Usually when you talk about polls in hoops-crazy Indiana and North Carolina, you’re referring to college basketball rankings. But today, all the “polling” talk has been associated with the two states’ important Democratic presidential primaries. Will tonight’s results finally settle it between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or will the race for the Democratic nomination go on and on? If it continues, maybe they should battle it out on the basketball court and determine the nominee with a game of H-O-R-S-E.

Stay tuned here as the results roll in. …

UPDATE (7:19 p.m.): Clinton leads early in Indiana.

UPDATE (7:30 p.m.): Polls close in North Carolina, and Obama is called the winner.

UPDATE (8:24 p.m.): CBS News calls Indiana for Clinton. … As of 9 p.m., they’re still the only one to do so.

UPDATE (9:15 p.m.): In a speech from Raleigh, N.C., Obama congratulates Clinton on her apparent victory in Indiana.

UPDATE (10:18 p.m.): Lack of Lake County (Gary), Ind., results is what’s keeping networks (other than CBS), AP, and others from calling Indiana.

In his now infamous remarks at the National Press Club, Rev. Jeremiah Wright said to applause from black leaders, “This most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it is an attack on the black church.”

He went on to say, “It is our hope that this just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible. …. Maybe that religious tradition will be understood, celebrated, and even embraced by a nation that seems not to have noticed why 11 o’clock on Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America.”

He was right about a few things: American churches are still segregated and until now, many white Christians were ignorant of black liberation theology. But just how mainstream are Wright’s views?

In the Globe and Mail, Michael Valpy says Americans are finally realizing the scope of black liberation theology, calling Wright “not a radical kook but a mainstream voice” and adding, “There are a lot of Jeremiah Wrights across their land.”

Other accounts paint a more complicated picture. God-o-Meter and The New Republic note that Wright’s church is more liberal and socially progressive than many black churches. NPR quotes another Church of Christ pastor in agreement with Wright: “”It is an attack on the black church — to muzzle us to silence the preaching and the power of that form of teaching and preaching and action in the world.”

But a Pentecostal pastor disagrees: “Jeremiah Wright is not mainstream. … He doesn’t represent the majority. … My guess is maybe 25 percent of black pastors may hold that view.” Another pastor told Bloomberg.com that Wright’s comments “were just totally ridiculous and do not reflect mainstream thought in the African-American community.” A Chicago pastor said Wright has done good in the Chicago community, but he’s a “very militant minister” who “took advantage of the big stage.”

The Associated Press finds pastors divided between their admiration of Obama and Wright and their disapproval of the way they handled the disagreement. The New York Times says parishioners are less likely to defend Wright than their pastors. Bloomberg.com quotes one of Wright’s ex-parishioners saying he partly agrees with Wright, but that Wright doesn’t represent the black church: “I feel like he’s trying to be a spokesperson for the black Christians, but we don’t want different races to look at us through Jeremiah Wright.”

Associated Press religion writer Eric Gorski points out that this week’s falling out between Barack Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright has put black pastors and their congregations in a difficult position. Do they fall in behind the man who could be the first black president of the United States or do they rally to support a well-known preacher who some think has been unfairly maligned?

“What I am disappointed in is Rev. Wright’s continuing to be in the public eye,” said Bishop Charles H. Ellis III, the senior pastor of 6,500-member Greater Grace Temple in Detroit. “If he has a point to get across, make your point. We as ministers have to be very careful about our timing.”

Another Detroit pastor, Rev. William Revely of 300-member Holy Hope Heritage Church, who has known Wright since the 1970s, questioned Obama’s claim that he’d never heard any of Wright’s controversial remarks from the pulpit: “Anybody who has heard Jeremiah preach has heard that. Jeremiah, he’s a pastor, and as a pastor you have to see things as they are. Politicians see things as they want them to be.”

Others, such as the Rev. Bennie Whiten, a retired United Church of Christ minister, try to see both sides while hoping for eventual reconciliation: “I think we’ve got two very good men, two very strong men, who find themselves in an almost impossible situation from which neither can extricate himself.”

To read Gorski’s complete article, where he talks to several other black pastors who find themselves and their congregations at odds with one or both of these two men, go here.

Former Hillary Clinton supporter Joe Andrew, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee appointed by Bill Clinton in 1999, has switched his allegiance to Barack Obama. With less than a week to go before the Indiana primary, the Indianapolis native urged other superdelegates to follow his lead and unify behind Obama: “[A] vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists [Republican] John McCain.” Andrew had been in the Clinton camp since she first announced her candidacy.

In losing Andrew, along with other recent gains by Obama, Clinton’s superdelegate lead has shrunk to just 15, 263-248. In overall delegates, Obama now leads 1,736.5 to 1,597.5 for Clinton, with 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

Hillary Clinton may have received the endorsement of North Carolina’s governor for next week’s primary, but her rival Barack Obama may have done her one better by getting the implied support of University of North Carolina men’s basketball coach Roy Williams and his Final Four Tar Heel team. Yesterday, while Clinton was hobnobbing with Gov. Mike Easley, Obama scrimmaged with the Heels, at one point missing a layup after driving by consensus National Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough. When Obama wasn’t getting enough passes his way, Williams yelled out from the sidelines : “You’ve got the future president of the United States wide open.”

In being present at such a pick-up game involving his players during the off-season, Williams was technically in violation of NCAA rules. The NCAA, however, made an exception in this case. “This was a unique situation and not an NCAA issue,” NCAA Media Relations Director Erik Christianson told The News & Observer. “It certainly was a great opportunity for the student-athletes to interact with a presidential candidate.”

It may not have concerned the NCAA, but rumors are now circulating that many of the Tar Heel faithful who are either Clinton or McCain supporters have gone over to the dark side and have become Duke fans.

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Americans will have two presidential candidates who are open to school choice measures.

Barack Obama went on Fox News Sunday this week and said, “We should be experimenting with charter schools” and “different ways of compensating teachers” — beliefs he’s long held but not always trumpeted, The New Republic’s Josh Patashnik says. Obama advocated charter schools and performance-pay for teachers in Illinois, and has even hinted that he wouldn’t rule out the idea of school vouchers.

John McCain visited New Orleans Thursday on his “It’s Time for Action” tour, stopping in cities the campaign said the federal government has forgotten, but where local solutions are working.

New Orleans has become a proving ground for charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to the campaign, it has the highest percentage of students in charter schools among U.S. Cities. Most of the city’s students now attend charter schools. Last year, students in New Orleans charter schools out-scored their peers in traditional public schools on a standardized test.

A president friendly to charter schools could spur the already-growing charter school movement. The number of charter schools nationwide grew by 11 percent in 2006, serving a student body that is on average 53 percent minority and 54 percent low-income, according a survey from the Center for Education Reform.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., J.C. Huizenga, the founder of National Heritage Academies, a national chain of 55 K-8 charter schools located in six states, recently announced plans to started a college prep high school to go head-to head with a new public college prep school.

Chicago school teacher Will Okun recently described his frustrations with traditional city schools in an blog post entitled “The Mire.” The Chicago Public Schools have 27 charter schools on 48 campuses. Hundreds are on the waiting lists, and the city plans for more by 2010.

Okun, while cautioning parents and policy-makers to remember the students left behind in the public schools, describes parents desperate to pull their children from traditional schools:

Charter-school parents speak of higher graduation rates, better facilities, more extracurricular opportunities, caring teachers, and stricter discipline. Most importantly, these parents speak of charter schools with a sense of hope and purpose that no longer exists in most public high schools on the West Side. … I do not blame parents for wanting to surround their children with other children and parents who give education top priority.”

John McCain and Barack Obama have one thing in common—a pastor problem. McCain has come under fire for John Hagee’s comments regarding Catholics and Hurricane Katrina, while Obama is taking heat for anti-American sermons by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Hagee’s endorsement of McCain has outraged many, and is arguably hurting McCain more than helping him. Recognizing this, McCain took a strong (albeit repetitious) stance against Hagee’s Katrina comments (in which he called the hurricane God’s judgment against the people of New Orleans) while visiting the Gulf Coast last week:

It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense. I don’t have anything additional to say. It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, I don’t have anything more to say … it’s nonsense. I reject it categorically.

In response to controversy surrounding Wright’s comments, Obama delivered a speech on race in Philadelphia in March, and has called Wright’s words “divisive,” “racially charged” and “views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”

On Monday, however, Wright fought back, accusing Obama of politicking:

He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American. He said I didn’t offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon.

Politics or not, quarantining himself from Wright is a necessity for Obama, especially since polls show Wright’s comments are costing the Obama campaign.

But these candidates vs. pastor problems mark a growing trend. Men of the cloth are increasingly taking on the role of political adviser, not just spiritual leader. This past fall, Robert Jeffers, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, campaigned against Mitt Romney, encouraging his congregation not to elect the former governor. Kenneth Taylor, a pastor in Algoma, Wis., might soon be fighting for his tax exempt status because of a politically-charged sermon he gave during the last election.

Because pastors are the shepherds of the flock, it is reasonable to expect them to point out danger and keep their parishioners from it. But increasingly, conservative pastors are sounding more like infamous Reverends such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Such comments also leave many Christian conservatives fumbling to defend language similar to Wright’s—a glaring hypocrisy to many.

The freeway between the “city of God” and the “city of man” keeps expanding. With the number of pastors preaching politics from the pulpit, we can probably expect more controversy.

While most pundits have conceded next Tuesday’s Democratic primary in North Carolina to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton picked up a key endorsement today in the Tar Heel state: Democratic Gov. Mike Easley. “There’s been lots of ‘Yes we can, yes we should,’” Easley said this morning with Clinton by his side. “Hillary Clinton is ready to deliver.” The two Democrats running to replace Easley as governor, Richard Moore and Bev Perdue, have endorsed Obama, which was the focus of the controversial TV ad produced by the N.C. GOP that was in the news last week.

Despite the fact that Obama says he wants his campaign to transcend race, exit polls and election anecdotes seem to reveal another shameful truth: Some people aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, and others are going to put up vocal, overt and racist opposition.

Andrew Sullivan says, “I think all of us who once dismissed the fashionable view around the world that a black man would have a real problem becoming an American president have had a learning experience these past few weeks. … You have to be blind not to see the impact of race.”

In Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign dealt with vandalism and volunteers faced racial slurs. The North Carolina GOP party ran an ad John McCain denounced and the New York Times condemned as “a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state.” Pennsylvania exit polls showed the usual racial rift: Clinton won white voters – the older the voter group, the greater the margin – while Obama won 85 percent of the black vote.

An April AP-Yahoo poll found that 8 percent of white voters would be uncomfortable voting for a black candidate, but given people’s reluctance to admit racism the number is probably higher. A prominent Republican told Politico’s Roger Simon that if Obama faces John McCain, the racist vote is worth 15 percent to McCain.

If McCain is getting the racist vote in November, is Hillary Clinton getting it now? Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told Talking Points Memo that race-based voters are “probably firmly in John McCain’s camp anyway.” But in Pennsylvania, about one in five said the candidate’s race was among the top deciding factors, and white voters who cited race supported Clinton over Obama three to one.

The racial tension is spilling over into party politics. The Washington Post leads today with a story about Democrats fearing a racial divide within the party. After Bill Clinton accused the Obama camp of playing the race card on him, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn called Clinton’s behavior “bizarre” and accused the Clinton campaign of marginalizing black voters and creating racial divides within the Democratic party.

On The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson says, “Much of the tragedy of the Obama campaign is how ever so steadily, incrementally its theme has devolved into a racialist message.” The question is whether or not this racialism was always present in Obama’s campaign, as Hanson suggests, or due to a still racially charged political climate.

After spending $15 million in Pennsylvania in the past month and logging hours on the road across the Keystone State, the two Democratic candidates traded just a dozen delegates.

Clinton’s victory, though nearly a full 10 points in the popular vote, was hardly substantial where it counted.  The situation mirrored Texas, which Hillary actually lost in the delegate count, and Super Tuesday’s races, all of which left the campaign nearly unchanged. The election has cost Obama and Clinton together over $350 million to-date with virtually inconclusive results continuously plaguing the race.

Though Hillary did not gain much ground on Obama this week, she did win two critical victories: she cut Obama’s popular vote lead by 25% and picked up a much needed wave of momentum. Almost as important for Hillary has been signs that Obama is wearing down. (His hair is even graying.) His uncharacteristic miscues, such as the comment about rural Pennsylvanians, are leading some Democrats to think that if he can’t go the distance in the primary, how could he withstand the presidency?

Financial expenditures and aging aside, the basic math is in Obama’s favor right now. Given a best case scenario in the remaining primaries, Hillary will still be well short of taking the lead (considering polls in Indiana and North Carolina). The contest will eventually come down to superdelegates, of which she will need 70% to 75% of the remaining undeclared. Unfortunately she has only gotten 4% of the pledged superdelegates since March.

This has led to many calls for Hillary to exit and allow Obama to focus on McCain. But Slate Magazine says Hillary has “every right to stay in the primary race for as long as she wishes” because she could capture the popular vote and sway the superdelegates. Yet, even if she were to win the popular vote, would superdelegates truly strip Obama of the nomination he leads by the party’s rules?

Considering superdelegates are the most important voters now, Democrats will basically be spending money on themselves under the guise of primary elections. The situation would almost be comical if one didn’t consider all the other things $15 million could have bought. How many uninsured Americans could get healthcare from the next $100 million spent in this campaign?