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

THE ELECTION ISN'T ABOUT OBAMA
(Michael Tomasky, The Guardian)
Some leading conventional-wisdom meisters, like Time's Mark Halperin, like to say that this race is completely about Obama. When they say that, you can hear them setting themselves up as Obama's judge and jury, just waiting for him to trip up so they can say that he's failing to "close the deal" and there are just "too many questions" about him, as they nudge their readers toward McCain, a media darling for many years now. Well, there is some truth to it. The race will be, to a certain extent, probably a considerable extent, about white voters' comfort with Obama. But it's not all about Obama. It's also about an unnecessary war that was based on lies. It's about a lousy economy and a housing boom that went bust. It's about $4-a-gallon gas. It's about America's dreadful reputation in the world. It's about federal inaction on a wide range of problems... It's about 84% of Americans thinking the country is on the wrong track. In other words, it's about the Republicans--their stewardship (failed), and their ideas (stale). And it's about how committed McCain is to that stewardship and those ideas. Those--a race about Obama and a race about what the GOP has done to the country--are two different races. And Obama is more likely to win the second one. 

THEY GET IT
(Timothy Egan, New York Times)
The furor over this week’s New Yorker cover — the satirical cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama in Muslim and black-militant poses — boils down to this: We get it, but what will those folks in fly-over country think? The answer is that they get it as well. Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River. And if they don’t get it, if they see the cover as affirmation of the sludge they’ve heard on talk radio or certain cable outlets, they’re never going to vote for Barack Hussein Obama anyway. People forget that part of the inspiration for the magazine cover is this year’s best media-division political laugher: the suggestion by Fox News that a triumphant knuckle bump between the Obamas, a gesture familiar to any third grader in Little League, could actually be “a terrorist fist jab.”... The biggest misperception of people in Montana... is that everyone is a rube just off the hay truck. That’s not to say there aren’t militia wackos hiding in the hills, trading toxic nonsense about Obama’s secret Muslim past. But for every nut, there’s a New Yorker reader — and then some.

MAY WE MOCK, BARACK?
(Maureen Dowd, New York Times)
At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor? Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious. But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah! ... John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

BACK TO THE USSR
(John Judis, New Republic)
John McCain likes to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. But, if he were to become president, could he more closely resemble Richard Nixon? Not Nixon the Watergate dirty trickster, but Nixon the statesman. Could the Arizona senator, despite his extreme rhetoric of the bomb-bomb-Iran variety, be less like a cowboy politician and more like the man who re-opened relations with China and signed a wealth of arms control agreements with the Soviets? Two years ago, I wrote a profile arguing that there were reasons to believe that McCain was more pragmatic than his support for the Iraq debacle suggested. In the interviews I conducted with him in 2006, he repeatedly distanced himself from neoconservatism, reminding me that he talked regularly to realists like Brent Scowcroft. I thought there was a good chance that there was a peacemaker lurking beneath McCain's warrior exterior--that a President McCain might be able use his hawkish reputation to, say, bring Iraq's warring parties together or to lure Iran to the bargaining table... But, based on McCain's actions over the last two years and conversations I've had with those close to him, I have concluded that this is wishful thinking. McCain continues to rely on the same neoconservative advisers; he still thinks U.S. foreign policy should focus on transforming rogue states and autocracies into democracies that live under the shadow of American power; and he no longer tells credulous reporters that he consults Scowcroft.

OBAMA AND MCCAIN DUEL OVER FOREIGN POLICY
(John M. Broder and Larry Rohter, New York Times)
Senator Barack Obama said on Tuesday that the addition of tens of thousands of combat troops to Iraq last year had significantly reduced violence in the country. But he said that positive developments there had not changed his mind about the need to pull troops from Iraq so America could focus more on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. In an address in Washington that was the most detailed outline yet of his national security strategy, Mr. Obama said it was time to rapidly end the war in Iraq, which he opposed from the start, and to begin to address the resurgent Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he said posed a far greater danger to American security than did the chaos in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s likely Republican opponent for the presidency, Senator John McCain, drew the opposite conclusion from events in Iraq. He said the success of the so-called surge, which he supported from the start, pointed the way toward victory in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

OBAMA'S PLAN IGNORES THE FACTS
(Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News)
While he offered a compelling view of how America should have engaged the world after 9/11 instead of invading Iraq and getting bogged down, the speech suffered from fundamental flaws in logic and fact that Obama refuses to confront. He can't bring himself to acknowledge how the successful surge of our troops has altered the dynamics in Iraq and that he was wrong to oppose it. He went further than usual in citing "the gains of the surge," but still won't factor those gains into his commitment to withdraw combat troops over 16 months. When he says, "I stand by my pledges to end the war," he might as well add, "The facts be damned." Meanwhile, he wants to use the surge strategy in Afghanistan, saying, "This is a war we have to win." The contrast he set up suggests he does not believe Iraq is a meaningful struggle and that we have little stake in the outcome. The number of Americans who agree with him is declining because of the success, proving they were not opposed to the war as much as they opposed losing it.

THE RETURN OF THE REFORMER
(Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico)
After a primary in which John McCain sought to avoid talking about his fight to reduce the role of money in politics — an issue that put him at odds with many GOP activists — the Arizona senator is once again embracing his campaign finance reform credentials. It’s a central part of McCain’s political identity, the genesis of his national profile as a reformer, a fact highlighted by the attacks he endured during the nomination fight over the sweeping 2002 campaign finance overhaul that bears his name. Many Republican activists and small-government conservatives revile the McCain-Feingold reforms as the epitome of big government infringement on free speech, and as a result they remain leery of McCain today. But the McCain campaign believes that by carrying the reform mantle in the general election, he will appeal to independent voters — and potentially undercut presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s change theme.

MCCAIN NAMES MORE TOP FUNDRAISERS, INCLUDING LOBBYISTS
(Michael Luo and Kitty Bennett, New York Times)
Senator John McCain released an updated list of his top money collectors on Tuesday, revealing that nearly a fifth of those who have brought in the largest amounts for him, more than $500,000 each, are lobbyists or work for firms that engage in lobbying. In his disclosure on Tuesday, Mr. McCain went further than Mr. Obama, specifying which people have raised more than $500,000 for him. (Mr. Obama’s highest category remains $200,000 and above.) Mr. McCain also lists the occupations and employers for each of his top fund-raisers — those who raised $50,000 or more — information that Mr. Obama does not provide and that watchdog groups say is critical for identifying bundlers and understanding their potential interests. Although the Obama campaign draws a much higher percentage of small-dollar contributions compared with the McCain campaign, the candidates have a strikingly similar number of high-dollar bundlers.

MORE: McCain Uses Fund to Raise $62.3 Million (T.W. Farnam, Wall Street Journal)
Sen. John McCain raised $62.3 million for his presidential bid in the second quarter in conjunction with the Republican National Committee, according to campaign-finance reports filed Tuesday night. The campaign gathered most of the money using an unprecedented system that allows it to collect checks as large as $70,000 from an individual by parsing the money between the campaign, the national party and state committees in four states. That fund raised $41.2 million in the three-month period.

POLL FINDS OBAMA'S RUN ISN'T CLOSING DIVIDE ON RACE
(Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee, New York Times)
Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. After years of growing political polarization, much of the divide in American politics is partisan. But Americans’ perceptions of the fall presidential election between Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, also underlined the racial discord that the poll found. More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama; about 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him. Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.