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

THE DEMOCRATS' DILEMMA
(Joel Kotkin, The American)
This Democratic ascendancy is by no means guaranteed for the long run. The changing nature of the party casts its future in doubt, particularly after 2008. Much of this has to do with how the party’s base has shifted, and where that base may lead it over the coming decades... The swing to the Democrats in recent years reflects in part the natural rhythm of American politics. The Democrats declined in the 1970s in part because the country recoiled from the failures of the Great Society. The bright Democratic prospects of 2008 are similarly a reaction to the Bush years. Yet today’s Democratic revival represents something far more profound. Rather than a shift to the “middle,” the current Democratic tide reflects a long-term secular shift in the composition of our economy and our class structure... Increasingly, the core Democratic constituency—and, even more so, the base of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign—consists not of working- and middle-class whites but of African-Americans and a rising new class of affluent, well-educated professionals. This second group, largely white but certainly spread across racial groups, has begun to supplant the old working- and middle-class base of the party. For the most part it differs from the old middle class of shopkeepers, skilled industrial workers, and small farmers, constituencies that have struggled as the economy has globalized and been transformed by the information revolution... Now the Democrats could soon be in danger of duplicating the Republican mistakes. The Clintons won by “triangulation” and appealing to the broad range of middle-class voters. But Obama’s Democrats could become the mirror image of Rove’s Republicans, extolling the superiority of their base and its values over those of other, less “enlightened” populations.

VOTER UNEASE WITH OBAMA LINGERS DESPITE HIS LEAD
(Gerald F. Seib and Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Midway through the election year, the presidential campaign looks less like a race between two candidates than a referendum on one of them -- Sen. Barack Obama. With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn't over any single issue being debated between the Democrats' Sen. Obama or the Republicans' Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama? This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey's most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be. The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have values and a background they can identify with. Those findings suggest voters' views of Sen. Obama are more fluid than his relatively steady lead indicates.

OBAMA'S TOUR DE FORCE
(David Broder, Washington Post)
It made no sense when Barack Obama left the country on his nine-day overseas tour for some of my fellow columnists to describe it as a high-risk venture. Foreign leaders, who can read the polls as well as anyone, would go out of their way not to embarrass a man who may, six months from now, be president of the United States. Obama prepares thoroughly for the big occasions. He is almost always well-briefed, and he was traveling in sharp company -- with Sens. Jack Reed and Chuck Hagel -- so you knew he would be thoroughly ready for these meetings. The chance of a major screw-up was minimal. And, as millions of Americans who watched the primary campaign learned, Obama is invariably articulate and well-spoken. There would be no verbal gaffes. So where was the risk? It existed mainly in the minds of some journalists and, perhaps, in the musings of Obama staffers who wanted to hype the journey. Acknowledging all that, it is still the case that Obama has pulled it off in great style and thereby enhanced his credentials for the Oval Office. What he could not have guaranteed was the role that luck played in the surrounding events and the cast of supporting players.

MCCAIN STILL WAITING FOR HIS TURN AT GOOD LUCK
(Michael D. Shear, Washington Post)
It seemed like a great way to counter Obamamania. Sen. John McCain would board a helicopter in New Orleans today, skim quickly over the Gulf of Mexico and land on an oil rig -- a made-for-TV moment to highlight his call for offshore drilling, an issue that Republicans believe will be a big winner in November. Then came Hurricane Dolly, a Category 2 storm that made a helicopter ride impossible. And then, improbably, a 600-foot oil tanker collided with a barge on the Mississippi River, creating a 12-mile oil slick and causing diesel fumes to waft over the city's French Quarter. The trip was off. In this campaign, it seems, McCain just can't catch a break. Through a series of missteps, gaffes and bad luck, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has endured a difficult week in what has been a choppy campaign. He now has no major event to offset Sen. Barack Obama's speech at Berlin's famed Victory Column, where a huge turnout is expected. Instead, he will be in Columbus, Ohio, speaking at a nighttime cancer event... On the other side of the world, Obama seemed blessed with perfect weather and perfect timing. At one stop, the senator from Illinois was filmed in a Kuwaiti gym shooting a basketball from behind the three-point line. Handing a microphone away, he dribbled a bit, struck a couple of poses for the troops, and warned, "I may not make the first one, but I'll make one eventually." He then let it fly. Swish. The competing visual from McCain was the 71-year-old senator riding in a golf cart during his visit to Kennebunkport, Maine, to meet with George H.W. Bush at the former president's retreat.

CANDIDATES SPAR OVER TROOP SURGE AND IRAQ CHRONOLOGY
(Michael Cooper, New York Times)
Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday when asked about Mr. Obama’s contention that while the added troops had helped reduce violence in Iraq, other factors had helped, including the Sunni Awakening movement, in which thousands of Sunnis were enlisted to patrol neighborhoods and fight the insurgency, and the Iraqi government’s crackdown on Shiite militias. “I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened,” Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there. “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others,” Mr. McCain said. “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.” The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge. (No less an authority than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, testified before Congress this spring that the Awakening “started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge.”) ... But several foreign policy analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the chronology wrong, his broader point — that the troop escalation was crucial for the Awakening movement to succeed and spread — was right. “I would say McCain is three-quarters right in this debate,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

MCCAIN'S FOREIGN POLICY FRUSTRATION
(Joe Klein, Time) 
"I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," John McCain said during a Rochester, N.H., town meeting on July 22. "It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." It was a remarkable statement, as intemperate a personal attack as I've ever heard a major-party candidate make in a presidential campaign, the sort of thing that no potential President of the United States should ever be caught saying. (A prudent candidate has aides sling that sort of mud.) It was also inevitable... In the end, both Obama and McCain seemed to have a piece of the truth about Iraq, but Obama's truth was larger and more strategic. Obama had been right about the war in the first place. It was a disastrous idea, a phenomenal waste of lives and American credibility that diverted focus from our real enemy, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Obama was right about the war now: the progress in Iraq was enabling a quicker withdrawal — a plan already hinted at by Bush. And Obama was right about the future: the Iraqis don't want long-term U.S. bases on their territory, a McCain keystone and the source of his infamous comment about staying in Iraq for 100 years. McCain's piece of the truth was tactical: he was right about the surge and right about the brilliance of David Petraeus' battle plan, which had helped quiet down Iraq. McCain was justifiably infuriated that Obama wouldn't acknowledge that success... McCain's greatest claim to the presidency — his overseas expertise — now seems squandered. He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan.

WITH ARIZONA CHANGING, MCCAIN FOCUSES ON HOME
(Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times)
As a general rule, Senator John McCain does not alert the news media when he eats breakfast in Arizona. But on a Monday morning this month, Mr. McCain campaigned in a local diner, after a Sunday stop at his campaign office here, where he urged volunteers to “make sure we get our voters registered, to make sure we are organized.” In the sea of uncertainty that defines American politics, presidential candidates have generally been able to count on the residents of their home state, Al Gore’s loss of Tennessee in 2000 being a notable exception. But a variety of factors have made Mr. McCain’s chances in Arizona less assured than they ordinarily would seem, which his campaign has acknowledged. The number of independent voters in Arizona has risen 12 percent since 2004, and those voters have helped send a Democrat to the governor’s mansion and given the party four of the state’s eight Congressional seats — including two in 2006, one in a historically Republican district. At the same time, Arizona Democrats, like many of their counterparts around the country, have outpaced Republicans in voter registration, adding almost 20,000 voters to the rolls since March, compared with the Republican majority’s 8,600 new voters. The second-term Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, remains wildly popular. Last month, the McCain campaign startlingly added Arizona to its list of 24 “battleground states,” a fact that state Democrats have clung to like sprinkles on a soft-serve ice cream cone.

A TALE OF TWO FLIP FLOPPERS
(Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal)
John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls. But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating? Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it... Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy. At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

MCCAIN AND OBAMA TAX PLANS ARE CRITICIZED
(Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times)
The competing tax plans laid out by Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain would both add trillions of dollars to the national debt and could add to the tax system's complexity, a nonpartisan tax research group concluded Wednesday in a newly released report. Both campaigns assert that their plans to continue many Bush-era tax cuts and offer new reductions would aid the economy without massive new spending. But the Washington-based Tax Policy Center warned that under either candidate, "the debt would likely continue to rise as it has over the past eight years." Obama's plan -- cuts targeted to middle- and low-income Americans and increases for the wealthy -- would increase the national debt by an estimated $3.4 trillion in the next decade, the center said. Under a similar analysis, McCain's plan -- largely a continuation of Bush's tax reductions -- would add $5 trillion. The deficit is now $9.5 trillion. 

GENERATION GAP WIDENS IN 2008 ELECTORATE
(Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Voter preferences have long been split by race and gender, but this year's election is adding another divide: a sharp age gap. Democrat Barack Obama has a strong lead among younger voters, and Republican John McCain is solidly in front among older voters. That divide has grown in the past month, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. "There's a huge generation gap," said pollster Neil Newhouse, a Republican who conducts the poll with Democrat Peter D. Hart... On age, the poll found that 55% of voters aged 18 to 34 prefer the 46-year-old Sen. Obama, while 31% favored Sen. McCain. That 24-point edge is up from a 13-point advantage for Sen. Obama in last month's survey. Sen. McCain, who turns 72 next month, would be the oldest person elected to a first term as president. At the same time, Sen. McCain's lead has ticked up among the oldest voters. He is now favored by 51% of those aged 65 and up, versus 41% for Sen. Obama. That 10-point gap is up from seven points in June. The gap appears to be much greater than it was four years ago. In 2004, exit polls found that while younger voters favored Democrat John Kerry and older voters favored President George W. Bush, the margins were much tighter.

GOP LOSING NEW MEDIA WAR
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills. But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks. The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand: One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers reportage with a point of view. The same might be said of the emerging differences between the conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model. At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right devoted to reporting—as opposed to just commenting on the news—is proving politically costly to Republicans. While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.