A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

IN FLAG CITY, FALSE OBAMA RUMORS ARE FLYING
(Eli Saslow, Washington Post)
On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance... Here in Findlay, a Rust Belt town of 40,000, false rumors about Obama have built enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography. Born on the Internet, the rumors now meander freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio -- through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants... Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his "love of country"? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin? Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?

'IT'S OVER, LADY'
(Maureen Dowd, New York Times) 
Unity was spared the banality of unanimity... When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears. As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears. When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears. “Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.

OBAMA'S IRAQ PROBLEM
(George Packer, New Yorker)
Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.”

THE OBAMA AGENDA
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
We could — and still might — do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more. Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade. They may have had it backward. Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination... The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands. In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.

PRESIDENTIAL IMPOTENCE
(Daniel Gross, Slate)
Today, while the president of the United States may be the most powerful person in the world, "his influence on the short-term macro-economy is generally overestimated by voters," says Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Partisans might think the economy got off the mat the minute Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 or when Bill Clinton took the oath in January 1993. But the factors that influence the business cycle are so myriad, powerful, and unpredictable that not even an executive as muscular as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could bend them to his will. The megatrends that made the 1990s a long summer of economic love—the end of the cold war, the deflationary influence of an emerging China, the Internet—would have happened with or without Rubinomics. And most of the factors now making life miserable—commodity inflation, a housing bubble and a weak dollar engineered by the Federal Reserve's promiscuous policies, the demand-driven surge in oil—would likely have materialized had John Kerry won in 2004 (sorry, MoveOn.org).  

SOME ON LEFT TARGET MCCAIN'S WAR RECORD
(Ben Smith, Politico)
The highest voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex, or age, but Senator John McCain's military service. McCain's campaign Sunday issued a pair of outraged statements after retired general and Barack Obama supporter Wesley Clark said he didn't think that McCain’s service as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war was relevant to running the country. Obama has consistently praised McCain's service, and called him "a genuine American hero."  But farther to the left—and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well—harsher attacks are circulating. Critics have accused McCain of war crimes for bombing targets in Hanoi in the 1960s. Sunday, a widely read liberal blog accused McCain of "disloyalty" during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured.

WESTERN STATES MAY SWING
(Karen Crummy, Politico)
One-third of Colorado registered voters are not affiliated with a political party. In New Mexico, Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 200,000, yet the state routinely votes for the GOP presidential candidate. Montana voters don’t even register with a party. Brimming with individualistic, self-reliant, libertarian-leaning voters, the Rocky Mountain West will play a pivotal role in a year when independent voters are expected to make or break John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s presidential bids. Voters here in recent elections have backed individual candidates regardless of political affiliation and have responded to messages emphasizing economic populism, fiscal discipline and the balance between individual rights and governmental protections. Already, McCain is emphasizing his 22 years as a Western senator sensitive to the region’s issues and personality, and touting his record of standing up to both political parties. Obama is portraying himself as a reformer, someone who won’t engage in Washington-style politics and is committed to taking the country in a better direction... The stakes couldn’t be higher. If just Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico had cast their electoral votes for John F. Kerry in 2004, he’d be president now.

OBAMA CAMP THINKS DEMOCRATS CAN RISE IN THE SOUTH
(Robin Toner, New York Times)
As they look to the fall election, Democrats face a strategic decision that has bedeviled their party for 40 years: How hard should they fight in the South?
And how does having Senator Barack Obama at the top of the ticket affect that calculation? Officials in Mr. Obama’s campaign say they are bullish on the South, and they have signaled their aggressiveness with early campaign appearances in North Carolina and Virginia, major voter registration drives in the region, and television advertising in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama, said he saw “tremendous potential” in several Southern states... Mr. Obama’s Southern strategy relies on significantly increasing black registration and turnout, as he did in the primary season. Mr. Hildebrand said that by some estimates there are 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia alone. The higher the black share of the vote, the lower the requirement for garnering white votes. But the Obama camp argues that it can increase its share of the white vote as well by focusing on younger, more progressive whites. 

OBAMA AND MCCAIN SEARCH FOR RUNNING MATES
(Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times)
Never in modern memory have so many eminent people been mentioned for a job that has been compared -- unfavorably -- to a bucket of warm spit. To believe the talk in Washington, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is considering more than two dozen candidates as potential vice presidential nominees, including 13 senators or former senators, 11 governors or former governors, two retired generals and former Vice President Al Gore. For Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the list of potential running mates is almost as long: eight current or former senators, 10 current or former governors, a couple of high-technology chief executives -- and one of the same retired generals Obama likes... this is how the winnowing is likely to proceed: McCain is tempted to choose his friend Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut... But he's more likely to go with Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, actual Republicans, who would be more palatable to the party's conservative core. Obama is reported to be considering Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia and former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, two Democrats with formidable national security credentials, but he's more likely to settle on Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware or Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who battled Obama for the nomination, is not likely to be chosen, Democratic strategists have concluded.

TRAVELING OVERSEAS TO WIN VOTES AT HOME
(John Harwood, New York Times) 
Colombia hardly constitutes a general election battleground. Neither does France nor Jordan. But Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are heading to those countries and others because votes can be won there. The votes are the reward that Americans confer for gravitas — the stature and experience that reassures them their would-be president can safeguard them from unforeseen events. What helps the candidates in this effort are the images of them consulting with foreign leaders and giving speeches on the international stage, as well as the knowledge they glean during these travels... Mr. McCain aims to reinforce that edge with his trip this week to Colombia and Mexico. Mr. Obama hopes to narrow that advantage with his coming travel to Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Jordan. (Details of his plans to visit Afghanistan and Iraq have not been disclosed, for security reasons.) Some Democrats argue that he needn’t do much, since the value of Mr. McCain’s experience remains limited at a time voters are so unhappy. “It’s a card they can play, but it can be trumped by the ‘change’ card,” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist behind Mr. Clinton’s victory in 1992. The biggest potential pitfall for Mr. Obama is an obvious mistake in imagery or rhetoric. Mr. McCain, 71, faced unflattering coverage when he mischaracterized Iran as supporting Sunni Muslim insurgents in Iraq. The 46-year-old Mr. Obama would likely pay a higher and more enduring price for a comparable flub.

HEARTS, NOT MINDS
(Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post)
What if the 2008 presidential election were decided by voters acting not on their political judgments or analyses of the candidates, but on their emotions? In the view of some experts, this is a trick question -- of course the election will be decided emotionally. Elections always are... Polls, the lifeblood of American politics, can also tell us what people think -- which candidate they favor, how much they approve of a president, whether they believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting. But polls are science, exploiting the mathematical laws of random samples to explain what "everyone" thinks by asking the right 1,200 or so Americans the same questions. Focus groups, by contrast, are art. Their success depends on the skills of the person leading the discussion. A talented focus-grouper tries to expose the emotional juice that can both explain and alter poll results.