negative campaign. I don’t think anybody who’s watching would deny that. I gather she’s determined that instead of trying to sell herself on why she would be the best president, she’s trying to convince folks that I wouldn’t be a good one.” And at a town hall meeting later in the day in Pahrump, Nevada, Obama was sure to talk about what he considers a solid and consistent record on the war in Iraq - and to mention that one of his opponents is trying to “rewrite history.”

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