Democratic challenger Michael Oliverio, a state senator, presents Mollohan with his toughest re-election race since the last round of redistricting in 1990. The last time Mollohan had a primary challenger at all was in 1998, and the incumbent has received at least 64 percent in each general election contest since 1984.

The 1st District primary race between Mollohan and Oliverio has been marked by attack ads and negative campaigning. In a recent commercial, Oliverio blasts Mollohan for being under investigation by the F.B.I. and states Mollohan “is one of the most corrupt members of Congress.” Oliverio has made ethics and integrity the cornerstones of his campaign and has also taken shots at the incumbent for allegedly getting rich off deals funneling money to friends’ businesses, a reported subject of the Justice Department probe.

Mollohan responds in an ad that he was exonerated by the Justice Department (which ended its four-year investigation in January) and says Oliverio’s ads are misleading. Mollohan counters that Oliverio is a “right-wing” candidate who seeks to privatize Social Security.

Each candidate commissioned polls that show a tight race and national political prognosticators indicate the outcome of tonight’s race isn’t easy to predict.

Additional races going on around the country tonight include:

West Virginia: The Mollohan-Oliverio primary is the marquee race in tonight’s West Virginia primary, but tonight’s race will also determine the GOP challenger to Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall in the 3rd District.

Nebraska: Rep. Lee Terry (R) faces a primary challenge from health care consulting firm owner Matt Sakalosky in the 2nd District, and Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R) also faces challengers in the 1st District. Though some local news outlets have devoted attention to these races, the challengers in both contests have been significantly outraised and remain largely unknown.

Georgia Special Election: Several special elections are taking place in Georgia tonight, most notably the 9th District race to succeed Republican Nathan Deal, who resigned this year in order to focus on his bid for governor. But tonight is unlikely to yield a final outcome. A total of eight candidates, six of them Republican, are competing on the same ballot. If no single candidate receives a majority (a likely result tonight), the top two finishers, regardless of party, will compete in a runoff three weeks from now.

To further complicate things, tonight’s election in Georgia’s 9th is only to elect a member to finish out Deal’s current term through Jan. 2011. A regular primary election will be held in July to elect a member to serve in the next session of Congress beginning in January.

Matt Duss has a good post about how American conservatives, unable to cope with the potential loss of a demagogic Iranian leader who provides a pretext for continued hostility, are suddenly discovering the progressive argument of the past several years that Iran’s president has meager authority to set foreign policy. While I neglected to blog it yesterday, at the Center for a New American Security conference, Nicholas Burns, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, told conservative op-ed writers they were making a mistake by discounting the potential for change in Iran.  President Obama “effectively has put Ahmadinejad on [the] defensive prior to this election because of our ability now to open up the vista for the possibility of negotiations,” Burns said. Gen. David Petraeus followed up shortly afterward with a more subtle remark, saying that Iranian foreign adventurism had acted as a recruiting tool for Arab forces in the Middle East to bandwagon with the United States in order to counter potential Iranian hegemony.

It would be a mistake to interpret whatever happens in the Iranian election as a referendum on the United States, because it’s primarily domestic concerns like high unemployment that are driving people out into the streets for Moussavi, as would make sense. What’s more, Moussavi is an old-guard figure who embraces the consensus Iranian position about developing nuclear energy. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier this week that Iran had a right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear energy. That’s a shade further than President Obama has gone, though he said in his Cairo speech that “any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” But it appeared to reflect a recognition that while the election of Moussavi won’t resolve the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United States, negotiations didn’t have to proceed from absolute positions.

The Obama administration has been more circumspect, not wanting to get in the way of an election that might remove Ahmadinejad and also not wanting to say anything that would foreclose any options if it still has to deal with him. Laura Rozen has a good post on that:

“We are committed to direct diplomacy with whatever government emerges,” a U.S. official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. The administration is “being tight-lipped on this one,” he acknowledged, noting that some planned interviews on the issue had been shut down out of apparent sensitivity to concerns that Iranian hard-liners could portray them as evidence of U.S. meddling, a sensitive issue in Iran.

Well, mostly. In one diplomatic blunder, Dennis Ross, the non-special-envoy to Iran, co-published a book yesterday that floats the prospect of an attack on Iran:

The authors included a nuanced, 30-page chapter that lays out options for dealing with Iran, which has so far not responded to President Barack Obama‘s overtures for better relations, with elections there coming up on Friday.

“Tougher policies — either militarily or meaningful containment — will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,” they wrote.

The book was scheduled to be published before Ross went into the administration. But he couldn’t have asked for a publication delay?

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The real truth Americans need to embrace is that nearly all of the most urgent global challenges — the quaking financial markets, climate change, terrorism — cannot be resolved by America’s acting alone in the world. Rather than retreat into isolationism, as we have often done in our history, or go it alone as the unilateralists advocated disastrously in the past decade, we need to commit ourselves to a national strategy of smart engagement with the rest of the world. Simply put, we need all the friends we can get. And we need to think more creatively about how to blunt the power of opponents through smart diplomacy, not just the force of arms. …

[I]t is crude, simplistic and wrong to charge that negotiations reflect weakness or appeasement. More often than not, they are evidence of a strong and self-confident country.

Why, that would be Nick Burns, former undersecretary of state for political affairs under George W. Bush, writing as a grown-up in Newsweek. He must be one of those “pathetically opportunistic ‘conservatives’ who’ve been desperately clambering on board the Obama juggernaut,” as Bill Kristol called Burns’ ilk in a Weekly Standard editorial.

I know. The way reality keeps shattering your worldview — it’s just not fair!