The biggest news of the week was undoubtedly John McCain’s smearing by the New York Times. While the senator may have gotten the best of it so far--even the Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, felt the newspaper shouldn’t have published the piece’s most scintillating passages--E.J. Dionne pointed out that the paper’s bumbling was something of a break for McCain, and that this story might not be over yet. "Sex is to journalism what the queen of spades is to a game of hearts, it overwhelms everything," Dionne said on This Week’s roundtable, but he thinks "short term, McCain had a good week because all of these conservatives rallied against the New York Times. I think long term this story hangs around because the core question . . . the sex kind of drove out the legitimate part of the story in the public’s mind, which is, ‘is this Saint John McCain?’"

The Democratic primary rumbles on. New Jersey governor Jon Corzine dodged a question as to whether or not his party’s "super-delegates" will decide the nomination, saying "we’ll see how March 4th comes out. I’m a lot more upbeat about Senator Clinton’s chances in that period. We have a big state in Pennsylvania still to vote." Knowing that those states probably won’t be enough to get his candidate, Hillary Clinton, over the top, Corzine ominously pointed out that his party "still [has] to sort out two very important elements, or states in our system, that is Florida and Michigan. How that ends up being decided, how those votes are taken into consideration."

Why does the Clinton camp need to break the rules and get Florida and Michigan’s delegates seated? Chuck Todd explained on Meet the Press:

"She'd have to do something impossible, which is win [in Texas and Ohio] by some 15 or 20 points. I mean, I sort of crunched some numbers from March 4th to see if she, she can win three of the four states, she could win Texas 52-48, Ohio 52-48, Rhode Island 52-48, lose Vermont, say, 55-45, and she will net all of three delegates in that scenario, because there's a couple things working against her. First of all, this Texas primacaucus, whatever you want to call it, where two-thirds of the delegates are going to be distributed by statewide vote in the state Senate districts and then a third of the delegates are decided later that night in a caucus."

Oh, and Ralph Nader announced his candidacy for president as well, taking up a full segment on Meet the Press to do so. I’ll be curious to see if Tim Russert grants Lyndon LaRouche equal time. The two will have about the same level of impact on the race this year.