Good Wednesday morning. The political world halts at 4 p.m. this afternoon for a memorial to Tim Russert, to be held at the Kennedy Center here in Washington. For one final day, Washington will say goodbye to a giant. Here's what else Washington is watching today:

-- The Senate is still at work on a bill to produce jobs in renewable energy, and may also take a moment to deal with an economic recovery bill aimed at the housing market that the House has already passed. The House meets at 10 a.m. for its own legislative business after once again successfully renaming several post offices last night. Appropriations committees in both chambers are taking up the Fiscal Year 2009 Homeland Security appropriations measure. President Bush has meetings set with the prime minister of Bulgaria and the Chinese delegation to the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue before addressing an NRCC dinner this evening.

-- Barack Obama and John McCain spent yesterday feuding over terrorism and how those who would commit such acts are treated under U.S. law. Obama told ABC's Jake Tapper that Guantanamo detainees should be tried in federal courts, as the first bombers of the World Trade Center were in 1993, while McCain surrogates warned that was a dangerously naive policy, as the New York Observer's Jason Horowitz writes. Obama surrogates including Richard Clarke, the one-time National Security Council staffer, and John Kerry, hit back, accusing McCain of politics as usual.

-- Terrorism, and the legal handling of suspects or perpetrators, is clearly playing on McCain's turf. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows 53% of voters say they trust McCain to handle the war on terrorism while 39% trust Obama to best handle it -- one of just two issues on which McCain has a clear lead. But both campaigns are probably doing well to at least raise the issue, as Marc Ambinder writes: Until now, terrorism has been more an overarching boogeyman than a real point of discussion. By talking about how they would handle terrorists, each is defining what, exactly, the war on terror means to them in a more substantive way.

-- The push to unify the Democratic Party, if it's even divided, continued yesterday as Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, joined senators at a weekly party lunch on Capitol Hill, MSNBC's Ken Strickland reported. After moving many key DNC functions from Washington to Chicago to integrate them more closely with the campaign, Obama's troops are consolidating power, and in some cases giving high-profile surrogate roles to former Clinton backers. North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and others have already been featured prominently on stage next to the candidate they opposed in the primaries.

-- Obama and Hillary Clinton will meet publicly for the first time a week from tomorrow, when the New York Senator will introduce Obama to her former national finance committee at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The two campaigns have been talking about how best to use Clinton through the Summer, and money is the first step, the New York Daily News reports. Clintonites might not be pleased with the role they have to play, as the last campaign to lose this year, but they're playing it, and the better the results the more credit Clinton will get.

-- Meanwhile, having been assigned top aides for the first time, the push to reinvent Michelle Obama is under way, beginning today when she hosts "The View." The potential First Lady has undergone a rough few months, as some have wondered whether she is patriotic, whether there is a "racial anger," as the New York Times' Michael Powell and Jodi Cantor call it, and other attacks worse than those visited on the candidate himself. Sometimes attacks on a spouse are the worst kind, raising subtle questions about the candidate while straying past the line of decency. Michelle's image, in the middle of a minor makeover, is evidence that the Obama campaign is trying to get out front of any rumors that may taint the candidate and his wife.

-- And forget McCain's and Obama's promises to run campaigns the clean way. They can abstain from lobbyist donations and PAC money, or at least say they will do so, as much as they want, but once both candidates get to conventions in St. Paul and Denver, respectively, they will begin to address a set of delegates who have known only the finest corporate contributions, both monetarily and in-kind. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, looking for donors for the GOP gathering, and the Denver finance committee, headed by Governor Bill Ritter and Mayor John Hickenlooper, are promising access to prominent government officials in exchange for contributions, and while an Obama spokesman told the Los Angeles Times he would change the practice going forward, it won't happen this year.

-- Explanation Of The Day: Here's why it won't happen this year, especially for Democrats: The party has fallen $11 million short of the $40.6 million it promised to raise in advance of the late August gathering, missing the final deadline earlier this week, the Washington Post writes. Already, the host committee has eliminated more than two dozen parties for delegates, instead relying on one massive party to be held centrally for every delegation.

-- Today On The Trail: Obama spends the day in Washington, where he will meet with a new senior working group on national security. Later, he meets retired generals and admirals before holding a fundraiser here. McCain starts his day with a discussion on energy and economic policy in Springfield, Missouri. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, hosts "The View" this morning.