For the past five months or so, Barack Obama relentlessly harped on a single message: You don't like George W. Bush. John McCain is George W. Bush. So vote for me instead.

In contrast, McCain has careened between at least eight different themes--in the past 48 hours alone. At a national-security roundtable in Tampa, Fla., he questioned Obama's readiness to be commander in chief. At a pair of "Joe the Plumber" events in Ohio, he claimed that Obama wants to "spread the wealth" around. Meanwhile, he managed to remind voters of Obama's past relationships with Bill Ayers, Khalid Rashidi and ACORN; accuse him of planning cut defense spending in Virginia; characterize him as soft on criminals; warn about the dangers of one-party rule; charge that Obama is just "a typical politician"; and slam him for voting in favor of Bush's 2005 energy bill.

All of which, I suppose, was meant to drive one overarching message: that Obama is an unsavory character. Call it the "Choose Your Own Attack" approach to presidential politics.

With that in mind, you can understand why I was a little surprised when McCain's latest national TV ad arrived in my inbox. The title says it all: "Obama Praises McCain." For your viewing pleasure:

I'll leave it to smarter observers to judge whether McCain's mixed messages are hampering his ability to connect with voters on the issues that matter most--i.e., the economy, the economy and also the economy. But I have to admit: I'm thinking of suing for whiplash.

I mean, I get that McCain wants me to be all excited that Obama once praised his "outstanding leadership" on greenhouse-gas emissions. You know, bipartisanship and whatnot. But doesn't this ad make Obama seem at least as bipartisan as McCain? And what about all that talk about Obama being a pro-criminal, anti-military terrorist lover who's conspiring steal the election and transform America into a socialist dystopia? Wouldn't that make his praise sort of offensive--like how a Hamas spokesman said some favorable stuff about Illinois senator and suddenly he was "the candidate of Hamas"? Wait a second. Does this mean that McCain has become... the candidate of Obama? And if so, what does that say about McCain's "character" and "judgment"?

Now, it's not like I care about some washed-up old redistributor. But the people have a right to know.

(Charlie Neibergall / AP)

If you'd fallen asleep on Nov. 2, 2004 and awoken, a la Rip Van Winkle, on Oct. 31, 2008, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Iowa is a battleground state. For starters, it flipped from blue to red in 2004. So you'd assume it could swing again. Then you'd check the papers. "Obama Rallies 25,000 is Des Moines" one headline would read; "McCain Chief Claims Iowa 'Dead-Even,'" would read another. At that point, you'd be crazy not to conclude that the Hawkeye State is, yet again, too close to call.

The only problem? It's not.

Or at least there's not a single shred of scientific evidence that it is. On Jan. 3, the Hawkeye State caucuses catapulted Obama into contention and nearly torpedoed McCain, who committed the cardinal Corn Belt sin of opposing ethanol subsidies. So it's long been clear which candidate Iowans prefer. Since July 10, only four polls--out of nearly 20--have shown Obama leading McCain by less than 10 points. Of those, only one has shown Obama garnering less than 50 percent of the vote. That poll--the Big10 Battleground survey taken from Sept. 14 to Sept. 17--has since been replaced by an Oct. 19-22 sounding from the same firm. It shows Obama clobbering McCain by 13 points, 52 percent to 39 percent. At RealClear Politics, Obama's average lead currently stands at 11 percent--which is larger than McCain's margins in Montana, Georgia, North Dakota, Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia. The electoral projection site FiveThirtyEight.com gives Obama a 100 percent chance of winning Iowa. Not 90 or 95. One hundred.

Still, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis insisted on a conference call with reporters this morning that "our own data has us dead even in the state of Iowa."

So what gives? Was the last month of public polling off by 10 to 15 points? Is McCain pollster Bill McInturff the only person in the country who knows how to survey Iowa's elusive electorate? My hunch is no. First of all, it's worth noting that losing campaigns always say that their "internal polling" shows a "dead heat" in the days before an election. They also, when pressed, always refuse to share any actual statistics--just like Davis did this morning. The truth is, the battle over Iowa is no longer electoral. It's symbolic.

Notice the timing of Davis's "dead even" assertion: the day that Obama is visiting Iowa for the first time in two months. The point was to frame Obama's trip as a defensive maneuver--an admission that the race is tightening. In fact, Davis even claimed on this morning's conference call that "the Obama campaign's data was also close in Iowa"--even though Obama sources say that their internal polling shows a "double-digit" advantage. In other words, Davis isn't really making a reality-based argument. Instead, he's sending a message meant to mobilize supporters: Don't be discouraged by the public polls. Believe that McCain is tied--even where he's trailing by 11 points. And act (vote, volunteer, etc.) accordingly. He's simply seizing on Obama's presence in Des Moines as proof that, behind the campaign curtain, this is much closer race than it appears. If McCain isn't really losing by double-digits in Iowa, Davis is saying, how can you be sure he's losing anywhere?

Given that Davis's approach relies more on faith than facts, we won't know for sure whether he's wrong or right until the actual results start rolling in. For its part, however, the Obama campaign is spinning the senator's return to Iowa as a sign of confidence, not nervousness. The candidate canceled an earlier Iowa trip so he could visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii, they say. So we rescheduled for Halloween out of convenience: he's planning to trick-or-treat with his daughters in neighboring Illinois this afternoon. But there's also the explanation--as my colleague Richard Wolffe reports--that Team Obama "savors the symbolism of returning to its roots" (Obama also swung through Des Moines the night he won a majority of Democratic delegates). In that reading, today's visit is a sign that the race is coming to a close--not that McCain is coming back.

Judging by all the available evidence, I'd put more stock in Obama's spin than McCain's. But as always, the only polls that matter are the ones that close on Election Night. Somebody wake me up when it's over.

The end is nigh.

For political junkies, the prospect of going cold turkey on Nov. 4 is terrifying--understandably so. In a new series for NEWSWEEK.com, a group of the magazine's political scribes went on camera to discuss life after Election Day--including yours truly. Whether you're horrified (like me, at least a little) at the prospect of life without Stumper or simply horrified at the sight of my sallow, unshaven visage (the medical term for it is "Blogger's Tan"), I thought I'd post the video here. Consider it my contribution to the All Hallow's (and Election) Eve fright-fest.

Not scary enough for you? Then I'd heartily recommend reading Julia Ioffe's wonderful story over at the New Republic about "what.. covering a two-year campaign do[es] to the soul of a journalist." It's full of post-election speculation from luminaries like Candy Crowley, Ryan Lizza, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ben Smith and, rather incongruously, me. Warning: navel-gazing ahead:

Younger journalists who came of age in this election are anxious for more personal reasons. Andrew Romano came to Newsweek to do long feature pieces but was conscripted as a blogger. "I'm not one of these crazy political junkies," he told me after another long blogging shift, in which he struggled not to say, "Obama is winning today, too." "It's not my life... [So] for a long time I was feeling like, 'I'm looking forward to this being over and going back to writing long-form journalism as opposed to writing multiple stories every day.'" But then a funny thing happened. His blog, long buried on Newsweek's website, started drawing nearly four million hits a month, making Romano the site's most-read author. "It's kind of like, this is who I am now. So the idea of the campaign being over and not doing a politics blog is a little bit like, who am I after this election?"

Spoooooky. Or, you know, not.

Which reminds me. My NEWSWEEK colleague Sarah Kliff has a new story up about other political junkies are preparing for withdrawal. But I'd be interested to hear how you, loyal Stumper readers, are coping. Afraid or relieved? Or a little of both? The comments, as always, are all yours.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama has built an unprecedented Democratic field organization this election cycle. But the big question as Nov. 4 approaches is how well McCain--who trails by massive margins in the money race and has invested far fewer resources in field offices and get-out-the-vote efforts--will be able to mobilize his voters. The answer could potentially decide the contest.

That's why I found today's papers so intriguing--and confusing. Scanning the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, I stumbled upon a pair of seemingly contradictory reports on the state of McCain's ground game. First the WSJ's Laura Meckler covered the sunny side of the street:

One key to Mr. Bush's re-election was the Republican party's nationwide get-out-the vote effort in the final 72 hours before election day... Heading into the crucial final weekend, Republicans say their operation is even stronger and running ahead of where they were four years ago at this time. They say their targeting is more efficient, their workers more experienced and their technology better. The McCain campaign, using an operation funded by the Republican National Committee, has already made 19.6 million phone calls this year nationwide. That's more than 2004, says Mike DuHaime, Sen. McCain's political director. And 2004, he says, "was the gold standard for turnout." Officials expect to make more than 15 million contacts, including phone calls and door knocks, just in these final days.

Then the Post's Matthew Mosk noticed some storm clouds on the horizon:

The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain's strategy. The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

Of course, this year's version of the "vaunted" "72-Hour Project" can't be "stronger... than four years ago" AND "scaled back for McCain." So what's going on here? My reading is actually pretty simple."Heading into the crucial final weekend," the RNC's phone-banking operation had outpaced 2004. But that was before McCain decided to "finance a final advertising push." As a result, the actual "door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls"--efforts planned for the weekend--have been "scaled back." DuHaime's calling will likely to continue to set RNC records. But there won't be as many "veteran GOP operatives" on the ground in key swing states as there were "in 2000 and 2004."

Strip away the spin, and it seems that McCain has decided shift the GOP's emphasis from targeting voters in person to targeting them from a distance, via phone calls and TV ads. Whether that's the best way to compete with Obama's massive, in-person army of volunteers and field staffers remains to be seen.

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

WHICH OBAMA WOULD AMERICA GET?
(Stuart Taylor, National Journal)
The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called "redistribution of wealth" in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system's all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits... The pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign is a prodigious listener and learner. He can see all sides of every question. He seems suffused with good judgment. His social conscience has been tempered by recognition that well-intentioned liberal prescriptions can have perverse unintended consequences. His tax and health care proposals are much less radical than Republican critics suggest... I do hope that if Obama wins, the enormity of the economic and international crises facing him will accelerate his intellectual evolution and convince him that simply replacing dumb Bush policies with dumb Democratic policies will only drive the country deeper into the ditch. The best thing for the country would be to take on the interest groups and govern from the center.

IN FINAL STRETCH, MCCAIN TO POUR MONEY INTO TV ADS
(Matthew Mosk, Washington Post)
Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama's ad blitz during the campaign's final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists. McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending. The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain's strategy. The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

OBAMA PLANS FOUR-DAY HUNT FOR MORE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS 
(Jeff Zeleny, New York Times) 
Senator Barack Obama is spending the final four days of his campaign mining for votes in places where Democrats have not turned out at full strength in recent presidential races, hoping to offset other areas in swing states where his candidacy may need a lift... His aides say they think the electoral battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Wisconsin and New Mexico are trending toward Mr. Obama, though advisers do not rule out a last-minute visit to any place that suddenly looks troublesome. Instead, he will focus his attention on six states that President Bush won four years ago. After a late-night rally on Friday evening in Indiana, Mr. Obama heads Saturday to Henderson, Nev.; Pueblo, Colo.; and Springfield, Mo. He is scheduled to make a three-city fly-around on Sunday. And on Monday, he is set to dash through Florida, North Carolina and back here to Virginia. The breadth of Mr. Obama’s travel underscores the number of Republican-leaning states that his advisers believe remain within his reach. It is a wide path to claiming the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, a strategy intended either to offer a multitude of options to get there or pave the way for a larger margin of victory.

WHAT'S UP WITH STILL-UNDECIDED VOTERS?
(Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times)
There is little research on undecided voters because they are an ever-changing population -- those who equivocate in one election cycle might not in another. A study of presidential elections at State University of New York at Buffalo found that the last time wafflers made a difference was 1960. But this year, they look to be significant again. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this week shows that this wavering wing of the electorate -- 6% in Florida and 8% in Ohio -- is large enough to make the difference in those battlegrounds. The rest of the nation, minds made up and marching by the thousands to vote early, has begun to wonder: What's up with those people? They are, after all, faced with two starkly different men, from different generations, with different ideas, revealed and vetted in perhaps the longest campaign cycle ever. Raymond and several others surveyed from Florida and Ohio explained their thinking in follow-up interviews this week, revealing an earnest if conflicted lot, deliberative by nature, particularly in decisions of consequence. 

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

From John McCain's rally this morning in Defiance, Ohio:

Where was Joe, you ask? Perhaps he was meeting with his new, Nashville-based manager, Jim Della Croce. Perhaps he was rehearsing tunes for his potential country album. Perhaps he was plotting a run for Congress ("Joe the Congressman '10!"). Perhaps he was auditioning for a Home Depot ad. Perhaps he was sharing his recent epiphany--as a guy who was "undecided" until last week--that President Obama would bring "death to Israel."

Or perhaps he was doing what he's always said he wants to do--that is, "get[ting] on with [his] life and do[ing] [his] job" as a plumber.

On second thought, never mind.

(Stephan Savoia / AP)

Could McCain be--brace yourself, people--coming back?

That's the argument members of hopeful right (and paranoid left) are making this afternoon. Given the latest numbers--and the obvious incentives for both McCain and the mainstream media to characterize the race as "close"--it's not much of a surprise. Over at RealClear Politics, Obama's average national lead has narrowed from eight points on Saturday to 6.1 points today. His average margin in the (more-responsive) tracking polls has fallen further, from 7.8 points to 5.5 points over the same five-day span. Yesterday, McCain pollster Bill McInturff told reporters that, according to his internal polling, “the campaign is functionally tied across the battleground states … with our numbers improving sharply," He added that "the race has moved significantly over the past week, closing to essentially tied." The mood on the Straight Talk Express, say reporters, is "unusually upbeat."

So should Obamans be worried? Perhaps--but not for the reasons they might think. 

There's no need, for example, to obsess over the national numbers. First, the national movement--one or two percentage points on the margin--is "well within the usual range of sampling noise," according to Pollster's Mark Blumenthal. In other words, the decline in Obama's lead isn't large enough (at this point) to qualify as statistically significant.

Second, much of the shift is attributable to a slight rise in McCain's level of support (from about 42.5 percent to about 44 percent); Obama's support, meanwhile, has hovered steadily around 50 percent or so. What this means is that a small percentage of the people who were "undecided" at the end of last week--disgruntled, economically-stressed former Bush supporters, for the most part--now say they back McCain. Such movement is inevitable--and it's the reason the gap between Obama and McCain may continue to close before Election Day. McIntuff, for one, has claimed that when "undecided/refuse to respond voters" break, they "will add a net three plus points to our margins." But the fact is, unless Obama's numbers slip firmly below 50 percent, McCain can't overtake him--even if he wins over every single undecided.

Which brings us to point number three: McCain won't win every single undecided--nor will he win enough to net three or more percentage points. Over the past 24 hours, two of the nation's most respected pollsters--Andy Kohut of Pew and Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin--conducted extensive analyses of the latest polling data and came to the same conclusion: that Obama and McCain will roughly split the five to six percent of the electorate that remains uncommitted.

Franklin's methodology was pretty simple. First, he examined the " raw, respondent-level data from more than 3,449 interviews conducted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 22 for the Diageo/Hotline poll" and discovered that "roughly 6 percent of the respondents were initially undecided, but split almost evenly (47 percent for Obama, 53 percent for McCain) when pushed for how they 'lean.'" Then he compared these leaners to the remaining undecideds for "every variable that seems predictive of vote preference--including party identification, age, race, gender, education, frequency of church attendance and geographic region." His finding? That the remaining undecideds should split about 54 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain.

Kohut's conclusion, as reported this morning on the Politico, was almost identical: "undecided voters [are] likely to split about equally between McCain and Obama." If Kohut and Franklin are correct, Obama should beat McCain 52 percent to 46 percent on Nov.4. So the only way McCain can catch up is by prying some support away from his opponent--not by relying on a landslide among undecideds. As Kohut put it, "there is likely no hidden life raft in the undecided vote for John McCain." [UPDATE: A third pollster, Stan Greenberg, concurs: "To get a 3-point net gain, the undecided would have to break 5 to 2 for McCain. There is no evidence to indicate such an impending break against Obama. Instead, the undecided could push Obama's vote up at least another point.")

So why should Obamans worry? One word: Pennsylvania. (Maybe.)

As you know, the presidency isn't decided by a national vote. So the national polls aren't particularly relevant at this point--unless they detect an emerging trend before it trickles down into the swing states. So far, Obama's standing throughout much of the battleground has showed no sign of slippage. As Noam Scheiber points out, "McCain's socialist/redistributionist attack may be getting him a lot of media coverage nationally" and "tightening the national numbers." But Obama has the "key battleground states... wired with paid staff and volunteers and is flooding them non-stop with ads"--so his support there is more "robust." Ultimately, Obama doesn't need to swing Ohio and Florida and Virginia to win the election; he just needs to add Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado--where his wide leads and 50-percent-plus poll numbers haven't changed an iota since Saturday--to John Kerry's 2004 map. A win in any one of the rest of the red states currently leaning Democratic--Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia--would simply be icing on the cake.

Unless, that is, McCain can battle back in Pennsylvania. Until today, there was no evidence that McCain's recent increases in stumping and spending were having any effect on the Keystone State. The last 14 polls had shown Obama clearing the 50 percent mark and leading by an average of 12 points. But this morning, the respected Mason-Dixon firm released a survey suggesting that Obama's support had slipped below 50 percent--and that his lead had shrunk to a mere four percentage points (47-43*).

The Mason-Dixon poll may be an outlier--or, as the only sounding that doesn't include data from last week, it may be ahead of the curve. We'll have to wait and see. But without Pennsylvania, McCain can't possibly compensate for likely losses in Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado--or mount a realistic comeback. So instead of watching the marginal, irrelevant fluctuations in the national numbers, I'll be watching the Keystone State instead.

UPDATE, Oct. 31:  Another poll--albeit from a Republican polling organization--shows McCain within striking distance in Pennsylvania. According to the latest stats from Strategic Vision, it's 49 percent for Obama to 44 percent for McCain. The margin between the two candidates may still be larger than five points. That said, the Oct. 8 Strategic Vision poll showed Obama ahead by 14, so McCain may also have real momentum. We need more numbers before we can say for sure.

*Typo fixed; used to read 43.

Over at Sprint to the Oval, my NEWSWEEK colleague Holly Bailey has some ominous color from the McCain caravan. Sign of trouble? Or mere coincidence? We report, you decide:

When Ross Perot pioneered the half-hour presidential-campaign infomercial back in 1992, he used pie charts to make his points. Last night, Barack Obama relied on apple pie instead.

Carrying a cool $5 million price tag and airing on NBC, CBS, FOX and the major cable-news networks, Wednesday's much anticipated "Obamamercial" wasn't particularly surprising. As a preview of an Obama presidency it was undeniably precise: glossy, humorless, focused and, at times, moving (often against one's will). Much of the broadcast consisted of testimonials by besotted pols and shots of Obama seducing massive crowds seamlessly studded with imagery swiped straight from the Chevy truck playbook: shimmering fields of wheat; smiling, multiracial faces; children holding American flags; veterans on parade. I expected Bob Seger to start singing, "like Barack, oh-oh, like Barack" at any moment.

But despite the astronomical pabulum factor, the Obamamercial was (above all else) effective. Why? Because it had a very simple objective—making undecided voters comfortable with the experience of a President Obama—and was very savvy about accomplishing it.

Content-wise, the heart of the show was a quartet of mini-documentaries about the "folks" Obama has met in his travels, each of which was narrated by the candidate himself and followed by a clip of him rattling off his pertinent proposals (laid out, as he telegraphed, in "specific detail"). The important thing here wasn't Juanita Stuart's rheumatoid arthritis or Obama's health-care plan—I doubt many viewers will remember either tomorrow. It was Obama's underlying argument about what sort of president he would be—that is, the sort who absorbs the "specific details" of your problems and produces specific, detailed policies to deal with them. He listens, he deliberates and then he acts. The implied contrast, of course, was with George W. Bush and John McCain—men known for shooting first and asking questions later. Even though Obama never mentioned the latter by name.

Ultimately, the entire Obamamercial was designed to provide voters with a preview of what it will feel like to welcome Obama in their living rooms for the next four years.  The presidency is the most personal of America's elective offices, and it is through the TV set, in the privacy of our own homes, that the relationship between the president and the people develops. More than the convention, or the debates, or any 30-second spot, the Obamamercial simulated how the country would interact with Obama if he were elected president—with him on one side of the screen, perched at a large, flag-framed desk, and us on the other, slumped on the couch. It was almost as if the election was already over, Obama was speaking from the Oval Office--and the country hadn't become a Communist caliphate. And that was the point.

Will the gambit work? Well, the latest polls show the Illinois senator cresting 50 percent; about 7 percent of the population is still undecided. If last night's broadcast convinced even a handful of undecideds (and perhaps a few of Obama's softest supporters) that he's not the socialistic, terrorist-sympathizing cipher of Republican caricature but rather someone they already feel comfortable seeing in a presidential setting, then it was a resounding success. At the very least, the show gobbled up two news cycles. With only five to go, McCain can't afford to lose many more.

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

DEMOCRATS VIE TO SHAPE AN OBAMA LEGISLATIVE AGENDA
(Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal)
Democrats inside Sen. Barack Obama's circle of advisers and on Capitol Hill are jockeying even before Election Day to shape an Obama administration's legislative agenda and define "Obamanomics," a concept he himself has left vague over the campaign. Sen. Obama has been able to win support by convincing voters he could simultaneously be a populist and a fiscal disciplinarian, that he could invest in education, energy and health care and adhere to rules that say additional spending must be more than offset by cuts or tax increases. He attacks greed and excess in Wall Street, yet reaches out to assure financial leaders he understands markets' needs. But if Sen. Obama wins on Tuesday and Democrats expand their congressional majority, the party in power will quickly have to reconcile these seeming contradictions into a legislative strategy.

HOW OBAMA CAN WALK THE POSTPARTISAN TALK
(Bob Kerrey, New York Daily News)
Joe Biden was right. If elected, Barack Obama's mettle will be tested. Not by Al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States - that possibility is actually much less likely with a President Obama--but by the Democratic Congress. This election is not over. But it's not too soon to envision the dangers and opportunities should Obama win. My worry is not with increased threats from abroad. I am convinced those threats will be reduced with Obama's election and the beginning of a much more sensible and trustworthy American foreign policy. By my lights, the primary threat to the success of a President Obama will come from some Democrats who, emboldened by the size of their congressional majority, may try to kill trade agreements, raise taxes in ways that will destroy jobs, repeal the Patriot Act and spend and regulate to high heaven. This is where Obama's persona is invaluable. He can withstand the arguments and pressure of the liberal wing in the Democratic caucus if, once elected, he is guided by the best instincts he has displayed on the campaign trail.

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY
(John Dickerson, Slate)
With only five days left until Election Day, John McCain's campaign aides seem happier than they have been in a while. For the last few days, the campaign has been increasingly buoyed by what it says has been improvement in its internal polling of 14 battleground states. Aides see a tightening race in states that are crucial to their long-shot march to 270 votes and victory. Even McCain himself is upbeat. "He's been happy for the last few days," says one aide. "That's a change."... Still, the landscape looks pretty bleak... How do McCain aides get around this dire picture without the aid of strong drink? Let's just say that McCain's campaign now relies on hope more than Obama's does. They hope that the Obama organization isn't as impressive as signs suggest it is. They hope that the greater enthusiasm apparent among Democrats turns out to be less than advertised on Election Day. They hope that the public polls that show a big Obama lead are poorly designed, overstating participation by young voters and African-Americans. They hope undecided voters will all break to McCain in the end. 

UNDECIDEDS AN UNLIKELY 'LIFE RAFT' FOR  MCCAIN
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
The pool of undecided voters on Election Day could be as large as one in 10, but John McCain can hardly rely on them to overtake Barack Obama. According to past election results, undecided voters are unlikely to break decisively for either candidate and dramatically alter Tuesday’s race. In the past eight presidential contests, voters who made up their minds during the last week of the campaign never went for either ticket by large margins of 3-2 or 2-1, which potentially could tip the scales.  “There is likely no hidden life raft in the undecided vote for John McCain,” said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. Pew recently conducted an internal analysis of its polls and concluded that undecided voters were likely to split about equally between McCain and Obama on Election Day, meaning the group is more evenly split between the two candidates than the electorate overall, Kohut said. In the coming days, Pew, like the Gallup poll, will finalize its best estimate for how undecided voters will cast their ballots.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Posting over at her new Sprint to the Oval blog, my NEWSWEEK colleague Holly Bailey reports on the McCain campaign's outrage du jour--i.e., demanding that the Los Angeles Times release a video (mentioned in its own pages last April) that captures Obama's remarks at a 2003 banquet honoring Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor and Palestinian scholar who has been critical of Israel. I intended to weigh in on the Khalidi "controversy," but Holly beat me to the punch, so I'll just condense the crucial parts of her item into a handy italicized excerpt:

Five months after the story was published, talk of the videotape resurfaced in blogs and subsequently in a McCain campaign release yesterday calling on the paper to release the tape. McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb accused the paper of “intentionally suppressing information that provide a clearer link” between Obama and Khalidi. “The election is one week away, and it’s unfortunate that the press so obviously favors Barack Obama that this campaign must publicly request that the Los Angeles Times do its job—make information public.”

This morning, McCain took it a step further, telling a radio station in Miami... that the Times was guilty of a double standard for not releasing the tape. “The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public,” McCain said. “I’m not in the business about talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet. I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.”

Less than an hour later, Sarah Palin, at a rally in Ohio, echoed the talking points. “Maybe some politicians would love to have a pet newspaper of their very own,” she said. “In this case we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there’s a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in kowtowing, then the LA Times, you’re winning.

I have a couple of problems with this approach.

The first is journalistic. As the Los Angeles Times revealed today, there's a reason--other than "kowtowing" to Obama--that it hasn't released the tape: "it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it. The Times keeps its promises to sources." In other words, the Times has no choice but to maintain the privacy of the video; to do otherwise would represent a major breach of journalistic ethics. This is simply how journalism works--as the McCain campaign, which has undoubtedly provided information to the Times "off the record or "on background, is well aware. McCain and Palin know that the Times can't release the tape, and they don't expect the paper to cave. They simply want to attach the words "Khalidi" and "Palestinian" to Obama in the press--and hopefully scare a few South Florida Jews (among others) in the process.

That's where my second problem comes in. While many Americans may disagree with Khalidi's views--which is bound to happen in any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--there's nothing approaching "neo-Nazi[sm]" in the professor's past. McCain apparently based that hyperbolic comparison on Khalidi's status as--his words--"a PLO spokesman." Unfortunately for the senator, the truth is far more mundane. It's accurate to say that Khalidi closely observed (and even sympathized with) Yasir Arafat's group during his years at the American University at Lebanon, and he occasionally spoke to the press--from a Palestinian perspective--about the ongoing conflicts. But the claim that Khalidi served as a "PLO spokesman"--which Khalidi strenuously denies--is based solely on an "erroneous column by the New York Times’s Tom Friedman [from] 1982." The fact is, he has never advocated violence. On the contrary, reports Harper's Scott Horton:

[Khalidi] is... deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies. In a sense, Khalidi’s formula for solving the Middle East crisis has not been radically different from George W. Bush’s: both believe in American values and approaches... [Khalidi] sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles.

Khalidi's views are so firmly within the bounds of mainstream debate, in fact, that McCain himself has supported the scholar's work, as ABC News and others reported today. In 1998 and 1999, the International Republican Institute--the GOP’s congressionally funded international-networking organization--gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies. McCain chaired the IRI at the time; Khalidi founded (and served on the board of) the Palestine Center. The center's goal, according to Horton: "the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank." Obama befriended Khalidi at the University of Chicago around the same time. So to claim Khalidi somehow taints Obama without tainting McCain is disingenuous. The truth is, he taints neither of them.

WARNING: Supergeeky content ahead.

Despite all my-blabbering and bloviating about "the latest polls," the only polls that matter are still the ones that close on Election Night.

Just not all of them. 

Why? Because some polls close earlier than others. Thanks to the magic of time zones, there will be a period of seven hours on the evening of Nov. 4 when we'll know some (but not all) of the results. And depending on what happens, "some" might be enough to know who's won.

To help guide you through Election Night, we here at Stumper headquarters have created a handy hour-by-hour "Choose Your Own Adventure" game. (Or quasi-"Choose Your Adventure" game.) NB: We're opearting under the assumption that states where one candidate leads by more than a dozen or so points aren't really up for grabs--Vermont, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Michigan, Washington, Oregon, Maine and Hawaii for Obama; Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Nebraska, Alaska and Idaho for McCain. The result: Obama starts with 207 electoral votes and McCain starts with 127.

Let's play.

(All Times Eastern)

6:00: Most polls close in Indiana. If McCain wins Indiana, wait until 7:00; If Obama wins Indiana, he's probably won the election. That's because Obama's current lead in Ohio (5.8 percent on average) is much larger than his current lead in Indiana (1.4 percent on average).Given their demographic similarities, it's unlikely that Obama would win the latter and lose the former--and without Ohio and Indiana, a McCain comeback is implausible. (OBAMA WIN SCENARIO #1)

Assuming that McCain has already won Indiana... 

7:00: Most polls close in Florida, Virginia and Georgia. If McCain wins all three, wait until 7:30. No one will be surprised if Florida (a true toss-up) and Georgia (a McCain leaner) go red, but the evaporation of Obama's 7.4 percent lead in Virginia would be a sign of trouble to come. If Obama wins only Virginia, he's on the road to victory; McCain would need to retain Iowa, Colorado AND New Mexico--or pick up a blue state--to compensate for the loss. If Obama wins Florida, the cake is probably baked; for McCain, there's no plausible road back to 270 that doesn't involve winning Pennsylvania and another mid-size blue state. And if Obama wins Florida and Virginia, go to bed. It's over. (OBAMA WIN SCENARIO #2)

7:30:  Polls close in Ohio.

Assuming that McCain has already won Florida and Virginia...

If McCain wins Ohio, he has a fighting chance to win the election. At this point, the senator would've overcome sizable Obama leads in both the the Buckeye State and the Old Dominion--an accomplishment that would cast doubt on Obama's similarly sizable leads in Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado and Pennsylvania. Winning all four of those states would be Obama's only (plausible) remaining  path to victory. If Obama wins Ohio, wait until 8:00. The only way McCain could compensate for the loss of 20 electoral votes is with a victory in either Pennsylvania or New Hampshire (or, less plausibly, Minnesota or Wisconsin).

Assuming that Obama has already won either Florida OR Virginia...

If Obama wins Ohio, it's game, set, match. There's no saving McCain. (OBAMA WIN SCENARIO #3). If McCain wins Ohio, on the other hand, he stays alive--but just barely. In the win-Florida-win-Ohio-lose-Virginia scenario, McCain would have to win [Iowa, New Mexico AND Colorado] or [either Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin or New Hampshire] to survive; all six of those states show Obama ahead by more than eight points. In the win-Virginia-win-Ohio-lose-Florida scenario, McCain would have to pick up 11 Kerry electoral votes--even if he held every remaining Bush state (i.e.,Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada AND Colorado).

8:00: Polls close in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Missouri.

Assuming Obama has already won either Florida, Virginia OR Ohio...

If Obama wins Pennsylvania, McCain is skating on very thin ice. At this point, an Obama one-two punch in [either Florida or Ohio plus Pennsylvania] would effectively knock McCain out. (OBAMA WIN SCENARIO #4). The only survivable blow would be Virginia plus Pennsylvania. To claw his way back, the Republican would have to win Iowa, New Mexico AND Colorado--or either Minnesota or Wisconsin. If McCain wins Pennsylvania, who the heck knows. Simply put, it won't happen. An Obama victory in either Florida, Virginia or Ohio would be a sure sign that the Keystone State won't be flipping.

Assuming McCain has won Florida, Virginia AND Ohio...

If Obama wins Pennsylvania, he could still eke out a victory--provided he scores a straight flush in Iowa, New Mexico AND Colorado. Lose one of the three, however, and he's probably toast. If McCain wins Pennsylvania, he's the next president of the United States. (MCCAIN WIN SCENARIO #1)

Post-8:30: At this point, we'll probably have a pretty clear idea who's inheriting the White House from George W. Bush. If Obama keeps the John Kerry states and adds either Ohio, Florida or Virginia to the Democratic column, chances are he'll seal the deal at either 8:30 (when the polls close in North Carolina) or 9:00 (when the polls close in New Mexico and Colorado). Granted, McCain could still struggle back from a Virginia loss--but not if he loses [Minnesota and Wisconsin] OR [either New Mexico or Colorado] at 9:00. (Or, for that matter, North Carolina at 8:30.) That said, if McCain has already won Virginia--along with Ohio, Florida and Indiana--Obama's only (plausible) remaining path to victory runs through Iowa, New Mexico AND Colorado. If he loses one of the latter two at 9:00, it's curtains. If he wins both, the election will be decided 10:00 p.m.--in Iowa.

And we'd be back where we began.

Necessary caveat: The closer the results, the longer it takes the networks to call a state. So this entire chronology could be pushed back 30-60 minutes (or further) depending on the closeness of the incoming numbers.

Call them the Icing States. The candidates aren't visiting. The reporters aren't calling. And the rest of the country barely knows they exist.

With six days until Nov. 4, the political world is focusing on traditional battlegrounds like Florida, where both Barack Obama and John McCain are campaigning today--and understandably so. But as Obama's edge in the Electoral College has expanded over the past few weeks--the latest RealClear Politics map shows him collecting 311 electoral votes solely from states in which he outpolls McCain by more than five points--a subtler shift has taken place under the radar. Since the start of the month, Obama has quietly, methodically reduced his rival's long-held leads in a quartet of red states--Montana, North Dakota, Georgia and, most surprisingly, Arizona--to the point where they could conceivably flip on Election Day.

Crazy? Only a little. George W. Bush won Montana by 20 points in 2004 and 25 points in 2000; now RCP shows McCain leading by a mere 3.4 percentage points. It's worth noting, however, that the RCP average includes three polls taken before Oct. 16. Restrict your results to surveys released in the last two weeks--Montana State (Obama +4) and NBC/Mason-Dixon (McCain +4)--and you suddenly have a dead heat. That's a dangerous position for McCain in a place where the GOP is in disarray and Democrats Jon Tester, Brian Schweitzer and Max Baucus have a monopoly on statewide office. Which is probably why the RNC just decided to start airing ads on local television.

It's a similar story in neighboring North Dakota, where Bush beat Kerry 63 percent to 36 percent four years ago. RCP shows McCain leading by four points, 47.7 to 43.7. But that's only because they include a Rasmussen sounding from Sept. 8 that gave McCain at 14-point advantage. Limit your sample to polls released since the start of October--Forum/MSUM (Obama +2), North Dakota UTU (Obama +3) and Research 2000 (tie)--and Obama is actually up by 1.67 percent on average. Given that the Sept. 14 Research 2000 poll showed McCain clobbering his opponent by 13 points, this is a sign of real movement.

Neither Georgia nor Arizona appears to be quite as close. But there's been a notable narrowing in recent weeks. A Sept. 29 Rasmussen poll showed McCain winning his home state by 21 points. Now the firm has him ahead by five. Overall, McCain's average Arizona advantage has plummeted from double-digits to about five percentage points--just barely beyond the margin of error. The latest Arizona State survey gives him a mere two-point edge, down from a seven points a month ago and 10 points this summer. In Georgia, McCain's average cushion has sunk from about 15 percent in mid-September to 5.2 percent today, and one pollster--the Atlanta-based Insider Advantage--says it's a one-point race. Add in a 10 percent boost in early voting among blacks, and that's too close for McCain's comfort.

Am I suggesting that Obama will win in Montana, North Dakota, Arizona and Georgia? Hardly. Five points is still a steep climb--especially in Republican strongholds like Arizona and Georgia where undecideds will likely break for McCain--and sparsely populated (and traditionally uncompetitive) states like Montana and North Dakota are notoriously difficult to poll.

That said, it's worth considering--for perspective's sake--how much stronger Obama seems to be in these "reach" states than McCain seems to be in states where he's still said to be competitive. Take Ohio--the king of all battlegrounds. According to RCP, Obama currently leads there by 6.3 percent. Or, say, Virginia, where a Democrat hasn't won since 1964--RCP has Obama up 7.4 percent. Or, for that matter, Pennsylvania--the last blue state on McCain's target list. Obama's latest margin? 10.5 percent--more than double McCain's lead in Georgia. Judging by the most recent polls, in fact, the odds of Obama winning Montana, North Dakota, Arizona or Georgia are better than the odds of McCain winning either Ohio, Virginia, Colorado (Obama +8.3), Nevada (+7.5), Iowa (11.4), New Mexico (8.4) or any single Kerry state. Them's just the numbers. If you want to say that McCain has a shot in Ohio, you have to admit that Obama has a shot in Arizona. And so on.

None of these prizes, of course, will tip the election to Obama. If he wins Georgia, he's already won Virginia and North Carolina; if he wins Montana or North Dakota, he's already won Colorado; and if he wins Arizona, he's already won New Mexico and Nevada. But if Obama succeeds in "expanding the electorate" in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and the rest of the swing states--which, it should be noted, is hardly a sure thing--those gains would undoubtedly extend beyond the battleground's traditional borders. In that case, Arizona, Georgia, Montana and/or North Dakota appear to be the states most likely to boost Obama from a "resounding victory" (say, 375 electorate votes) to a "massive landslide" (more than 400). In other words, they'd be the icing on the cake.

Over at "Race to the Finish," my fellow NEWSWEEK blogger Howard Fineman takes a look at the latest "traditional" Gallup tracking poll--which shows "Obama lead[ing] McCain by only two percentage points, 49 to 47 percent"--and explains why we still have a battle on our hands:

By all accounts and by all odds, Obama is fairly comfortably ahead in the Electoral College—which, as Al Gore will tell you, is what matters.

On TV Wednesday night, Obama will give what one aide described to me as a “meaty” discourse on his basic tax and health-care proposals. No high-flown rhetoric, but rather a briefing paper for wary undecided swing voters---most of whom, the campaign thinks, are “soft Republicans” who kind of want to vote for Obama but need reassurance.

And yet, in the meantime, Sen. John McCain has not quite disappeared in the rear-view mirror...

Why hasn’t Obama run away with this?

Because the country remains culturally divided. Because the more it looks like Democrats will score huge gains in Congress, the more worried “soft Republican” voters get. Because McCain has succeeded, in the minds of some of those voters, in raising the hoary specter of “tax-and-spend” liberals. Because Obama hails from a place (South Side Chicago) and background (the son of professional academics) more reminiscent of Democratic losers like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry than winners like LBJ, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Because some voters remember the hate-filled sound bites of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And, to a degree we cannot measure and may never fully know, because Obama is an African-American---and one with a Swahili name at that.

There is nothing that the staffers here in Chicago can do about any of that at this point. Up on the 11th floor of the office building here, they're hard at work. They aren’t thinking about those things. Their campaign manager, David Plouffe, won’t let them. “We expected this to tighten,” one of them said to me a few hours ago.

And so, it seems, it has.

What do you guys think? Is this "tightening" real? Or is it just statistical noise? Why aren't the swing states moving, too? I'll be back with my own thoughts on the latest polls later today. Until then, the comments are all yours. 

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

HOW JOHN MCCAIN RAN AGAINST HIMSELF
(Walter Shapiro, Salon)
Just over the horizon lies an alternate universe in which John McCain is locked in a tense nail-biter of a presidential race with Barack Obama, one in which the polls gyrate daily and "too close to call" describes most of the contested political landscape... All that would have been required to achieve electoral parity and a plausible road map to the White House would have been for the Republican nominee to have transformed himself into... the John McCain of the 2000 primaries... While alternative history is inherently speculative, a reasonable case can be made that McCain could have won the 2008 Republican nomination even if he had not pandered to Falwell and had not abandoned his fiscal conservatism to compete with Romney on taxes. The victory formula would have been built around McCain's biography, his unorthodox style, his unstinting support for the surge in Iraq and the general feeling that eight years earlier the GOP made a tragic mistake with Bush. In short, McCain could have come out of the GOP primaries prepared to run against Obama as a true maverick rather than a generic Republican railing against socialism. All it probably would have taken are these four steps. 

OBAMA AHEAD OR TIED IN 8 KEY STATES
(Ron Fournier and Trevor Tompson, Associated Press)
Barack Obama, gunning for a national landslide, now leads in four states won by President Bush in 2004 and is essentially tied with John McCain in two other Republican red states, according to new AP-GfK battleground polling. The results help explain why the Democrat is pressing his money and manpower advantages in a slew of traditionally GOP states, hoping not just for a win but a transcendent victory that remakes the nation's political map. McCain is scrambling to defend states where he wouldn't even be campaigning if the race were closer. Less than a week before Election Day, the AP-GfK polls show Obama winning among early voters, favored on almost every issue [and] benefiting from the country's sour mood... "If you believe in miracles," said GOP consultant Joe Gaylord of Arlington, Va., "you still believe in McCain."... The polling shows Obama holding solid leads in Ohio (7 percentage points), Nevada (12 points), Colorado (9) and Virginia (7), all red states won by Bush that collectively offer 47 electoral votes. Sweeping those four — or putting together the right combination of two or three — would almost certainly make Obama president... There are only two Kerry states still in contention — Pennsylvania with 21 votes and New Hampshire with four — and AP-GfK polls show Obama leading both by double digits.

WHY MCCAIN IS GETTING HOSED IN THE PRESS
(John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, Politico)
There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe. As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own... Of the factors driving coverage of this election — and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama — ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil... For most journalists, professional obligations trump personal preferences. Most political reporters... are temperamentally inclined to see multiple sides of a story, and being detached from their own opinions comes relatively easy... It is not our impression that many reporters are rooting for Obama personally. To the contrary, most colleagues on the trail we’ve spoken with seem to find him a distant and undefined figure. But he has benefited from the idea that negative attacks that in a normal campaign would be commonplace in this year would carry an out-of-bounds racial subtext. That’s why Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was basically a nonissue in the general election. Journalists’ hair-trigger racial sensitivity may have been misplaced, but it was not driven by an ideological tilt.

2 RIVALS PLANS ON FISCAL ISSUE ADD TO DEFICITS
(Jackie Calmes, New York Times) 
While both presidential candidates enter the campaign’s final week promising to be the better fiscal steward, each has outlined tax and spending proposals that would make annual budget deficits worse, analysts say, with Senator John McCain likely to create a deeper hole than Senator Barack Obama would. Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, has proposed bigger tax cuts. He has also promised more in spending cuts, but he has not specified where most of them would come from. Even now that the financial crisis has given rise to one bailout package and prompted both candidates to call for billions more in stimulus spending, Mr. McCain has stuck by his promise to balance the budget by the end of his term, a pledge that fiscal analysts call unachievable. Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival, has vowed to reduce the deficit and put it on a path to balance. He also promises an expensive effort to make health care insurance more widely available, a raft of other spending programs and tax cuts for most families and small businesses. He would raise taxes on the wealthiest households to help pay for his health care plans. Neither presidential candidate has provided enough detail, especially about spending programs and what they would cut, for budget groups to put price tags on their agendas.

CONSERVATIVES PLAN SECRET POST-ELECTION STRATEGY SESSION
(Jonathan Martin, Politico) 
Two days after next week's election, top conservatives will gather at the Virginia weekend home of one of the movement's most prominent members to begin a conversation about their role in the GOP and how best to revive a party that may be out of power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue next year. The meeting will include a "who's who of conservative leaders --  economic, national security and social," said one attendee, who shared initial word of the secret session only on the basis of anonymity and with some details about the host and location redacted. The decision to waste no time in plotting their moves in the post-Bush era reflects the widely-held view among many on the right, and elsewhere, that the GOP is heading toward major losses next week... Few believe that the Republican party will respond to another brutal election by following a path of moderation, but conservatives are deeply dispirited and anxious to reassert the core values they believe have not always been followed by Bush, congressional leaders and their party’s presidential nominee . Many on the right, both elites and the rank-and-file, see a rudderless party that is in dire need of new blood and old principles: small government, a robust national security and unapologetic social conservatism.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

QUAKERTOWN, Penn.—Driving on John Fries Highway through Quakertown is almost like taking a guided tour of the local electorate.

First you pass a few farms—the last remnants of a fading way of life. Then there's a sign for Bethlehem Catholic School. Next up is LifeQuest Nursing Center on the left. Soon, you've sped past a smattering of small businesses—large appliances, lawn furniture, heating oil—and a billboard touting the "Light Sippin'" vehicles for sale at a nearby Ford dealership. By the time you finally arrive at 601 Mill St., site of Quakertown Memorial Stadium and, not coincidentally, the afternoon's John McCain and Sarah Palin rally, you've got a pretty decent idea which voters the GOP ticket is targeting in Bucks County: ex-urbanites, white ethnics, senior citizens, small-business owners and blue-collar workers. 

The only problem? No one—including McCain and Palin—is actually in the stadium.

Shortly before Barack Obama struggled on stage this morning amid a chilly, steady rain, the McCain campaign announced it was postponing its 1:15 p.m. Quakertown event "due to weather." I decided to drive the 80 miles from Chester anyway—you know, to survey the lay of the land. If McCain wants to win on Election Day, he'd be well-advised to return as soon as possible.

In fact, this is the one keystone-state stop McCain can't afford to miss. 

Bucks County is like Pennsylvania in miniature. It's technically a northern suburb of Philadelphia, completing the "collar" of counties that begins with Chester to the southeast and extends up through Delaware and Montgomery. But "suburban" doesn't really describe its notably diverse—and strikingly representative—population. The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Kaminski recently mapped the county's political topography well: "Rural northern 'upper Bucks' is socially conservative, clinging—as Mr. Obama famously said this year—to guns and religion; the center around Doylestown is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, once dominated by Republican 'moderates'; and "lower' Bucks around Bristol is blue-collar, formerly industrial, depressed and tends to vote Democratic."

As a result of this heterogeneity, Bucks has become something of a bellwether county in recent years. In 2000, Al Gore beat George W. Bush 50 percent to 46 percent in both Bucks County and greater Pennsylvania; four years later, Kerry's 51-48 margin in Bucks was almost identical to his statewide split (51-49). So it doesn't bode well for McCain that he's losing 43-46 in a new countywide poll by Politico/Insider Advantage.  

Why, then, should the Arizona senator hurry back? Because if McCain wants to win the keystone state, Bucks is both his best place to start—and his best hope. As Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report recently noted, Obama's entire 11-point lead in Pennsylvania comes from the population-heavy southeastern part of the state. The latest stats from SurveyUSA, for example, show the Democrat ahead 64 percent to 32 percent in the region. Right now, McCain's carrying the rural, pro-Republican west-central and south-central counties and polling within the margin of error in the traditionally Democratic areas around Pittsburgh and Scranton. If he weren't running so far behind Obama in metropolitan Philadelphia, he'd probably be within striking distance statewide. And he won't win unless he starts doing better.

That's where Bucks County comes in. Heavily urban Philly won't budge—nor will the posh Main Line suburbs of Delaware County or the ascendant exurbs of Chester County, which both voted for Obama in April's Democratic primary by double-digit margins. Once a Republican stronghold, Montgomery County, where Clinton won 51-49, may lean a little further to the right. But it's Bucks County that holds the most promise for McCain. There, Clinton clobbered Obama 63-37—a striking result considering that Chester County, a mirror image of Bucks County in 2004, chose Obama 55-45. What that suggests is that there's a different kind of Democrat in and around Quakertown—the kind that's notably less enamored of Obama than the rest of his metro Philly peers. Given that Bucks belongs to the Philly media market and ranks as the fourth most populous county in the state, it makes perfect sense for McCain to center his efforts here (in addition to driving GOP turnout in the west and center of the state). Target those Clinton Democrats in person. Get on Philly television as a result. Hope your message spreads across the rest of the "collar"—and boosts your broader metro margins on Election Day. 

This isn't news to McCain. It's why he appeared in the suburbs twice the week before last and kicked off a cross-state bus tour in nearby Bensalem last Tuesday—a day after his wife Cindy campaigned in Bucks County. And it's why he was planning to return today. For now, McCain's intense focus on the region seems to be paying off: today's Bucks County Politico/Insider Advantage poll (which shows McCain losing by three) is an improvement over its Oct. 14 predecessor (which showed him losing by six). What's more, Obama has yet to approach the 50-percent threshold—meaning that undecideds could still swing the county for McCain. Ultimately, it's unlikely that a boost in Bucks County alone would erase Obama's double-digit lead in Pennsylvania. But as Bucks goes, so goes the state—or at least it has in past.

Which is why McCain would be wise to steer the Straight Talk Express down John Fries Highway. Pronto.

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

ONE WEEK
(Barack Obama)
After decades of broken politics in Washington, eight years of failed policies from George Bush, and twenty-one months of a campaign that has taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are one week away from change in America. In one week, you can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street. In one week, you can choose policies that invest in our middle-class, create new jobs, and grow this economy from the bottom-up so that everyone has a chance to succeed; from the CEO to the secretary and the janitor; from the factory owner to the men and women who work on its floor. In one week, you can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election; that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat; that asks us to fear at a time when we need hope. In one week, at this defining moment in history, you can give this country the change we need.

STAND UP AND FIGHT
(John McCain)
We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: hoping for our luck to change at home and abroad. We have to act. We need a new direction, and we have to fight for it. I've been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it. If I'm elected President, I will fight to shake up Washington and take America in a new direction from my first day in office until my last. I'm not afraid of the fight, I'm ready for it. I have a plan to hold the line on taxes and cut them to make America more competitive and create jobs here at home. We're going to double the child deduction for working families. We will cut the capital gains tax. And we will cut business taxes to help create jobs, and keep American businesses in America. Raising taxes makes a bad economy much worse. Keeping taxes low creates jobs, keeps money in your hands and strengthens our economy. If I'm elected President, I won't spend nearly a trillion dollars more of your money. Senator Obama will. And he can't do that without raising your taxes or digging us further into debt. I'm going to make government live on a budget just like you do.

AGAINST ALL ODDS, MCCAIN STILL SEES A FINAL COMEBACK
(Jay Carney, Time)
McCain seemed tired, as if he had been up too many late nights, and at times his answers meandered through a series of only tangentially connected sentences. But his central argument — that the race is not over, that he might still pull this thing out — is not completely unreasonable. It is not just that McCain has stared long odds in the face before and triumphed, as he did when his campaign collapsed in the summer of 2007, financially broke and in disarray. Back then, trusted friends advised him to withdraw rather than suffer a humiliating defeat. Even some of his closest associates were ready to give up, and it fell to McCain to tell them to quit feeling sorry for themselves, to lecture them about what it means to keep fighting for what you believe in. Of course, he was right, and he emerged improbably from a field of contenders to win the Republican nomination. "McCain doesn't have a lot of time for quitters," says a senior McCain adviser. "He's not about to quit now."

IN OBAMA'S CLOSING ARGUMENT, ACCENTS OF BILL CLINTON, 1992
(Greg Sargent, TPM Election Central)
Obama's success -- like Bill's -- is rooted in an uncanny sense of the electorate's mood, and of what it's looking for in its next leader. The likenesses were unmistakable today. In 1992, Bill -- though he was running against a popular incumbent who'd just prosecuted a successful war -- sensed a widespread drift among voters that was only partly rooted in economic doldrums. Crucially, Bill also sensed that the electorate was looking for a clear signal from its next President on just how the nation would be moved from the 20th Century to the 21st at a time of rapid global change... Obama -- should he win -- has outworked McCain in ways very similar to Bill's outmaneuvering of Bush Sr. Like Bill, Obama has sensed that the electorate is looking for something larger than a set of policies or personal attributes. Unlike McCain, who has proven utterly incapable of grasping the public mood on many levels, Obama has sensed that the electorate wants to know how we will remake our politics -- domestic and international -- for the next century.

AFTER I WIN... ER, MAKE THAT IF I'M ELECTED
(Mark Leibovich, New York Times)
Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have been ever vigilant in recent days for signs of January Fever. The candidates have slipped a few times into the “when I’m president” construction in campaign speeches, but usually are careful to use the cautionary “if I’m president” refrain... The United States does love a winner, but it most certainly does not love an early-celebrating one. Mr. McCain has spent significant stump time recently trying to portray Mr. Obama as the political equivalent of that strutting football player... Mr. McCain regularly mentions the “planning already under way” among Mr. Obama; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assume their hammerlock on the government come January. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Sunday, Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of already “measuring the drapes” for the White House, something he has said repeatedly. As far back as July, Mr. McCain’s campaign has tried to pin the premature-inauguration tag on Mr. Obama. They dismissed his summer tour of Europe and the Middle East as a “premature victory lap,” and mocked him for fashioning his campaign logo into a faux-presidential seal (an experiment the Obama campaign quickly scuttled). For his part, Mr. McCain traveled abroad before Mr. Obama did, delivered a speech looking back on a hypothetical first term, and began giving a Saturday morning radio address, just as real, live presidents do.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Today in Cleveland, John McCain made an interesting comment: “That’s what change means for the Obama administration. They’re redistributing. It means taking your money and giving it to someone else.”

This is interesting for two reasons.

I hesitate to say that McCain isn't telling the truth, because it depends on whom McCain means by "you" (as in, "your money") and who he means by "someone else." If by "you" he means the 2 percent of Americans who make more than $250,000 year, then he's absolutely correct. Sorry, quarter-millionaires: Obama plans to raise "your" marginal income tax rate by 3 percent to its pre-George W. Bush level and thereby "take" more of "your money." But if by "you" McCain means the other 98 percent of America, he's incorrect. If "you" make less than $200,000 a year, Obama actually plans to take less of "your money" than Bush--and less, in many cases, than McCain. People who make under $250,000 a year have every right to be offended by this if they want to be. Maybe they plan to make $250,000 sometime soon; maybe they just believe in trickle-down economics. But they shouldn't think that Obama wants to take their money and give it to someone else--and they shouldn't be told that he does. He actually just wants to give them more money.

Which brings us to the second point of interest. Conservatives are eagerly pushing the charge--online, at rallies and in my inbox--that "Barack the Redistributor" is a secret communist, Marxist or socialist. (Today, the right is misreading as evidence of his pinko ways a 2001 interview in which Obama complains that progressive activists once wrongly wanted the Supreme Court to "ente[r] into the issues of redistribution of wealth.") Now, I understand the appeal of this line of attack, which provides voters with a familiar, 20th-century bogeyman to fear. But characterizing Obama's plan to tax the nation's top earners at 39 percent instead of 36 percent as socialist is absurd. Dwight Eisenhower taxed top earners at 91 percent. Richard Nixon taxed them at more than 50 percent. Even Ronald Reagan didn't lower the top marginal rate to less than 50 percent until the last two years of his second term. Were these Republicans secret socialists, too?

The answer, of course, is no. As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait points out, "literally having any government at all involves taking somebody's money and giving it to somebody else? Even the more restrictive definition of redistribution--using government to create a less unequal distribution of wealth--has been going on for a century. If McCain is really opposed to redistribution, then that means he thinks the rich should get back a dollar in spending for every dollar they pay in taxes." For the record, he doesn't; his proposed income-tax structure is still progressive in nature, meaning that it taxes the affluent at a higher rate than the less affluent. And McCain still plans to channel tax dollars into government programs--Social Security, Medicare, etc.--that disproportionately benefit people who pay lower taxes. Again, you may prefer McCain's plan to "redistribute" the wealth to Obama's. By all means. But not because one is socialist and the other isn't.

Deep down, I suspect McCain knows that Obama isn't really a socialist. Why? Because he once sounded a lot like his rival on taxes. During the 2000 campaign, for example, a young woman asked McCain why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.”  "Look, here's what I really believe," he added. "That when you are--when you reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more." He soon backed up his words with action. After Bush was elected, McCain told Congress that he was disappointed by the president's plan to "cut the top tax rate of 39.6 percent to 36 percent." When it came time for a vote, the Arizonan stood on the Senate floor and announced that "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief." Unless McCain was a socialist in 2000 and 2001, Obama isn't a socialist now.

Ultimately, McCain has every right to talk about taxes in the closing days of the campaign. Voters deserve a serious debate on the issue. But right now, he's treating us as if we're too dumb to understand the difference between socialism and a competing vision of the top marginal tax rate. That's not just interesting. It's disappointing.

(Stephan Savoia / AP)

Speaking this morning in Cleveland, Ohio, John McCain sharpened an argument that has emerged in recent days as a central element of the GOP's case against Barack Obama: that electing him president would give Democrats--or, more ominously, "liberals"--complete control over Washington. "This election comes down to how you want your hard earned money spent," he said. "Do you want to keep it and invest it in your future, or have it taken by the most liberal person to ever run for the Presidency and the Democratic leaders who have been running Congress for the past two years -- Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?"

McCain's basic premise is sound. Right now, Democrats narrowly control both chambers of Congress, and experts estimate that they'll pick up between 23 and 28 seats in the House and between seven and nine seats in the Senate. So if Obama wins, it's all donkeys all the time. That said, I'm not sure how well McCain's "divided government" argument will work from a political perspective. Why? Because it has to accomplish several difficult tasks at once.

1. Convince voters that an Democratic government is to be avoided at all costs. Everyone loves checks and balances--in theory. But after eight years of widely reviled Republican rule, it's not clear that voters automatically dread a Democratic regime. In fact, according to the latest NBC/WSJ poll, 49 percent would prefer a Democratic Congress (vs. the 38 percent who's prefer a Republican Congress); 57 percent say that a unified government could "work together" and "end the gridlock in Washington"; and only 18 percent blame Congress for the country's problems (vs. the 35 percent who blame the Bush Administration). All of those forces are working in the Dems' favor.

2. Convince voters that Obama is a secret radical. According to the same poll, only 18 percent of voters think Obama is "too liberal on social and moral issues"; you can bet that all 18 percent of them are already voting for McCain. When asked to respond to McCain's divided government argument yesterday in Colorado, Obama said voters shouldn't expect any "sudden lurches to the left." He continued: "I think what we need to do is to create a responsive enough government that we’re dealing with our heath care crisis, dealing with energy in a serious way, pushing through a more balanced tax program so that middle class families are benefiting and responsibly ending the war in Iraq. Those things are going to take up a huge amount of time, you know when we’re also trying to stabilize the financial market. I don’t think we’re going to have time to engage in a bunch of crazy things that people, the McCain campaign specifically, has suggested we might." McCain is essentially asking voters to believe that Obama is lying and that his policies are actually more liberal than they suspect. Not an easy sell.  

3. Convince voters that Reid and Pelosi would control Obama. Swing voters may not believe that Obama is a liberal in sheep's clothing, but many do see Pelosi and Reid as too liberal for comfort. Theoretically, McCain could gain points by arguing that Obama would be powerless to stop their agenda and that only a Republican White House could keep things under control. But as New York magazine's John Heilemann reports, this may be uniquely untrue. "The unconventional way he ran for office, the whole bottom-up movement thing, may grant him a degree of independence unique in modern history," he writes. "'Personally, I think the depth of the Obama realignment is being underestimated,' says the Republican media savant Stuart Stevens, who helped elect Bush twice. 'They have basically invented their own party that is compatible with the Democratic Party but is bigger than the Democratic Party. Their e-mail list is more powerful than the DNC or RNC. In essence, Obama would be elected as an Independent with Democratic backing—like Bernie Sanders on steroids.'" Voters may sense this.

4. Convince voters to punish Obama--and not their Congressional candidates. Let's assume that voters buy McCain's basic premise that it'd be good to have a divided government and are willing to vote in part to preserve one. It's still not clear why they'd vote against the presidential candidate that they prefer--56 percent are either “optimistic or confident” or “satisfied and hopeful” that Obama would do a good job, while only 44 percent say the same of McCain--instead of simply voting against their local Democratic congressional candidate. McCain has an admirable history of crossing party lines, and he's probably the Republican best equipped to get things done in what promises to be a massively Democratic D.C. Still, he's hoping voters will base their presidential preference on the likely composition of Congress. That seems a little backwards.

5. Convince voters who already say they support Obama. As I reported this morning, "according to the RCP swing-state averages, Obama leads by more than eight points and pulls down more than 50 percent support in every John Kerry state as well as the Bush states of Iowa and New Mexico, bringing his electoral vote count to 263. In addition, Obama's beating McCain 51.7 to 44.5 in Virginia and 51.3 to 44.8 in Colorado. That puts the Democrat at 286 electoral votes--and again, that's if we're only counting states where he's polling above 50 percent." Which means that McCain could convince every single undecided in the country to vote for a divided government--and still lose the election. To win, he has to convince current Obama supporters to jump ship. Calling for checks and balances isn't likely to do the trick. 
 

 
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Bradley Effect is dead! Long live the Obama Effect!

Or at least that's the cri de coeur coming from conservative circles as the 2008 presidential race enters its final sprint. Writing this morning for Salon and the Weekly Standard, a pair of political consultants--Bill Greener (a Republican) and Arnon A. Mishkin--seize on the same statistical argument to explain how John McCain, who trails Barack Obama by 7.3 percent in the latest RealClear Politics national polling average, could still win the White House eight days from now. Neither operative claims that pre-election polls are overstating the black candidate's support--perhaps because research has shown pretty convincingly that the Bradley Effect no longer exists (if it ever did). Instead, both posit the existence of an Obama Effect. According to this theory, most undecideds are actually decided--for McCain. Which means, in turn, that the Republican nominee will benefit from a big boost on Nov. 4.

Greener and Mishkin advance different explanations for their hypothesis. Mishkin attributes it to "social acceptability." Given Obama's overwhelming momentum, he writes, "it seems likely that if voters are not ready to tell a pollster that they are with Obama, they are unlikely to get there... Where there is a perception that there is a 'socially acceptable' choice, respondents who do not articulate it are likely not to agree with it." Greener, meanwhile, is more blunt. "If you're a black candidate running against a white candidate, what you see is what you get," he writes. "And it doesn't matter whether you're an incumbent or a challenger. If you're not polling above 50 percent, you should be worried."

So should Obama be worried?

I'd say no. As always, the standard caveat applies: anything can happen between now and Nov. 4.  But there are a few problems with the Greener/Mishkin theory--at least as an explanation of why McCain might still win (a claim, it should be noted, that only Greener makes).

First of all, Greener's argument that undecideds break overwhelmingly against black candidates on Election Day doesn't really hold water. As evidence, he points to four races from 2006--the Tennessee and Maryland senate races and the Massachusetts and Ohio governor's races--then compares the pre-election polls to the final results. In each case, he says, the black candidate's support held steady while the white candidate's support shot up. Unfortunately, Greener chooses to cherry-pick surveys that support his thesis instead of using the more comprehensive RCP averages as the basis of his comparison. As a result, his conclusion is misleading.

Tennessee--where black Democrat Harold Ford was up against white Republican Bob Corker for Republican Bill Frist's old U.S. Senate seat--is a good example. "The day before the election, [Ford] was within a point of Corker, 47 to 48 with 5 percent undecided, according to OnPoint Polling," writes Greener. "On Nov. 7, Corker got 50.7 percent of the vote, Ford got 48 and an assortment of independents took 1.3 percent." But OnPoint was the only pollster to show a one-point margin; the RCP average, in fact, put Corker ahead by six, 50.3 percent to 44.3 percent. On Election Day, Ford earned 48 percent of the vote to Corker's 50.7 percent--meaning that it was Ford whose support shot up the most (by 3.7 points, compared to 0.4 points for Corker). In other words, more undecideds broke for the black guy than white guy. Likewise, Ed Rendell (a white Democrat) beat Lynn Swann (a black Republican) by a slightly smaller margin in Pennsylvania (10.8 percent) than the polls predicted (11.8 percent). But Greener simply ignores the Rendell-Swann race.

The rest of Greener's examples aren't quite as misleading. In Massachusetts, Deval Patrick (a black Democrat) gained less than two points on Election Day; his white challenger (Kerry Healy) gained nearly six. In Maryland, Michael Steele (a black Republican) lost nearly a point at the ballot box; opponent Ben Cardin (a white Democrat) gained more than five. And a similar (if slightly smaller) pattern cropped up in the Ohio gubernatorial race between Ted Strickland (white Democrat) and Ken Blackwell (black Republican). That said, these differences aren't statistically significant (as Nate Silver, who beat me to the punch by a few hours, has pointed out). On average, black candidates gained 1.6 percentage points on Election Day; white candidates gained 3.6 percent. With mixed results (see: Tennessee and Pennsylvania) and a dearth of data points, it's pretty hard to conclude that an Obama Effect will inevitably "rear its head" in the general election--let alone influence the outcome. What's more, two of the three white candidates who overperformed on Election Day 2006 were Democrats as well--and in 2006, a disastrous year for the GOP, "Democratic candidates overperformed their polls in a significant majority of competitive races around the country," as Silver notes. That leaves Greener with only one applicable case study--Patrick versus Healy. Not exactly a solid foundation for a grand theory of voter behavior. 

Which brings up to the second problem with the Obama Effect.  Not only does history disprove the notion that with black candidates (or "socially acceptable" candidates), "what you see is [always] what you get"--it proves that, for Obama, the reverse is true. As Silver showed back in August, the Illinois senator actually outperformed the polls by an average of 3.3 percentage points over the course of the entire primary season. In the West, he did 1.1 percent better than pollsters predicted (on average). In the Midwest, he surpassed the surveys by 3.1 percent. And in the South, he exceeded expectations by a whopping 7.2 percent. The only region where Obama underperformed, in fact, was the Northeast (where he can most afford to lose a little support); there, he finished about two points below the pre-primary trendline. As I recently reported, this leap is probably the result of pollsters underestimating the turnout of Obama's young and black supporters, who are voting in higher numbers this year than ever before. Ultimately, McCain may very well clobber Obama among late breakers, as Hillary Clinton did during the primaries. But if past is prelude, the boost that Obama receives from "expanding the electorate" will be at least as large as his opponent's gains among undecideds.

The final issue with the Greener/Mishkin theory is the most devastating. Both consultants argue that "as the election winds down, one should look less at the difference between Obama and McCain, and more at the actual number that Obama is getting in the polls"--largely because of McCain's assumed advantage among undecideds. And that, according to Greener, is why Obama should be worried: "[he] needs to be polling consistently above 50 percent to win. And in crucial battleground states, he isn't." The only problem? Obama may not be polling consistently above 50 percent in some "crucial battleground states"--but he's polling consistently above 50 percent in enough of them to win. Presumably, Greener is cherry-picking his polls again. According to the RCP swing-state averages, Obama leads by more than eight points and pulls down more than 50 percent support in every John Kerry state as well as the Bush states of Iowa and New Mexico, bringing his electoral vote count to 263. In addition, Obama's beating McCain 51.7 to 44.5 in Virginia and 51.3 to 44.8 in Colorado. That puts the Democrat at 286 electoral votes--and again, that's if we're only counting states he's polling above 50 percent. In other words, McCain could sway every single undecided voter--i.e., Greener and Mishkin could be completely, 100-percent correct--and Obama would still win the election by 224 electoral votes, at least according to the latest polls.

The bottom line is that even if the Obama Effect did exist--which is probably doesn't--it wouldn't be enough to propel McCain to the White House. To do that, the Republican needs to start convincing Obama's supporters to jump ship. And he's running out of time.
 

In this week's NEWSWEEK, two of America's smartest policy wonks--Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg--send unsolicited letters to the next president of the United States. Haass warns of the international challenges ahead; Bloomberg tackles the economy. Below are key excerpts. But be sure to read the whole "President's Inbox" package; it's a important reminder that winning the election will be the easy part. The comments, as always, are all yours.

HAASS: 

There are only two and a half months—76 days, to be precise— between Election Day and your Inauguration, and you will need every one of them to get ready for the world you will inherit. This is not the world you've been discussing on the trail for the last year or more: campaigning and governing could hardly be more different. The former is necessarily done in bold strokes and, to be honest, often approaches caricature. All candidates resist specifying priorities or trade-offs lest they forfeit precious support. You won, but at a price, as some of the things you said were better left unsaid. Even more important, the campaign did not prepare the public for the hard times to come.

There will be days when you will wonder why you worked so hard to get this job. What will make it so difficult is not just all that awaits, but the constraints that will limit what you can actually do. When George W. Bush became president nearly eight years ago the world was largely at peace, the U.S. military was largely at rest, oil was $23 a barrel, the economy was growing at more than 3 percent, $1 was worth 116 yen, the national debt was just under $6 trillion and the federal government was running a sizable budgetary surplus. The September 11 attacks, for all they cost us as a nation, increased the world's willingness to cooperate with us. You, by contrast, will inherit wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tired and stretched armed forces, a global struggle with terrorism, oil that has ranged as high as $150 a barrel, a weaker dollar (now worth 95 yen), substantial anti-American sentiment, a federal budget deficit that could reach $1 trillion in your first year, a ballooning national debt of some $10 trillion and a global economic slowdown that will increase instability in numerous countries.

You will take office two decades after the end of the cold war. What some dubbed the unipolar moment is history. Economic, political and military power is held by many hands, not all of which belong to states, not all of which are benign. This does not mean the United States is weak. To the contrary, this country is still the single most powerful entity in the world. But the United States cannot dominate, much less dictate, and expect that others will follow. There are limits to U.S. resources; at the same time the country has serious vulnerabilities. Enron, Abu Ghraib, Katrina and the financial crisis have taken their toll: America's ability to tell others what to do, or to persuade them through example, is much diminished.

Against this backdrop, you will face specific challenges. Many are to be found in the greater Middle East, the part of the world where every president beginning with Jimmy Carter has stubbed his toe. Consider Iraq, the issue that most dominated the foreign policy of Bush. There will be ample time for historians to sort out the wisdom (or lack thereof) of embarking on this costly war of choice. The priorities now are to gradually reduce U.S. force presence, back the integration of Iraq's Sunni minority into national institutions, persuade Arab states to help the government and resume a dialogue with Iran on Iraq's future. The good news is that many of the arrows in Iraq are finally pointing in the right direction and it will not dominate your presidency. The bad news is that you know you are in for a rough ride when Iraq is the good news.

BLOOMBERG: 

The stock market has plummeted. The credit markets are frozen. Unemployment is rising. Housing foreclosures are skyrocketing. Consumer spending is weakening. Manufacturers are cutting production. A global recession is in the offing. Welcome to the White House, 44. You're sure you wanted the job, right?

The global financial crisis has prompted countless comparisons to the Great Depression, and no doubt members of the media will soon be asking you to detail your agenda for your first 100 days, expecting you to pursue a legislative sprint as fast as Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1933. My advice: ignore them. Your first 100 days in Washington will be better spent preparing for the 1,360 days that will follow.

FDR's first 100 days achieved what the Bush administration and Congress have been trying to do for the past 60 days: restoring confidence in our financial institutions. By the time you take the oath of office, the worst of the bank panics should be behind us. And while the economy may well be in a full-fledged recession, leading the country out of it, and laying the foundation for a new century of growth and prosperity, can't be done in a few short months—and it can't be done with regulatory reform alone.

Reforming the structures that govern financial institutions will likely be the hot topic of the next Congress, and that's long overdue. But it is critical that you not allow Congress to confuse regulatory reform with an economic agenda. The long-term health and strength of the nation's economy depends less on the shape of federal regulations than on the country's capacity for growth and innovation.

Over the past decade, as you well know, our status as the world's economic superpower has been challenged as never before. Thanks largely to America, capitalism has triumphed around the globe, and now everyone wants to beat us at our own game.

This is a competition we should relish, because we continue to enjoy all sorts of advantages: the best universities, the most advanced factories and health care, the most entrepreneurial workers and the best quality of life. But like a champion who has gotten complacent and sloughed off on workouts, the federal government—paralyzed by partisan gridlock and special-interest pandering—has let America slip out of top fighting form. Getting back into shape will not be easy or pain-free, but the alternative—losing ground to China, India, Korea, Japan, the European Union and others—is simply not an option.
 

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

CEDING THE CENTER
(David Brooks, New York Times)
McCain shares the progressive conservative instinct. He has shown his sympathy with the striving immigrant and his disgust with the colluding corporatist. He has an untiring reform impulse and a devotion to national service and American exceptionalism. His campaign seemed the perfect vehicle to explain how this old approach applied to a new century with new problems — a century with widening inequality, declining human capital, a fraying social contract, rising entitlement debt, corporate authoritarian regimes abroad and soft corporatist collusion at home. In modernizing this old tradition, some of us hoped McCain would take sides in the debate now dividing the G.O.P. Some Republicans believe the G.O.P. went astray by abandoning its tax-cutting, anti-government principles. They want a return to Reagan (or at least the Reagan of their imaginations). But others want to modernize and widen the party and adapt it to new challenges. Some of us hoped that by reforming his party, which has grown so unpopular, McCain could prove that he could reform the country. But McCain never took sides in this debate and never articulated a governing philosophy, Hamiltonian or any other... As a result, Democrats now control the middle.

END OF BATTLE CENTERS ON TURF BUSH CARRIED
(Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are heading into the final week of the presidential campaign planning to spend nearly all their time in states that President Bush won last time, testimony to the increasingly dire position of Mr. McCain and his party as Election Day approaches... While some Republicans said they still had hope that Mr. McCain could pull this out, there were signs of growing concern that Mr. McCain and the party were heading for a big defeat that could leave the party weakened for years... His decision to campaign on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Ms. Palin campaigned there, was questioned even by Republicans who noted polls that showed Mr. Obama pulling away there. But it reflected how few options the campaign really has, as poll after poll suggests that Mr. Obama is solidifying his position. Mr. McCain has found relatively small crowds — particularly compared with those that are turning out for Mr. Obama — even as he has campaigned in battleground states. His campaign has become embroiled by infighting, with signs of tension between Mr. McCain’s advisers and Ms. Palin’s staff, and subject to unusual public criticism from other Republicans for how his advisers have handled this race.

THE NEXT NEW DEAL
(John Heilemann, New York)
The circumstances Obama will confront are infinitely more daunting than those that Clinton faced at the outset of his administration... Although the mounting deficit compelled Clinton to abandon much of the new spending he’d envisioned, the fiscal situation he inherited was nothing like the house of horrors awaiting Obama. Add to that the collapsing real-estate market, the credit crunch, a weak dollar, and rising unemployment, and Obama will find himself staring down the barrel of a downturn so steep and ugly that it could easily consume his whole first term. Oh, and did I forget to mention that the country is at war—in not one but two countries? All too aware that, should he win, these cascading crises will leave Obama with no time to gain his sea legs and terrifyingly little margin for error, he and his people, to a degree few realize, have been planning their transition from campaigning to governing for months with characteristic care and rigor. Like so much about Obama’s historic bid for the presidency, the first few days and weeks and months will be like nothing we have seen before—and all of it grounded in the insight that, mind-boggling as it might sound, winning was the easy part. These are Democrats they’ll be dealing with, after all.

CAMPAIGNS SIDESTEP HARSH REALITY FACING U.S.
(Albert R. Hunt, Bloomberg News)
On election night in the U.S. there will be an emotional celebration, the likes of which contemporary America has rarely seen, especially if Barack Obama wins. Echoes of the Founding Fathers, and the promise and imperfections of the nation, will reverberate. Even if John McCain pulls an upset, he is a man of such character that he will try to address some of the wrongs perpetrated in his name, while being immortalized as the most resilient Phoenix-like figure in U.S. political history. This is a big election; in very different ways, these are two big men. Yet soon thereafter a sobering reality will hit: This new president inherits the most troubled country, in domestic and foreign policy, of any new leader since Franklin Roosevelt. Fascinating as 2008 has been, neither of these men has educated voters much on the challenges ahead. The tone and substance of the campaign are really no different than six weeks ago, while the world has changed.

HOW WOULD OBAMA GOVERN?
(Will Englund, National Journal)
Obama's conduct -- as an organizer, as a Chicago politician, as a U.S. senator, and as a campaigner on a national stage -- provides more than a few clues. Smart but untested, disciplined but low-key, sure of himself but a careful listener, Obama would bring a measure of calm and consideration to the Oval Office. He can flash a brilliant smile, but he is not -- to use Roosevelt's description of Al Smith -- a happy warrior. As it was with Roosevelt, voters haven't flocked to Obama because of his campaign proposals. His supporters want to throw the Republicans out, and they see an intangible leadership quality in him. Roosevelt spelled out his philosophy succinctly (and accurately, as it turned out) in a campaign speech he gave at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. "Take a method and try it," he said. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." The voters went for it, on faith. If they elect Obama, that, too, will be on faith. The question is not so much what his positions are, but how he would govern -- and whether he's up to the challenges that the next four years, if not the next four months, are sure to bring.

HOW WOULD MCCAIN GOVERN?
(Kirk Victor, National Journal)
Although he's no stranger to casinos and enjoys playing craps, when it comes to policy, McCain is not about to simply roll the dice and hope for the best. He has, however, shown himself willing to stick his neck out and make calculated gambles. In fact, he has demonstrated, in this campaign and throughout his political career, a willingness to jump into risky situations and to confront his own party. Even though he often makes speedy decisions that seem, at times, to be impulsive, his friends insist that McCain proceeds only after taking stock of the rewards and perils of a course of action. But that calculation does not end his decision-making. Those who know McCain well invariably describe his strong reliance on his instinctive feel for an issue. What separates him from most other politicians is that the 72-year-old actually seems to relish pushing the envelope and doing the unexpected. While many lawmakers race away from risks, McCain seems to thrive on taking a bold stance.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Jonathan Darman reports:

With less than two weeks left in the presidential contest, Barack Obama continues to hold a commanding double-digit lead over John McCain according to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll. Among registered voters nationwide, Obama now leads McCain by 13 points, 53 percent to 40 percent. Among likely voters, Obama's lead is similarly strong, 53 percent to 41 percent.

Obama's lead in the NEWSWEEK Poll is consistent with other recent national polls, including soundings taken by CBS News and The New York Times, The Washington Post and ABC News, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal and by Pew Research, all of which measured Obama's lead over McCain as somewhere between 10 and 14 points. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama's lead stayed virtually unchanged from two weeks ago, when he led McCain 52 to 41 among registered voters. (For the complete results, click here.)

The new poll suggests Obama is consolidating his support across demographic groups. He now leads McCain in every age group, even among voters 65 and older, who choose him over McCain 48 percent to 42 percent. He leads handily among men, 52 percent to 42 percent, and among women, 54 percent to 39 percent. He now leads McCain by 46 percent to 44 percent among working class whites, a dramatic reversal from April, when McCain led him in that group 53 percent to 35 percent.

Still, McCain's attempt to raise anxiety about Obama's economic policies—with his relentless focus on Joe the Plumber and his suggestion that an Obama presidency could usher in an era of socialism—seems to have had some effect with working-class voters. In the poll, 39 percent of working-class and poor whites said they would list as a major concern the fear that Obama's tax plans could hurt small business. The McCain attacks seem to have had a larger impact with middle class and high-income voters, 48 percent of whom deem Obama's tax policies a major concern.

READ THE REST HERE. 
 

Sometimes strategists say the darndest things. As Dan Balz reports in this morning's Washington Post...

... McCain's team dismisses the most dire polls -- those showing the race nationally with a double-digit lead for Obama. Advisers believe the contest's margin is in the five-to-seven-point range, about the same deficit, they say, that then-Vice President Al Gore faced at this time eight years ago against then-Gov. George W. Bush.

The implication, I suppose, is that because Gore clawed his way back and won a popular vote victory on Election Day, McCain can, too.

This may be true. McCain may still win the the election. It's just that the Bush v. Gore poll numbers don't give us any reason to believe that he will (even if they do make for a nifty talking point).

Here's why. The current RealClear Politics polling average shows Obama leading McCain by 7.8 percentage points nationally (50.3 to 42.5); it includes 15 surveys released between Oct. 19 and Oct. 23. Unfortunately, RCP didn't exist in 2000, so there's no historical average to use for comparison. But we can create our own. Thanks to Polling Report's comprehensive catalog of presidential trial heats, I was able to average together all 25 surveys released between Oct. 19 and Oct 23, 2000. The results? Over that four-day period, Bush led Gore by only 3.5 percentage points (46.1 to 42.6). Two things to notice:

First, while McCain's average level of support (42.5 percent) is nearly identical to Gore's (42.6 percent), the average gap between McCain and Obama (7.8 percent) is twice as large as the average gap between Gore and Bush (3.5 percent). McCain's advisers may "say" that Obama's "five-to-seven-point" lead matches Bush's margin from eight years ago, but facts are stubborn things. The fact here is that McCain now faces a much steeper uphill battle than Gore ever did.

Second--and most importantly--Bush was polling nearly four points under 50 percent on Oct. 23, 2000. Obama, on the other hand, is averaging over 50 percent in the polls. Only three of the 25 surveys released between Oct. 19 and Oct. 23, 2000 show Dubya attracting a majority of supporters; meanwhile, 11 of the last 15 2008 soundings put Obama past the magic 50 percent mark. That's a big difference. To win in 2000, Gore merely had to sway a significant number of undecided voters--which is what ended up happening. But to beat Obama, McCain has to convince people who already say they support the Democrat to jump ship--a much harder task. If the election were held today, polls indicate that Obama would capture a popular-vote majority--even if every single undecided voter sided with McCain. You simply couldn't say the same thing for Bush at this point in the 2000 race (and that's not even accounting for the Electoral College math, which looks far worse for McCain than it did for Gore). 

Ultimately, McCain may win. He may lose. But while Gore's 2000 performance has given his strategists a convenient talking point, it shouldn't really give them hope.

Funny how a quickly a non-story can become a story.

When reports first surfaced yesterday--and by "surfaced" I mean "appeared atop the all-powerful Drudge Report"--that a " 6'4", 200-lb African-American male" in "dark clothing" punched, kicked and scratched a "B" (apparently for "Barack") into the face of the woman he was mugging outside a Pittsburgh ATM after he spotting a McCain bumper sticker on her car, I made a conscious decision not to comment.

My reasoning was simple. Despicable individuals exist. Some of them shout "kill him" at John McCain rallies; others cut people who disagree with their politics. But since 99.9 percent of McCain and Obama supporters are normal, sane human beings, the press probably shouldn't encourage the public to think otherwise by obsessing over the 0.1 percent who aren't. That's why I didn't report on the bigots who occasionally crop up at Sarah Palin events. And that's why I wasn't going to report on "Borro."

Until, that is, this afternoon, when Pittsburgh authorities revealed that 20-year-old Texas native Ashley Todd--the alleged "victim"--had confessed to making the entire story up (and injuring herself in the process). Of course, only Todd, a McCain volunteer, can say for sure what her motives were. But the deliberately inflammatory description she created of her fictional assailant--big, black, pro-Obama--provides us with a rather unsubtle hint. Like the "Kill Him" crowd, Todd belongs to the 0.1 percent of McCain supporters who happen to nuts, or bigoted, or whatever. The difference is that when those folks shout "kill him," they only expose their own ugliness. Todd tried to make other people look ugly.

I'd say she deserves her 15 minutes of infamy.
 

After struggling for weeks to present a coherent case against Barack Obama, John McCain has finally found a closing argument—and he's sticking to it. The surprising thing, at least in light of his earlier sallies, may be that it's worth sticking to.

Call it the Tale of Two Joes. Steering the "Straight Talk Express" through central Florida's vote-rich I-4 corridor—pit stops included a doctor's office, a diner, a farm and a sawdust-strewn lumberyard—the Republican presidential nominee hammered away yesterday at the two-man message that his strategists hope will carry him through Nov. 4.

On one hand, there was Joe the Plumber—the Ohio worker who confronted Obama about his tax plan earlier this month. "After months of campaign-trail eloquence, we finally learned Sen. Obama's economic goal," McCain told a crowd of 3,500 in Sarasota. "He wants to spread the wealth around."

On the other, there was "Joe the Biden"—the Democratic vice-presidential nominee who recently informed Democratic donors in Seattle that if his "brilliant 47-year-old" boss is elected, "we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test [his] mettle." “We don’t want a president that invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars," McCain said in Ormond Beach. "[Sen. Biden] accidentally delivered some straight talk to America.”

Here at Stumper headquarters, we'd like to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming—mindlessly slobbering over the latest polls, baselessly speculating about 2012—to note what many of our colleagues in the media probably won't: that McCain's "Two Joes" message (reinforced today with a pair of ads) is a huge improvement over the dreck that preceded it. In fact, it's probably the best strategy available to him in the final days of the race.

Here's why.

It's Nothing Personal. Averaging more than 50 percent support in the national polls—and in enough states to garner him a game-ending 306 electoral votes—Obama can afford to float above the fray and spread sunshine about the land. McCain can't. To win, he has to pull Obama down below the magic 50 percent mark—which means he has to attack.

Unfortunately for the Arizonan, his initial attempts to "disqualify" Obama—Bill Ayers, ACORN, etc.—hurt him more than they hurt his rival. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, for example, shows Obama's favorable-unfavorable split at 53-33; McCain's, on the other hand, has plummeted to 36-45. Obsessing over a "washed-up old terrorist" when the rest of the country was obsessing over the economy—and Obama was obsessing with them—made McCain look like a typical "out-of-touch" politician.

That's why the "two Joes" message—while still fundamentally negative—is a step up. It's framework for discussing the implications of Obama's domestic- and foreign-policy proposals--and, by extension, the issues facing the country--rather than a vessel for fear-mongering and spooky innuendo, You might disagree with McCain on the substance of his statements about the candidates' competing tax plans and contrasting attitudes toward hostile international leaders. (As I've written, Joe the Plumber would get more money back under Obama than McCain.) But at least now there's some substance to disagree with.

From Their Mouths... McCain's mantra during the days of Ayers and ACORN was "Who is Barack Obama?" The point, it seemed, was to create a false air of mystery and encourage voters to fill in the blanks with their own biases, suspicions and fears. McCain resorted to innuendo because he thought he had more to gain from preying on ignorance than providing information. But swing voters actually examined the data and decided that Obama wasn't a closet radical and ACORN wasn't a nefarious conspiracy (sloppy, yes; dangerous, no). So the strategy didn't work.

Now, instead of darkly warning America about the things Obama hasn't said, McCain is seizing on the things his rival (and his rival's running mate) have said. Obama, for instance, actually told Joe Wurzelbacher, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody"; Biden specifically highlighted Obama's youth as a reason to expect a "generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy." You might argue that McCain is taking these comments out of context, but hey, that's politics; Obama did the same thing with McCain's "100 years in Iraq" remark. The fact is, criticisms are much more memorable when they're supported by a soundbite from your rival.

Keep it Simple. By the time McCain arrived at Hofstra for the final debate, he was practically a powder keg of anti-Obama talking points. It's fair to say he exploded on stage. By my count, the Republican unleashed a dozen different attacks that night. Now he's down to two: one on the economy, one on foreign policy. "We will focus like a laser on those messages in the closing days," a McCain adviser told the Washington Post this morning. Given that voters absorb only a limited amount of information, this strategy—simplicity and consistency—is infinitely preferable to the "kitchen-sink" assault that preceded it. Plus it has the added bonus of not making McCain look like a loser who's desperately flailing at his opponent—a potentially fatal image in the final days of a campaign.

McCain's "Two Joes" message isn't perfect. Much of his rhetoric, for example, remains overly alarmist. Agree or disagree, calling Obama's plan to raise the top tax rate from 36 percent to 39 percent a sign of "socialism" is ridiculous; as Colin Powell noted Sunday, "there is nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is, who should be paying more, who should be paying less." Redistributing wealth—that is, taking a bigger slice from the affluent than the less affluent—is how our system of progressive income taxation works. Likewise, it's a little over-the-top to suggest that only Obama would "invite testing" from overseas, given that Michael Chertoff, the guy in charge of Homeland Security, just told Bloomberg News that "any period of transition"—whether Obama's or McCain's—"creates a greater vulnerability, meaning there's more likelihood of distraction." And the campaign is still investing in under-the-radar, innuendo-laden robo-calls.

That said, no reasonable observer expects a candidate who's losing by an average of 7.4 percentage points to spend the last 11 days of a presidential campaign playing pattycake. By and large, McCain's closing argument is substantive, focused and totally within the bounds of American political acceptability. It's perfectly legitimate to argue over whether rich people should pay higher taxes—or to wonder why Biden didn't say "every President gets tested in his first six months in office, and Barack Obama won't be any different."

Of course, that shouldn't excuse the incompetence and occasional absurdity of McCain's previous infractions (lipstick on a pig, anyone?). And it probably won't be enough to turn his campaign around—the upcoming NEWSWEEK poll, for example, shows that voters prefer Obama by 15 points on taxes and think that the economy is a more important issue than national security by a margin of 32 percent. But it's worth considering as the second (and third, and fourth) drafts of history are written in the days and weeks to come.

Sarah Palin is well known for rallying her base, getting social conservatives behind the Republican ticket. But there’s another constituency that she has gotten plenty excited lately: the big pro-choice groups. The Alaska governor and Planned Parenthood have dramatically opposed views on abortion--and that’s exactly what has made her a great uniter for the pro-choice movement.

Palin is unwaveringly pro-life, more so than her running mate. John McCain is by no means a centrist when it comes to abortion--you can read more about that here--but his views are not as strong as Palin's. She calls herself as "pro-life as any candidate can be" and does walk the talk. She's pointed to the fact that she chose to have her son Trig even though she knew he would be born with Down syndrome and that she supports her daughter Bristol's pregnancy as signs that she embraces what she calls a "culture of life." The same is evident in her policy positions: Palin supports outlawing all abortions except in cases where the mother's life is at risk and opposes stem-cell research that would destroy embryonic stem cells. That already had pro-choice voters pretty riled up when McCain selected her as a running mate--one survey in early September found that more than half of women, when told about Palin’s views on abortion, viewed the Republican ticket less favorably. Then in an interview earlier this week with Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Palin raised eyebrows when she said her running mate's views were closer to her own. Asked if McCain would support the Republican platform if elected (The 2008 Republican Party platform opposes stem cell research and supports a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The platform does not include exceptions in cases of rape or incest*), Palin responded:

James Dobson: "In your private conversations with Senator McCain, is it your impression that he also strongly supports those views? I know that he did not oppose that platform when it was written. Do you think he will implement it?"
 
Sarah Palin: "I do, from the bottom of my heart. I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details, too, about the different planks and what they represent."

In April, the governor denied the state legislature's request for extra debates on two controversial anti-abortion bills, one requiring minors to obtain parental consent before having abortions and another outlawing partial-birth abortion except to save the life of the mother. After state senators failed to reach agreement, the chamber's president tried to attach them to the agenda of a special legislative session being held on Palin's top legislative priority: a new natural gas pipeline. Palin demurred. "Alaskans know I am pro-life and have never wavered in my belief in the sanctity of every human life," she said in a statement. "These issues are so important they shouldn't be diluted with oil and gas deliberations."

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

BLAME GAME: GOP FORMS CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD
(Jonathan Martin, Mike Allen and John F. Harris, Politico)
With despair rising even among many of John McCain’s own advisors, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering—-much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely... These public comments offer a whiff of an increasingly acrid behind-the-scenes GOP meltdown—a blame game played out through not-for-attribution comments to reporters that operatives know will find their way into circulation. At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted... One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides – a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns... “The cake is baked,” agreed a former McCain strategist. “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”

IN MCCAIN'S UPHILL BATTLE, WINNING IS AN OPTION
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
Senator John McCain woke Thursday morning to what has become a fairly common greeting in these tough last weeks of his campaign. A raft of polls showing him well behind. Early post-mortems on his candidacy. Even Republicans speaking of him in the past tense. But is it really over? As Mr. McCain enters this closing stretch, his aides — as well as some outside Republicans and even a few Democrats — argue that he still has a viable path to victory... Even the most hearty of the McCain supporters acknowledge that it will not be easy, and there are a considerable number of Republicans who say, off the record, that the 2008 cake is baked. At this point in the campaign, Mr. McCain’s hopes of victory may rest on events over which he simply does not have control. Still, there do seem to be enough question marks hovering over this race that it is not quite time for Mr. McCain to ride his bus back to Arizona.

POLLS POINT TO STRUGGLE FOR MCCAIN
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
For John McCain, the batch of battleground state polls released yesterday brought almost universally bad news. The Republican nominee's path to the presidency is now extremely precarious and may depend on something unexpected taking control of a contest that appears to have swung hard toward Barack Obama since the end of the debates. McCain's advisers acknowledge that his way back is difficult, but they maintain that there is a way. It requires a combination of smart campaigning, traction for his arguments and what the McCain team hopes will be fears among the electorate at the prospect of a Democrat in the White House with expanded Democratic majorities in Congress. McCain plans in the closing days to focus on taxes and spending, national security, and what one adviser called "the perils of an Obama presidency with no checks and balances." The campaign will point to congressional Democrats' claims about the agenda they plan in the new Congress, Obama's "spread the wealth" remark to "Joe the Plumber" and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s comment that his running mate would be tested internationally early in his presidency.

43% AIN'T NOTHING
(Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)
Amid two wars, a deep economic crisis, a fractured base, too much cynicism, and a campaign with the wind not at its back but head on in its face—with all of that working against Mr. McCain, 43% of the American people say, right now, in these polls, they are for him. And there are a significant number of undecideds. Four years ago about 122 million people voted. Forty-three percent of 122 million is 52 million people, more or less. A huge group, one too varied to generalize about because it includes flinty elderly Republicans from New England, home-schooling mothers in Ohio, libertarianish Republicans in Colorado, suburban patriots outside the big cities, and many others. They are the beating heart of conservatism, and to watch most television is to forget they exist, for they are not shown much, except at rallies. But they are there, and this is a center-right nation, and many of them have been pushing hard against the age for 40 years now, and more. For some time they have sensed that something large and stable is being swept away, maybe has been swept away, and yet you still have to fight for it. They will not give up without a fight, and they will make their way to the polls. And they will be a rock-hard challenge to Mr. Obama if he wins.

IDEOLOGY ASIDE, THIS HAS BEEN THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN
(Lois "No Relation" Romano, Washington Post)
Two months after Sarah Palin joined the GOP ticket, and four months after Hillary Clinton ended her quest for the presidency, 2008 is turning out to be a transformative year for women in politics, according to women leaders across the political spectrum. As Election Day nears, it's clear that gender was not a disqualifying factor for either Clinton or Palin. Voters who turned against them did so for other reasons, just as they do with male candidates. Women from both parties also perceive with satisfaction a heightened emphasis on their issues in this year's race. Palin's candidacy has sent a jolt through traditional liberal women's organizations as she tries to redefine feminism, suggesting that the old movement has become detached from the hockey moms Palin champions. The mother of five and former beauty queen is the antithesis of the bra-burning militant libbers of the '60s, and she is adamantly antiabortion. Yet Palin has grabbed the feminist label vigorously and has been hailed as one by the thousands of supportive women who wave their lipstick tubes at her rallies.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Via Jonathan Martin, I see that John McCain floated a rather curious criticism of Barack Obama this afternoon in Florida:

"Barack Obama's only answer is to double-down on the Bush Administration's legacy of out-of-control spending."

The attack on the president is predictable. Judging by McCain's scathing interview with the Washington Times this morning--"we just let things get completely out of hand"--the era of forced comity between the two former foes is officially over. But the thing that gets me is the pivot to Obama. It's like McCain suddenly linked Obama's incessant "More of the Same" refrain to Bush's sub-30 percent approval rating and decided, you know, what the hell. This is a game two can play.

Setting aside the mind-bending irony of the senator's argument--last time I checked it was McCain who had an R after his name and "voted with the President over 90% of the time"--I have to admit that I'm eager to see where he takes it next. Does Barack Obama plan, for example, to double-down on the Bush Administration's legacy of launching unilateral wars in the Middle East and predicting that "we will be welcomed as liberators"? How about the Bush Administration's legacy of cutting taxes for "the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief”? Then again, McCain could go in a different direction and start accusing Obama of being an "erratic" hothead who selected an unprepared neophyte as his running mate.

So much strategery, so little time.

UPDATE, Oct. 24: By the way, McCain is right to suggest that Obama's proposals would add to the federal deficit. The problem is that his would, too. Via the Los Angeles Times:

In a recent study, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget laid out how much the presidential candidates' spending and tax-cut proposals would add to the federal deficit in 2013. McCain's proposals for major new corporate tax cuts and other expenditures would add $211 billion to the $147-billion projected deficit, said Maya MacGuineas, president of the watchdog group.  Obama would raise the CBO's projected deficit by even more -- by $286 billion -- if the government adopted his program of middle-class tax cuts, a healthcare insurance program, and boosted energy and infrastructure funding.

Pot, meet kettle.

When we weighed in Tuesday on reports that McCain insiders now consider Colorado "gone"--that is, breaking for Barack Obama--there was considerable pushback from the campaign's Crystal City headquarters.

Unfortunately, actions speak louder than words. As a top McCain strategist told CNN's John King earlier this week, "Most of us have a hard time counting on Colorado." Now, it seems, they're not.

A pair of reports released this afternoon reveal that both the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee have decided to drastically slash their ad spending in the Centennial State. According to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, McCain ran 195 spots this past Monday, down from 243 the previous Monday. Meanwhile, public records show that the RNC cut its ad buys for McCain at Colorado's three biggest television stations by 46 percent over the past week.

The shift likely reflects the fact that Obama has topped the magic 50 percent mark in eight of the last night Colorado polls--a lead that McCain, with only a dozen field offices to Obama's 51, would find it difficult to overturn. The GOP hasn't given up on Colorado entirely; Palin rallied Grand Junction earlier this week and McCain has long planned to visit the state tomorrow. But it's clear that neither the campaign nor the party is feeling particularly high--Rocky-Mountain-style--as the election comes to a close.

A quick reminder about what this means. If Obama hangs onto the 252 electoral votes John Kerry won in 2004, then adds Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado to the Democratic column--all states where Obama averages more than 50 percent in the polls and where McCain staffers have admitted that things look bleak--he'll win 273 electoral votes (and the election). Without Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, McCain can't afford simply to  retain the rest of Bush's map (and/or swing New Hampshire, long thought to be his best pick-up possibility). He'd need to poach Pennsylvania--where the five polls released this week show him trailing by 11.2 percent.

According to Tracey, however, McCain has scaled back his ad spending in the Keystone State as well, running 284 spots this past Monday, down from 336 the previous week. The only places where he's boosted his investments? Virginia and Florida--both Bush states, both leaning (slightly) toward Obama. The way things are going, McCain could erase his rival's leads in both states by Election Day--and Nevada, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina. It still wouldn't be enough.

We hereby recommend that the senator embark on an all-cheesesteak diet. 

Photo by Max Whittaker/Getty Images

Why Sarah Palin would don a Democratic-themed donkey scarf at at Oct. 21 rally in Reno, Nev., remains the deepest of fashion mysteries, but the photograph of her with said accessory has already become overexposed in the blogosphere.

NEWSWEEK first spotted the devious designs draping the veep candidate on Getty Images' wire services in a series of photos taken by Max Whittaker, a Sacramento, Calif.-based freelancer. A brief Stumper post later, the photo was soon snapped up by hundreds of blogs, including Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Media Bistro.

Much speculation about the donkey scarf was tossed about the Internets, most of it snark-laden. "Is Sarah Palin This Amazingly Stupid?" was the headline of the Kos post, while the Belfast Telegraph headline chided, "Donkey wrong: Sarah Palin wears 'Vote Democrat' scarf at Republican rally". We may never know why Palin wore that scarf -- the press office in the McCain campaign hasn't returned our calls -- but 11-year photojournalist Whittaker gives us his take on the story:

The Reno event "went down like any other campaign rally," Whittaker says. Palin did not have a scarf on during her speech and wasn't wearing it "at least the first five or ten minutes of working the rope line" afterward. Whittaker worked his way through the post-speech crowd toward Palin and "shot her for about 5 minutes until she was out of my sight, and she had the scarf on the whole time." How did she get it? It's still unclear, but Whittaker notes that in the meet-and-greet-frenzy "it's pretty inconceivable that anything happened beyond someone in the crowd giving her this scarf. I can't see her suddenly pulling it out of her handbag in this rope line." When he went to shoot her a half-hour later for an interview with CNN, the scarf had disappeared, he said.

That there were donkeys on the scarf never registered with Whittaker as he was transmitting his photos to Getty. "I didn't even notice it myself until you guys put it up," he says. "When I saw your blog, I was just like any typical reader who thought, 'That's pretty funny.'"

A strange update: On Oct. 26, the Contra Costa Times reported in its "The Eye" column that the scarf was given to Palin by former Hillary Clinton supporter Linda Williams, of Carmel Valley, Calif., who claimed that she gave up the vintage 70s item to send a message that she was now supporting Palin.

Next week, Barack Obama will engineer the last big set piece of the extraordinary 2008 presidential campaign--a 30-minute infomercial scheduled to air on the major broadcast networks and three cable news networks. According to my NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe, "one senior source close to the campaign puts the price tag in the $6 million range—which would make it the most expensive single political ad ever." Here, Wolffe reports on what we should expect to see (other than a stage decoupaged in dollar bills): 

Putnam has produced more than 1,000 TV ads for Democratic candidates across the country, including some of the most striking spots broadcast over the last two cycles. His work for Gov. Bill Richardson's re-election campaign in New Mexico in 2006 and 2007 was widely praised and politically effective, not least for their use of humor. One spot showed Richardson in a Western movie, wearing a sheriff's badge and often riding on horseback. The ad touted his record of shuttering crystal-meth labs as the governor strode into a saloon to order a glass of milk. It ended with a line about movie production in New Mexico, with the governor riding off into the sunset. "Next time," Richardson said, "let's make a space movie."

Putnam also handled Richardson's ads in this year's Democratic presidential primaries. They were among the most distinctive and talked about of the year... Two of the ads featured mock job interviews with a lazy, sandwich-eating interrogator who rattled off Richardson's impressive foreign-policy resume, only to ask at the end: "So what makes you think you can be president?" Richardson looks wryly at the camera and says nothing.

More recently, Putnam produced Michelle Obama's bio video at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The video was narrated by Michelle's mother, Marian Robinson, and sought to portray Michelle's family and community work in often intimate ways—ending with an emotional emphasis on Michelle's late father...

"He's a very, very good writer and producer," says Peter Fenn, the Democratic strategist who worked with him through the late 1980s and early 1990s. "He's very creative and a real perfectionist when it comes to his ads. He takes real pride in them. There are a lot of folks who do cookie-cutter things and churn them out. Not Mark." (Senior Obama campaign staff declined to comment on the prime-time ad or Putnam's work, and they did not make Putnam available to discuss it.)

Friends credit Putnam for his creativity. "He's very strong on the concept side, [as he demonstrated in] the Richardson ads," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity speaking on the subject. "And secondly, he understands this is an emotional medium. He is excellent at producing affective material."

The friend cautions that next week's Obama spot won't be an ideal showcase for Putnam's creative talents. There will be a lot of hands in the project—including campaign manager David Plouffe, chief strategist David Axelrod and senior advisers Robert Gibbs and Anita Dunn. The team has been considering a classic town-hall format and weighing a mix of video and new original material, as well.

READ THE REST HERE.

Do you believe that the evangelical share of the electorate will skyrocket from 23 percent in 2004 to 44 percent on Nov. 4? Or that John McCain will clobber Barack Obama by 52 points among voters under 25?

If so, I've got some polls to sell you. They're right over here... next to this bridge.

It's one of America's favorite political pastimes, especially common as October comes to a close--cherry-picking the surveys that help you (whomever you are) tell the tale you want to tell.

Over the past 24 hours, the Drudge Report, the Politico Playbook and Mark Halperin's The Page--three of the main arbiters of Washington CW--have all linked to the latest national polls from IBD ("close!") and AP-Gfk ("shock!"). Why? Because they show Obama leading by one point (45-44 and 44-43, respectively)--and none of the interested parties has any incentive to disagree. McCain wants us to show he's still in the hunt. Obama wants his forces to keep fighting. And the media desperately desires the drama and tension of a photo finish. Hence the lede on Liz Sidoti's AP write-up: "The presidential race [has] tightened after the final debate." And the new graphic that has magically materialized on FOX News: "TIGHT RACE. AP POLL SHOWS VIRTUAL TIE."

Unfortunately, the same polls also show McCain crushing Obama in the sub-25 demographic (IBD) and benefiting from a 19 percentage point boost in evangelical turnout (AP). Given that Obama typically leads by 20 to 40 points among young voters and that McCain isn't particularly popular with the born-again crowd, those of us in the reality-based community--that is, those of us who actually want to figure out who's winning and by how much--can probably agree that AP and IBD aren't the best polls to go by.

But that raises the question: which stats should reality-based observers rely on? Here are three tips:

1. The Law of Averages. Don't obsess over the constant influx of individual polls. A lot of them--like AP, IBD and, for that matter, the NEWSWEEK survey from June that showed Obama winning by 15 points--are probably outliers. Follow the averages instead. RealClear Politics only includes nonpartisan firms in its average; Pollster includes everyone. Right now, both sites show Obama ahead by an average of slightly more than 7 percentage points among likely voters--his largest lead of the cycle. That's pretty solid evidence that the race hasn't tightened. What's more, both sites show Obama hovering above 50 percent--meaning that he'd win a popular-vote majority if the election were held today.

Still, when consulting averages you should remember that they lag behind events by design. The RCP average, for example, includes polls that were in the field last Thursday. Averages are still our best reflection of on-the-ground reality. It's just that they reflect a reality that's a few days in the past.

2. A Likely Story. Given that only 60 percent of eligible adults vote in a typical election, pollsters can't simply survey a random sample of adults and then publish the results. They have to at least attempt to determine which of those respondents are going to vote. Hence screening for "likely voters."

In the past, public-opinion  organizations like Gallup would ask respondents a series of questions--How much thought have you given to the upcoming election for president: quite a lot, or only a little? How often would you say you vote: always, nearly always, part of the time or seldom? Do you, yourself, plan to vote in the presidential election this November, or not?--and then weigh the results to determine who was likely to show up on Election Day.

The hitch with this model, however, is that it allows the pollster to "mak[e] a determination as to how the voter will behave." As Nate Silver writes, "a voter can tell you that he's registered, tell you that he's certain to vote, tell you that he's very engaged by the election, tell you that he knows where his polling place is, etc., and still be excluded from the model if he hasn't voted in the past." In previous elections, this wasn't much of an issue. But based on massive gains in Democratic registrations, enormous increases in turnout among "unlikely" voting blocs during the Democratic primaries and a nearly 20 point enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, there's a strong chance that Obama could "expand" the electorate by driving new voters to the polls on Nov. 4.

In an attempt to account for the electorate's potentially new complexion, an increasing number of pollsters are now publishing results based solely on respondents' stated voting intentions. Yesterday, Silver divided the eight current national polls that list separate results for likely and registered voters into two clusters: one (on the top) that relies on a "traditional" model and one (on the bottom) that relies on the "expanded" model. As you can see, the traditional filter tends to strip about 5 points from Obama's lead:

If you believe that millions of newly registered Obama supporters--young people, African-Americans, Latinos, etc.--won't show up on Election Day, stick to the traditional likely voter model. But if you suspect that at least some of them will, it's worth including the expanded version in your calculations.

3. The States of Play. With less than two weeks to go, McCain and Obama are largely ignoring the national numbers and focusing on key battleground states. You probably should, too. As the New Republic's Noam Scheiber notes, "having an active campaign in a state makes a big difference... McCain is husbanding his resources for the absolute minimum number of electoral votes he needs to win ... [so] there's no reason to think he couldn't lose the popular vote by 2-3 points but still win Virginia by 1." 

To see how the states are shaking out, check RealClear Politics Electoral College page from time to time. Right now, RCP shows Obama leading by an average of more than 5 points in states worth 306 electoral votes; factor in states he's winning by average of less than 5 points--Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Missouri--and his tally rises to 364.

The important number to watch, however, is how many electoral votes (EVs) Obama is collecting in states where he averages more than 50 percent support--i.e., states he'd win even if every single undecided voter breaks for McCain. As of today, the Illinois senator is topping 50 in all of the Kerry states (252 EV) plus Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9) and Virginia (13)--for a grand total of 286 EVs, or 16 more than he needs to win. What's more, there are signs that Ohio might be breaking his way as well. The three polls that were in the field this week--Big10 Battleground, CNN/Time and Quinnipiac--show Obama leading McCain 53-41, 50-46 and 52-38, respectively. Note that all of Obama's numbers start with a "5."

As with national polls, states averages lag behind events. So there's a chance that McCain could still catch up--or be catching up right now. That said, there's simply no evidence so far that "the presidential race has tightened." In fact, much the opposite. Like the rest of you political junkies, I'll be staying tuned to see whether something changes. But I won't let any single poll--however "close"--"shock" me into believing a storyline that's not supported by the stats.

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

MCCAIN LAMBASTES BUSH YEARS
(Joseph Curl and Stephan Dinan, Washington Times)
Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush... whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat. "We just let things get completely out of hand," he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years... McCain lashed out at a litany of Bush policies and issues that he said he would have handled differently as president... "Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously," Mr. McCain said... aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio. "Those are just some of them," he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter.

WHY BARACK OBAMA IS WINNING
(Joe Klein, Time)
Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain's peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama's quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public's choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he's far more comfortable when he's able to think things through. "He has learned to trust his gut," an Obama adviser told me. "He wasn't so confident in his instincts last year. It's been the biggest change I've seen in him."

THE MAKING (AND REMAKING) OF MCCAIN
(Robert Draper, New York Times Magazine)
John McCain’s biography has been the stuff of legend for nearly a decade. And yet Schmidt and his fellow strategists have had difficulty explaining how America will be better off for electing (as opposed to simply admiring) a stubborn patriot. In seeking to do so, the McCain campaign has changed its narrative over and over. Sometimes with McCain’s initial resistance but always with his eventual approval, Schmidt has proffered a candidate who is variously a fighter, a conciliator, an experienced leader and a shake-’em-up rebel. “The trick is that all of these are McCain,” Matt McDonald, a senior adviser, told me. But in constantly alternating among story lines in order to respond to changing events and to gain traction with voters, the “true character” of a once-crisply-defined political figure has become increasingly murky.

LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE
(Steven Stark, Boston Phoenix)
NOVEMBER 5 -- There was Wilson over Hughes. And, of course, Truman over Dewey. But there's never been a surprise in presidential politics like the one that awaited Americans this morning, who woke up to discover that, somehow, John McCain had been elected president over Barack Obama... Of course, Wednesday-morning quarterbacking is ridiculously easy, but in retrospect, what happened should have been crystal clear: Obama's lead was never as great as the media hype that accompanied it -- he only led by two to six points in some major tracking polls. In several of them, Obama tellingly never cleared 50 percent. (There was a larger-than-usual undecided vote.) And whether it was the so-called "Bradley effect" (suggesting a racial element to the vote) or something else, Obama performed last night exactly as he often had in the spring against Hillary Clinton: he ran below expectations. Meanwhile, the tsunami of youth support for Obama never materialized. Instead, it was the over-65 crowd who turned out as if the election were a five-o'clock dinner special, and who voted in record numbers for their fellow senior citizen.

MCCAIN'S PATH TO VICTORY THROUGH PA.
(Charles Mahtesian, Politico)
Nearly everyone in a position to know thinks the race for Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes is considerably tighter than what recent polls reveal. “There’s a tendency in Pennsylvania for the polls to change dramatically in the final days,” says John Brabender, a top Republican political consultant based in Pittsburgh. “In the governor’s race in 2002, there were polls just a few days out showing [Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell] with a 25-point lead and he ended up losing 50 of 67 counties and won by nine points.” I don’t believe there’s a double-digit lead,” said Jon Delano, a western Pennsylvania-based political analyst who also serves as an adjunct professor of Public Policy and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University. “The history of the presidential elections here is different.” Even top Democrats concede that McCain’s deficit in the polls — 11 percentage points, according to the latest Real Clear Politics polling average — isn’t a solid indicator of his chances of carrying the state. On Tuesday, CNN reported that an anxious Rendell had sent two recent memos to the Obama campaign requesting that the Democratic nominee spend more time campaigning in Pennsylvania.

PALIN DROVE A STAKE INTO CENTRIST HEARTS
(Froma Harrop, Providence Journal)
For the longest time, I was sitting on the fence, as were many centrists. A former Hillary Clinton supporter, I was bothered by Barack Obama's thin résumé, his rock-star rallies and the sexism tolerated by his campaign. At the same time, I admired McCain for his fiscal rectitude, history of bipartisanship and concern over global warming. That the right wing despised him for several high-profile breaks with the Bush administration -- notably on torture and the early tax cuts -- was a plus... What happened, Mark? Sarah Palin happened. Independents like me wanted two things out of a McCain running mate. (1) A capable leader who could step into the top job should something happen to the not-very-young No. 1. (2) Someone who would temper McCain's recent efforts to woo social conservatives. They got neither in the Alaska governor... Independents tend to be fiscally conservative, socially liberal and strong on defense. They were McCain's natural constituency and in mid-September gave him a 13-point margin. That lead has since flipped over to Obama, and Palin is a big reason. The choice of her as McCain's VP would have been politically brilliant had a Democrat made it.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

If Barack Obama swipes the Sunshine State's 27 electoral votes from the Republican column, the 2008 election is over. Can he swing it? Right now, the Illinois senator (who finished a two-day visit Tuesday) is doing his best—but John McCain (who arrives tomorrow) has signaled that he's willing to fight to the finish. Here are the latest stats on where Florida stands—conveniently categorized by which candidate they benefit:

ADVANTAGE OBAMA:

• 1 percent: Obama's lead in the RealClear Politics polling average.
• 73,476: Obama's lead, out of 306,444 ballots cast, in early-voting results (not including absentee-ballot numbers)
• 657,775: Amount by which Democratic registrations outnumber Republican registrations (up from less than 370,000 four years ago); Bush beat Kerry by 381,000 votes in 2004
  
• 120,000: Number of black Democratic voters registered since January
  
• 25: Number of Obama-Biden events since Sept. 1; McCain and Palin have held 16
  
• 5: Approximate number of calls per day that Tom Slade, a former Florida GOP chair, was receiving last week from fellow Republicans demanding that he "do something" about McCain's "perilous" position in the state.
• 3-to-1: The margin by which Obama is outspending McCain on local television
• $39 million: The amount Obama is spending overall (more than any other state)
  
• 2: The number of top field generals—Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes—Obama has dispatched to the state.
• More than 60: The number of Obama field offices
• More than 400: The number of paid Obama staffers (up from 250 for Bush-Cheney 2004); McCain currently boasts less than 100.
  
• More than 100,000: The number of active Obama volunteers.
  

ADVANTAGE MCCAIN

• 1.3 percent: McCain's average lead in the three non-partisan polls released since Oct. 16, all of which show him ahead of Obama
• 3 percent: Amount McCain has gained in the respected Mason-Dixon poll since Oct. 6
• 6 percent: Amount McCain has gained in the Rasmussen poll over the last week alone
  
• 5 percent: Bush's margin of victory in 2004
• 220,000: Amount by which Republicans lead in absentee ballot requests
  
• 55,000: Number of votes by which McCain leads in early voting (including absentee ballots requested, but not returned)

Ultimately, Florida will boil down to a pretty simple question: Can Obama's massive, unprecedented investments in advertising, registration and getting out the vote expand the electorate enough to overcome the GOP's traditional edges in infrastructure and mobilization? Right now, it looks like a jump ball—perhaps with a little bit of momentum on McCain's side. But given the intangibles of turnout, we won't know who's won until Nov. 4.

UPDATE, Oct. 23: A new St. Petersburg Times/Bay News 9/Miami Herald poll shows Barack Obama leading McCain 49 percent to 42 percent in the Sunshine State. Adam Smith reports:

The biggest factor? Less partisan independent voters moving to Obama by a margin of more than 2 to 1... At a time when economic anxiety trumps all issues in Florida, about half of the voters surveyed — and almost 6 in 10 independents — said Obama has a better plan to improve the economy, while one in three voters say McCain does. Forty-five percent said Obama has shown the most leadership on the economy, and 34 percent said McCain.

This should increase Obama's average RCP lead to two percent.

I'm a "young voter"--as are many of Stumper's most avid readers. So I thought it'd be worthwhile to direct your attention to the latest opus from NEWSWEEK's brilliant financial columnist Robert Samuelson: a cogent, impassioned explanation for why those of us under 35 should forget about "hope" and "change" and start demanding that the next president overhaul government retirement programs. Sam may not be young--but he's right. Listen up, kiddies:

To: Voters Under 35
Subject: Your Future
Recommendation: Get Angry

You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health costs for state and local workers have doubtlessly been underestimated. There's the expense of decaying infrastructure—roads, bridges, water pipes. All this will squeeze other crucial government services: education, defense, police.

You're not hearing much of this in the campaign. One reason, frankly, is that you don't seem to care. Obama's your favorite candidate (by 64 percent to 33 percent among 18- to 29-year-olds, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll). But he's outsourced his position on these issues to AARP, the 40 million-member group for Americans 50 and over.

Don't believe me? Go to the Web site, www.aarp.org. On Sept. 6, both Obama and McCain addressed an AARP convention celebrating the group's 50th birthday.

Click on the Obama video. You'll see some world-class pandering. There are three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles). In his talk, Obama effectively rejected all three.

Or look at the September-October issue of AARP the Magazine, which has a "voters' guide." In it, Obama and McCain receive the opportunity to check boxes agreeing or disagreeing with AARP's positions on 11 issues. Obama checked agreement on 10. He's not an agent of change but a staunch defender of the status quo. Indeed, he would expand subsidies to the elderly by exempting from federal income taxes anyone 65 and over with $50,000 income or less.

McCain pandered, too. In his video, he praised AARP effusively. He didn't mention benefit cuts. But he hedged. He said today's system is "broken" and shouldn't be inflicted on future generations. In the voters' guide, he didn't check "agree" or "disagree" but merely described his positions. The hint is that, as president, he might try to curb retirement spending. There's a precedent; McCain voted against the Medicare drug benefit.

I am 62. Most of my friends are in their 50s, 60s and 70s. I wish everyone a pleasurable retirement. But we need to overhaul our government retirement programs for the common good and not just the good of the elderly. We have already waited so long that there's no way to do this without being unfair to someone—overburdening the young or withdrawing promised benefits from older Americans. The present financial crisis, by reducing retirement savings, has made a hard job even harder. Still, these federal programs began as safety nets for the needy; now they've become subsidies for living long, regardless of need.

READ THE REST HERE.

As the old saying goes, "Clothes make the man"--or woman. But can they unmake her as well?

Despite a war in Iraq, another in Afghanistan and a world economic system teetering on the brink of collapse, the good people of Washington D.C. are chattering this afternoon about one thing and one thing only: Sarah Palin's wardrobe. As the Politico first reported last night, the Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 "to clothe and accessorize" Palin since she joined the GOP ticket in late August--a sum that includes purchases of $49,425.74 from Saks Fifth Avenue, $75,062.63 from Neiman Marcus, $9,447.71 from Macy's and $5,102.71 from Bloomingdale's.

For Republicans, this is a nightmare. To put it mildly.

Palinites, of course, will claim that Palin's new duds are irrelevant. The RNC's expenditures weren't illegal or anything, they'll say. Politicians always invest in clothing and makeup. Which is correct--except that it ignores how America's political culture operates. The press and the public don't obsess over what's important. They obsess over what's memorable--particularly when it confirms something that they already suspected about a candidate. For years now, the GOP has taken advantage of our collective weakness, seizing on minute details of dress and demeanor to portray Democrats as effete, inauthentic snobs. Palin's $150,000 shopping spree is exactly that sort of detail--trifling, distracting, ultimately meaningless. But given that voters have already punished her Democratic predecessors for far cheaper infractions, there's no reason to suspect that they'll suddenly give her pass.

For perspective, let's consider some recent numbers. Four years ago, John Kerry was labeled an elitist for riding an $8,000 Serotta Ottrott road bike. But during a single day at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, Palin's stylist dropped nine times that amount on apparel. In this year's Democratic primaries, a single $400 trim was enough to undermine John Edwards's populist cred and reinforce the perception that he was a vain lightweight. But Palin managed to spend 12 times as much--$4,716.49--on hair and makeup in a single month. All told, $150,000 could buy 50,000 bottles of Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, 50,000 MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars AND 50,000 bunches of arugula--all examples, according to the McCain campaign, of The One's prissy "celebrity" sensibility.

No one thinks Palin is an elitist, or a snob, or a celebrity. But according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 55 percent of voters--a substantial majority--consider her unprepared for the presidency. Thanks in part to Tina Fey--and, truth be told, Palin's own interviews with Katie Couric--many Americans now see her as a sort of political Eliza Doolittle: plucked from obscurity, pumped full of talking points and still not ready for prime time.

In short: all style, no substance. The fact that the cash-strapped McCain campaign decided (in the midst of a major economic crisis) to spend four times Joe the Plumber's annual income on one month of Palin's apparel--even though she can't name a single Supreme Court case she disagrees with--only serves to reinforce this "Image First" impression. The irony is that the very image McCain and Co. invested so heavily to create--the image of Palin as a small-town, 'Joe Six-Pack' American--is precisely the one that's undercut by the massive receipts from Saks and Neiman Marcus. 

Fair or unfair, the shoe--or, in this case, the red patent-leather pump--is suddenly on the other foot.

PHOTO GALLERY: The Saks Girls on Sarah Palin's Wardrobe

Is Palin making plans for 2012?

I ask because she's contradicted John McCain on a number of subjects in recent weeks--and every contradiction seems calibrated to preserve (or even enhance) her standing with the Republican base should the Arizona senator lose on Nov. 4. To wit:

Oct. 3, Michigan: Palin first wandered off the reservation when McCain decided to withdraw from the Great Lakes State earlier this month. Noting that she "read that this morning and... fired off a quick e-mail" to campaign HQ questioning the move, the Alaska governor told reporters, "I want to get back to Michigan and I want to try." She continued: "Todd and I, we'd be happy to get to Michigan and walk through those plants of the car manufacturers. We'd be so happy to get to speak to the people in Michigan who are hurting because the economy is hurting."

Oct. 5, Wright: Asked by Bill Kristol whether her boss should harp on Obama's connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., Palin was quick to say yes--and remind readers that it was McCain who had decided against attacking: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Oct. 11, North Korea: When the Bush Administration removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror, McCain was quick to issue a critical statement. But Palin was far more accomodating: "Having worked on this strategy for quite some time, I have faith…that they’re making this wise decision."

Oct. 20, Robocalls:  On Sunday, Palin criticized the automated calls that the Republican National Committee and her own campaign have put out linking Obama to Bill Ayers. "If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand," Palin told her traveling press corps, "I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and winning the war and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls and includes spending so much money on the television ads that, I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of Americans' attention span. They get a bit irritated with just being inundated."

Oct. 21, Gay Marriage:  In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Palin signaled her support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage--even though McCain once described such a ban as “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.” Here's what she said: “In my own state, I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. I wish on a federal level that that's where we would go because I don't support gay marriage."

Maybe I'm crazy. But doesn't it sort of seem like Palin's saying, Hey Republicans: don't blame me if this guy loses? Consider all the things she's hinting she would've done differently. She would've revived the good Reverend. She would've tried harder in Michigan. She would've moved further right on social issues. She would've pursued a less bellicose foreign policy. And she would've refused to bug you with stupid, "old, conventional" robocalls. In short, Palin would've been more of a culture warrior than McCain and less a product of the past--an "authentic" sociall conservative, but also a breath of fresh air. At least according to Palin.

If the GOP ticket loses--which isn't a given--we should expect a 2012 primary battle defined largely by right-wing, populist, grassroots anger toward the relatively moderate McCain (and toward the conservative elites that either pushed for his nomination or defected to Obama). Given her popularity with the base--and all this preemptive distancing stuff--Palin could conceivably ride that rage to the top of the primary pile. Of all the possible 2012ers, she clearly has the largest, most ardent following. The question is whether she could overcome the Tina Fey Factor and cobble together a political majority outside the GOP.

Right now, it doesn't look possible. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only 38 percent of voters feel positively toward Palin, while a full 47 percent feel negatively. She's the only principal with a net negative rating. What's more, 55 percent of voters say Palin is not qualified to be president if the need arises, up from 50 percent two weeks ago. And she keeps pouring fuel on the fire. Asked Tuesday by a third-grader what vice presidents do, Palin said that "they’re in charge of the U.S. Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes"--which, given that the vice president casts tiebreaking votes as Senate president but "has no official role in developing legislation or determining how it is presented or debated," isn't really accurate. (Video above.) Still, four years is a long time. Long enough, I suppose, to rehabilitate one's public image. And to read the Constitution.

Or so says FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver--who, as I reported earlier this cycle, has a pretty impressive track record when it comes to predicting election outcomes. As Silver writes in an exclusive NEWSWEEK.com analysis, John McCain and the GOP shouldn't count on the polls overestimating Obama's level of support: "examples like Bradley and Wilder are nearly a quarter of a century old, and there's no proof that the Bradley effect still exists." A key excerpt:

Everyone remembers New Hampshire, when nearly all polls predicted a big win for Obama, but Hillary Clinton emerged victorious...What fewer remember is what happened two weeks later in South Carolina. In that case, the Pollster projection had Obama winning by 15 points—but he won by 29. That 14-point error was actually of greater magnitude than the mistake in New Hampshire, if less noticeable because the polls hadn't picked the wrong horse.

South Carolina was not the only state in which Obama overperformed his polls. They significantly underestimated Obama's margin in essentially every Southern state, including Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as a couple of states outside the South, like Wisconsin, Indiana and Oregon. On balance, the polling during the primaries underestimated Obama's support by 3.3 points when compared to the Pollster averages in those states. And yet, a belief in the Bradley effect persists. Why? People are confusing voters exhibiting racist behavior with voters lying about their intentions to pollsters.

There is little doubt Obama is losing some votes due to his race; a recent Associated Press survey suggested that as many as 6 percent of the electorate may be voting against Obama because he is black. But that's not what the Bradley effect is about. As long as those prejudiced voters are telling pollsters that they're going to vote for McCain, their sentiments will be reflected accurately in the polling. The Bradley effect emerges when voters tell pollsters one thing and then do another at the ballot booth.

So the question is why, if a voter does not intend to vote for Obama, would he or she feel compelled to lie about it? There are perfectly legitimate reasons not to vote for Obama; a voter who wanted to vote against him because of his race would have little trouble rationalizing his vote. If a voter felt compelled to lie to a pollster, he might tell them that he was voting against Obama because of his inexperience or his liberal politics—when, in fact, he was voting against him because of his race. But the pollster would still tally the vote correctly in the McCain column. By contrast, in cases where the Bradley effect existed, including Bradley's race itself, the black candidate was as much or more experienced than the white opponent. So voters found it harder to excuse their racism and may have misstated their voting intention to pollsters as a result...

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

IN ENDGAME, METRICS ARE ADDING UP FOR OBAMA
(Charlie Cook, National Journal)
Today it seems very unlikely that the focal point of this election is going to shift away from the economy. And as long as the economy is the focal point, it's difficult to see how this gets any better for Republicans up or down the ballot... The metrics of this election argue strongly that this campaign is over, it's only the memory of many an election that seemed over but wasn't that is keeping us from closing the book mentally on this one. First, no candidate behind this far in the national polls, this late in the campaign has come back to win. Sure, we have seen come-from-behind victories, but they didn't come back this far this late... As things are going now, this election would appear to be on a track to match Bill Clinton's 1992 5.6 percent margin over President George H.W. Bush, the question is whether it gets to Bush's 1988 7.7 percent win over Michael Dukakis or Clinton's 8.5 percent win over Robert Dole in 1996. Maybe some cataclysmic event occurs in the next two weeks that changes the trajectory of this election, but to override these factors, it would have to be very, very big.

ARE THE POLLS ACCURATE?
(Michael Barone, Wall Street Journal)
Can we trust the polls this year? That's a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes -- with qualifications... Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins, after examining dozens of races involving black candidates, reported this year, at a meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, that he'd found no examples of the "Bradley Effect" since 1996...  What this suggests is that Mr. Obama will win about the same percentage of votes as he gets in the last rounds of polling before the election. That's not bad news for his campaign, as the polls stand now. The realclearpolitics.com average of recent national polls, as I write, shows Mr. Obama leading John McCain by 50% to 45%. If Mr. Obama gets the votes of any perceptible number of undecideds (or if any perceptible number of them don't vote) he'll win a popular vote majority, something only one Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, has done in the last 40 years.

THE NYT'S DRAPER ON MCCAIN
(Mike Allen, Politico Playbook)
Despite their leeriness of being quoted, McCain’s senior advisers remained palpably confident of victory — at least until very recently. By October, the succession of backfiring narratives would compel some to reappraise not only McCain’s chances but also the decisions made by Schmidt, who only a short time ago was hailed as the savior who brought discipline and unrepentant toughness to a listing campaign. "For better or for worse, our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic," one senior adviser glumly acknowledged to me in early October, just after Schmidt received authorization from McCain to unleash a new wave of ads attacking Obama’s character. "So this is the new tactic."

AFTER A YEAR ON THE ROAD, OBAMA IS CHANGING HIS TEMPO
(Michael Powell, New York Times)
It is tempting, in contrasting the Obama of a year ago with the presidential candidate of today, to conclude that Miles Davis has turned himself into Barry Manilow. That is not quite the case; he still draws crowds — 100,000 in St. Louis on Saturday — that would warm a rocker’s heart. And his words can still soar, as when he and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton formed a campaign duet Monday in Florida. But this Mr. Obama is a consciously, carefully, intentionally more grounded one, and a touch duller for the metamorphosis. The slow muting of Mr. Obama’s rhetorical dial, particularly noticeable as world markets gyrate and unemployment spikes, speaks to a candidate who has run a rigorously disciplined campaign. His goal a year ago was to soar while rivals still cast their eyes down; now he must convince voters that he can walk just a step or two ahead of them, and so help navigate treacherous ground.

HOW JOHN MCCAIN CAME TO PICK SARAH PALIN
(Jane Mayer, New Yorker)
A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice... With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing... Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin.

The headline posted on CNN.com last night was crystal clear: "McCain Camp Looking for Way to Win Without Colorado." Unfortunately for McCain, how he'd actually go about winning without Colorado is not.

According to CNN Chief National Correspondent John King,  "two top [McCain] strategists and advisers" now say "that situation in [Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado] looks increasingly bleak" and that Crystal City is examining "an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error."

That's putting it mildly. Especially because the campaign seems to be counting on Pennsylvania.

It's no surprise that the McCain camp has all but conceded Iowa and New Mexico, where Obama leads by 11.8 and 8.4 percentage points, respectively; observers have long considered the Hawkeye State (where Obama is seen as a native son) and the Land of Enchantment (where Obama dominates among Latinos) as out of McCain's reach.

But Colorado is a shock. In 2000, George W. Bush won the Centennial State by more than eight points in 2000; four years later, he defeated John Kerry by four. In fact, Colorado has only voted Democratic once since 1968. What's more, the last ten days of polls show McCain trailing there by less than five points--well within striking distance (and far closer than he seems to be in Virginia, another Bush state). But according to King, "most" of McCain's campaign believes that Obama's far superior turnout operation--built in part during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, as Stumper previously reported--will give him a decisive advantage on Election Day. Colorado is "gone," said King's source. "Most of us have a hard time counting on [it]."

Which brings us to the aforementioned "way to win without the Centennial State." By conceding that Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa are basically lost causes, the McCain camp has said, in effect, that its only path to victory runs through a 2004 blue state. The math is simple. If Obama adds the 21 electoral votes from Iowa (7 EV), New Mexico (5 EV) and Colorado (9 EV) to John Kerry's map (252 EV), he'll pass the magic 270 mark and proceed directly to the White House. The only question now is where McCain will go hunting for those lost electoral votes.

He doesn't have many options. There are currently only five Kerry states where Obama leads by an average of less than 15 points: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. McCain pulled out of Michigan--where the latest polls show him down by 16 percent--earlier this month. Meanwhile, the campaign is scaling back its advertising in Minnesota and Wisconsin, among other places--states that neither McCain nor Sarah Palin has visited since Oct. 10.

That leaves Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. As the New Republic's Michael Crowley has noted, McCain could pursue a "Go North, Old Man!" strategy, which would involve "mak[ing] a late and dramatic return to the site of his great political launching pad in hopes of reminding people what they liked about him in the first place." A win in New Hampshire--small, cheap, familiar and perfect for the underfunded, retail-politicking McCain--would boost the Republican by four electoral votes; if Obama won Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico, the two would tie 269-269. In that case, McCain would have to rely on an upset in neighboring Maine's "more rugged, Bangor-centric, moose-hunting" northern region for the tiebreaking vote. (Maine splits its electors by congressional district.) It's a long shot--McCain currently lags behind Obama by more than nine percentage points in both states--but anything is possible.

The problem with the Northern Strategy is that it leaves absolutely no room for error. As I noted earlier, McCain is actually trailing by a larger margin in Virginia--eight points, to be exact--than Colorado. Losing the Old Dominion's 13 electoral votes would render New Hampshire and Maine irrelevant. That's why McCain seems to be focusing on Pennsylvania (21 EV) instead. Since the start of the month, McCain and Palin have made a whopping 15 stops in the state; today, the ticket-topper stumped four times between Bensalem and Pittsburgh. As the Washington Times reported this morning, McCain's goal is to "flip soft supporters" of Obama in the "blue-collar, white suburbs and rural areas across the broad midsection of the Democratic-leaning state"--areas where race may be a larger factor than the polls suggest.

According to McCain field chief Mike DuHaime, "the campaign is operating three dozen offices in the state and is making hundreds of thousands of phone calls every week to identify and persuade potential GOP voters." Arguing that McCain "needs to flip" only 2,000 voters in each of the state's 47 counties to erase Kerry's 2004 margin of 140,000 votes, DuHaime claims that internal data is “trending” toward McCain and showing “a lot of things” not apparent in public polls--including signs that McCain will outperform Bush among former Clintonites, suburban Philadelphia moderates and western Rust Belt residents. 

In this scenario, Pennsylvania would act a floodwall of sorts. If the Obama wave overcomes McCain in New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia, Pennsylvania is the only "winnable" state large enough to keep McCain afloat (273-265). Meanwhile, a larger wave--i.e., additional Democratic victories in the Bush states of Florida, Ohio, Missouri and/or North Carolina, where Obama currently leads--will sink McCain no matter what. Given that Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado may be "gone"--and Virginia is at serious risk of going--McCain simply has no choice but to turn to Pennsylvania for possible protection.

That said, McCain's chances in Pennsylvania are looking pretty bleak--even if you assume a surprise Bradley effect. Only one poll released since the start of the month puts McCain within eight points of Obama; the rest show the Illinois senator leading by anywhere from 10 to 15 percent. Even Republicans aren't particularly bearish. "It doesn't make much sense," said former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman as McCain rallied supporters in Chester County this morning. "He's got to be in the states where he's got a chance to win."

Unfortunately for McCain, that's precisely the problem--the states where he has a conventional "chance to win" don't quite add up to 270 (at least according to campaign insiders). So with two weeks to go before Election Day, the Arizona senator has been forced to pin his hopes on a place where a Republican hasn't prevailed in a presidential contest in 20 years, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million voters and where the polls show him as far behind as Obama is in Kentucky, Kansas and Mississippi. 

The audacity of hope, indeed.

Call it the Masochistic Maneuver.

Each day, political reporters like, say, Stumper are inundated with messages from each campaign's "rapid response" squad--a group of operatives who rebut attacks, forward fact-checks and and flag reports that could damage their boss's rival, all for the benefit of the "overworked" national press corps. Obama's team--which consists of spokesmen Tommy Vietor and Hari Sevugan--is especially rapid and especially responsive. On an average day, the dastardly duo sends me 15-20 emails, and yesterday was no exception. But amid the usual detritus--"McCain Employing GOP Operative Accused Of Voter Registration Fraud"; "McCain Solicits Russian U.N. Ambassador"--there was one message that stood out.

The note--entitled "Flailing"--originated with Mr. Sevugan. In it, the loyal Obaman listed the "ten different attacks" that Team McCain had unleashed on the Illinois senator during the previous 24 hours--complete with links. These included swipes at Obama regarding ACORN ("threatening the fabric of our democracy"); taxes ("sounds like socialism"); readiness ("the next President won't have time to get used to the office"); the press ("the media has a thumb on the scale for Obama"); Bill Ayers ("people should be informed about Barack Obama's background, including his relationships with domestic terrorists"); and baseball ("After repeatedly saying he would root for the Phillies in the World Series, Barack Obama switched teams while campaigning in Tampa today"). This is unusual--to put it mildly. Typically, rapid responders will reference attacks in their messages--but only to show why they're "demonstrably false" or "categorically untrue." This may be the first time I've ever seen a guy like Sevugan simply collect a bunch of criticisms of his candidate and transmit them, unaltered, to the nation's leading political scribes.

So why the shift?

As weird as the maneuver seems--I mean,"Don't Spread Attacks on Your Own Candidate" is like, Campaign Politics 101--Sevugan and Co.'s decision reflects a fundamental reality of the 2008 presidential race as it enters its final fortnight: by going negative, McCain has been hurting himself more than he's been hurting Obama. The proof is in the pudding. On Sept. 24, both candidates enjoyed identical 17-point net-positive ratings (the number you get when you subtract the number of voters who see a candidate unfavorably from the number who seem him favorably). But over the past few weeks, McCain's net favorable rating has plummeted (to 7.3 percent) while Obama's has ticked steadily upward (to 19.5). In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, Obama's favorable-unfavorable split is 53 percent to 33 percent; McCain's, on the other hand, is 36 percent to 45 percent. Those numbers represent gains of 10 points for both candidates since the September survey--Obama on the "favorable" side of the ledger, McCain on the "unfavorable" side.

The thinking in Chicago is that the risk of alerting reporters to attacks they haven't heard--I, for one, didn't known about the Phillies phlap until I received "Phlailing"--is minimal compared to the benefits of pushing the campaign's preferred narrative: a desperate, "erratic" McCain flails at Obama and avoids the economy; meanwhile, the Democrat floats above the fray and only discusses "the issues that matter to America."  As Sevugan wrote in his introduction, "With 15 days to go, John McCain still hasn't found a compelling message to persuade voters that he is offering something other than four more years of the same failed policies and destructive politics of the last eight. Instead he's offered up the kitchen sink... and not one of [his attacks] ha[s] a thing to do with turning the economy around."

So far, America seems to agree. Six in ten voters recently told CNN that McCain is unfairly attacking his rival, and 69 percent of CBS respondents say that the Republican is spending more time gnashing his teeth than explaining what he plans to do as president. As long as those numbers hold steady, the defining dynamic of the race will remain unchanged: the more McCain attacks, the more negatively voters see him--and the more positively voters see Obama. It's no surprise, then, that Sevugan is circulating lists of the Arizonan's latest punches. The only surprise may be that McCain is still trying to land the same old blows.

By Sarah Kliff

Voting machines in Beaufort County, South Carolina weren't working when early voting started on Oct. 6. The problem? The state had given local election officials the wrong password to format the machines. Machines in Jacksonville, Fla. wouldn't record ballots. In Houston, ID scanning machines broke down, leaving about 300 voters waiting in line. "I came out here just expecting to shake people's hands and it's pandemonium," Representative Shelia Jackson Lee told the Houston Chronicle.

Early voting kicks off and, no surprise, a slew of mini-meltdowns follows. This is just the beginning of it: experts readily admit that somewhere, in some unforeseen county, there will be a voting breakdown--machines that don't record votes or tallies that don't add up. As election day nears, the more difficult question is: Will it be similar to 2000 in Florida—a recount fiasco that stretches on for weeks—or 2004 in Ohio, where problems with provisional ballots were resolved relatively quickly? And which unforeseen county will become the electoral scapegoat? Achieving that level of specificity is a bit harder.

"There will be some close election, even if it's not presidential, where they don't have proper procedures in place and things break down," says Larry Norden, project director at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Norden's new, 190-page report asks, "Is America Ready to Vote?" The answer: sort of. He and his co-authors found nine states largely unprepared for the election, including key swing states like Colorado and Virginia. Ironically, the majority of the most prepared states—California, Oregon, Alaska, Wisconsin—aren't really in play (Missouri is one exception).  Sarah Kliff touched base with Norden about the potential problem spots and what voters can do about them. His take on what we're in for this time around:

Ohio and Florida still have meltdown potential, but not for the same reasons as before. They're among the growing number of states that require an exact match between a voter's ID and his or her voter registration information.  These "no-match, no-vote" policies mean that any typo or nickname can get you disqualified. Norden uses himself as an example: he's Larry on his driver's license, Lawrence on his voter registration and, if he's in a "no match, no vote" state," he won't be voting. Both Ohio and Florida--two of the top swing states--have these policies. In Ohio, things look particularly grim: about 200,000 of the 660,000 voters who have registered there since Jan. 1 have records that don't match other government databases—and, on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio's top election officials do not have to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility. Those 200,000 disputed registrations are a serious concern in a swing state where the Republican margin of victory was only 119,000 votes last time around.

Change: not just a campaign slogan. Two-thirds of voters will use a voting technology that's different from the one they used in the last presidential election, raising the risk of human error. The changes may vex election workers as well. If a county switches from electronic voting machines to paper ballots, for example--as many did this time around--officials need to create and follow an entirely new set of procedures. This is one of the problems that has plagued Palm Beach, where new technology played a major role in their latest voting meltdown.

High Turnout + Mechanical Failures = Recipe for Disaster. Record turnout and overwhelmed polling stations are basically a given after the massive crowds that turned out for the primaries. What could really cause a meltdown is if voting machines begin to malfunction and polling stations don't have a back-up plan. It's not an unlikely situation: by Norden's count, the majority of states do not have a policy to deal with voting machines gone haywire. This could be particularly problematic in some key swing states. Pennsylvania, for example, does not mandate that polling stations switch to emergency paper ballots unless all voting machines are down. So if half the machines go down, Norden says, lines could become four or five hours long. Without an emergency option, voters would likely get discouraged and go home. In Virginia, there's no statewide policy on how to deal with a mechanical malfunction, which will probably be a bigger problem for voters using electronic ballots. "Places that use paper usually have some indication that they're running low," says Norden. "Whereas if a machine breaks down, you didn't have any warning, and then you're stuck."

Voters can't fix everything—but they can fix some things. Here comes the public service announcement—what you, dear reader, can do to make this election a smooth one. First, make sure you're registered. It seems obvious, Norden says, but between 2004 and 2006, the states collectively purged 13 million voters. Purges are meant to remove the deceased and departed from the rolls, but they're prone to error and partisan manipulation (in Mississippi, for example, one election official purged 10,000 voters a week before the primary--from her home computer). While you're at it, double check your polling location, too. "In many states, if you vote at the wrong location, it won't count," Norden explains. A good place to find the necessary information, he says, is www.govote.org. And don't forget to check out a sample ballot--especially if you're among those two-thirds of Americans who will be grappling with a new technology on Election Day.

Last but not least, do your Democratic duty. "Barring some major breakdown in the system, which occasionally happens, the vast, vast majority of votes will count," says Norden. "So you should get out and vote." In the meantime, pray that we don't end up with Florida: The Sequel.

Nov. 20, 2007 Rudy Giuliani applauds Obama for being open about his teenage drug use: “I respect his honesty in doing that. I think that one of the things we need from our people who are running for office is not this pretense of perfection. The reality is all of us that run for public office, whether its governor, legislator, mayor, president–we are all human beings. If we haven’t made mistakes don’t vote for us.”

Oct. 20, 2008 Rudy Giuliani wonders why the press--and specifically the New York Times--isn't writing more about Obama's teenage drug use: “There shouldn’t be two different rules for Republicans and Democrats... You can’t even — you can’t even raise these issues. And, you know, God forbid somebody would do some reporting on Barack Obama’s use of drugs."

Amazing what can happen to a thrice-married, pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, pro-gun-control, pro-cross-dressing former mayor of the nation's leading den of iniquity when he no longer has to convince people he should be president, isn't it?

Oh, and BTW: The New York Times has already investigated Obama's past drug use. After "three dozen interviews" with friends and associates, the paper found in February that the young Obama “did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.”

Damn liberal media. Bunch of dope smokers if you ask me.

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

SURVEY SAYS...
(Michael Crowley, New Republic)
Leve and his ilk are proliferating because an unprecedented demand exists for the information they peddle. An anxious, politically savvy public has developed a compulsive need to know precisely where the presidential contest stands at any given moment. The profusion of poll numbers in turn fuels the public's hunger for more definitive, or more reassuring, polls--a cycle made all the more relentless by a panoply of websites, such as RealClearPolitics and Talking Points Memo, that post every last number almost in real time. This new, frenetic age of polling has not necessarily led to more empirical certainty. The very instantaneousness of polls like Leve's threatens to shape perceptions as much as record them. And the deluge of polling data has just given partisans another opportunity to cherry-pick facts and impugn their rivals. In this besieged environment, even pollsters themselves fight bitterly over the best way to measure public opinion and whether the likes of Jay Leve have it exactly right--or very, very wrong.

OBAMA APPEAL RISES IN POLL; NO GAINS FOR MCCAIN TICKET
(Meghan Thee, New York Times)
As voters have gotten to know Senator Barack Obama, they have warmed up to him, with more than half, 53 percent, now saying they have a favorable impression of him and 33 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. But as voters have gotten to know Senator John McCain, they have not warmed, with only 36 percent of voters saying they view him favorably while 45 percent view him unfavorably... The percentage of those who hold a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama is up 10 points since last month. Opinion of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Obama’s running mate, is also up, to 50 percent last weekend from 36 percent in September. In contrast, favorable opinion of Mr. McCain remained stable, and unfavorable opinion rose to 45 percent now from 35 percent in September. Mrs. Palin’s negatives are up, to 41 percent now from 29 percent in September. Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. 

OBAMA TAKES THE HOMESTRETCH IN STRIDE
(Mark J. Penn, Politico)
The presidential campaign’s homestretch is looking a lot more like President Bill Clinton’s 1996 solid reelection over Republican nominee Bob Dole than like Ronald Reagan’s late-breaking 1980 landslide over incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama appears headed toward victory over John McCain. But a campaign’s closing couple of weeks can be unexpectedly treacherous. Just ask John F. Kerry and Al Gore. In 2000, Vice President Gore’s popularity had begun to dip after the Democratic National Convention, when his populist people-vs.-the-powerful theme came off to much of the electorate as a call for higher taxes. During the last three weeks of the campaign, he lost late-breaking voters almost 2-to-1... This year, Democrats have considerably more reason for optimism about closing strong.

FEAR OF FAILURE HELPED FUEL OBAMA'S RECORD FUNDRAISING
(Matthew Mosk, Washington Post)
Unease about lingering tensions within the Democratic Party and worry that an Internet drive would underperform infused Sen. Barack Obama's campaign with an urgency that led to the most voracious one-month fundraising drive in American politics... Obama's record-breaking month is primarily a story about the explosive fundraising power of the Internet, and the expanding role of regular people in financing modern presidential campaigns. But it also underscores the importance of the powerful and well-connected, who accounted for about a third of the money that poured into Obama's coffers. Raised in $2,300 increments at VIP receptions, that money remains a foundation of the fundraising effort. A review of the Democrat's schedule shows that he dramatically ramped up the pace of his high-dollar fundraising events in September, such as the Barbra Streisand concert that helped him raise $9 million in a matter of hours. The campaign also dispatched a team of surrogates that included billionaire Warren Buffett, former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin and Caroline Kennedy, all of whom could tap Rolodexes full of contacts who could write large checks. 

When Republicans say that Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists," they've clearly crossed the line.

But what about when a Democrat implies that John McCain is an incontinent old codger?

Speaking this afternoon at a business summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry complained about the inane questions he fielded from the press during his 2004 presidential bid--and expressed sympathy for this year's crop of candidates. The target of his ire: "the famous 'boxers or briefs' question." Praising Obama for successfully parrying the inquiry--Kerry confessed that he "was tempted to say commando"--the Bay Stater informed his audience that McCain had encountered some problems: "Then they asked McCain, and McCain said, ‘Depends.'" Hotcha! The crowd, according to PolitickerMA, cracked up.

I mean, I get the joke: McCain is so old that he wears Depends--the best-known brand of adult diapers--to keep from soiling his slacks. Ha. But just as Republicans have cheapened a legitimate line of attack against Obama (that he's avoided taking a firm stand on some issues) by calling him a shady terrorist sympathizer, so too do Democrats risk diluting their best criticism of McCain (that he can be erratic, impulsive and unreliable) by harping on his age. Both comments are not only inappropriate; they're counterproductive. After all, Obama is relying on older white voters--his newest, softest supporters--to propel him to victories in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio (among other places). 

So something tells me that Kerry is about to receive a call from Chicago telling him that if he doesn't cut the crap and keep it above the belt from now on, he could be pissing away his chance to serve in an Obama administration.

Thank you, ladies and germs. I recommend the veal.
 

When Barack Obama recently announced that he'd shattered the single-month money record by raising $66 million in August, we said we were "impressed." But we also noted that to keep pace with John McCain and the Republican National Committee, "Obama and the DNC must rake in another $200 million or so before Nov. 4, which divies up as $100 million per month--or $17 million more than the $83 million they raised together in August." Our conclusion? The Illinois senator "still has a lot of work to do."

Well, the latest stats just trickled in, and it looks like Obama has done it. And then some. On Sunday morning, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe emailed supporters to announce that Democratic nominee had raised a shocking $150 million in September, more than doubling the previous monthly record and bringing his total take to about $604 million. To provide some perspective, that nearly matches the amount raised by all of 2004's major-party candidates--combined. (All told, Obama has raised an average of less than $100 from 3.1 million Americans.) Coupled with the DNC's healthy haul--$50 million total; $27.4 million in cash on hand--Obama's staggering September should propel the Democrats past McCain and the RNC for the first time, well, ever. As of Oct. 1, the Republicans had $124 million in the bank--$47 million in McCain's coffers and $77 million at the RNC. That's a lot of money. But given that Obama started September with $77 million on hand, it's safe to assume that he and the DNC finished the month (after spending was subtracted) with a war chest worth between $125 million and $175 million. [UPDATE: The final number is $160 million.] Most importantly, Obama controls between $100 million and $150 million of that pot. [UPDATE: $133 million.] McCain, meanwhile, is free to spend only a third of the Republican kitty.

The money gap has been especially evident since the start of October. Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6, Obama dropped about $20 million on television advertisements in 17 battleground states; the next week, he increased his outlay to $32 million. McCain, on the other hand, spent only $10 million on ads in 14 states during the second week of October, while the RNC chipped an additional $6 million. As a result, Obama is currently doubling the combined McCain-RNC TV budget--and directly outspending his rival more than three-to-one on the airwaves. (CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising, predicts Obama’s general election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million George W. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week.) How does this affect the electorate? Take health care. Neither candidate has spent a ton of time talking about the issue. But Obama has flooded national TV markets with a series of (not always accurate) ads that characterize McCain's market-based plan as "radical" and accuse him of planning "drastic cuts to Medicare"--and McCain hasn't ponied up for a response.  Which may be why 54 percent of voters surveyed earlier this month by the New York Times and CBS News said they weren't confident McCain would "make the right decisions on health care." Only 10 percent said they were "very confident" he would.

Ultimately, the new cash disparity gives Obama a major messaging advantage. In public, the Illinois senator can appear to float above the fray. But in the privacy of America's living rooms, he can frame McCain's plans however he wants--dangerous, erratic, radical, out of touch, whatever. “What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop,” CMAG's Evan Tracey recently told The New York Times. Given the economic instability and the dismal political environment for Republicans, McCain can't afford to let his rival define him. But right now, it's looking like he can't afford not to, either.

As you've probably heard, former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, a Republican, endorsed Barack Obama for president yesterday on "Meet the Press." I'm a little late on this--alas, I spent the weekend without my trusty laptop--but I still thought it'd be worthwhile to post a few quick thoughts on what the announcement accomplishes.

Some observers, like the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, have said that Powell will help Obama overcome any lingering racial opposition. "Powell is a culturally individuated African-American hero," he wrote yesterday. "To the extent that there remain white voters who have inchoate worries about Obama's race, it helps to have him associated with a man whose race they've already gotten over." I disagree. Oprah Winfrey is a "culturally individuated African-American hero," too, but her endorsement of Obama last May hardly gave swing voters a compelling reason to support the Illinois senator. The key thing about Powell isn't that he's black. It's that he (unlike Winfrey) doesn't strike casual voters as your typical Obama supporter. He's a Republican. He's a military man. He backed both Bushes. And he's even donated to McCain. That's why Powell's endorsement is so powerful.

The most important element of Obama's extensive field operation is the local validator: a person who looks like you, talks like you and (presumably) thinks like you but who's still vouching for the unfamiliar face at the top of the ticket. Powell has now become Obama's key validator. Ahead by five to seven points in the polls--often with more than 50 percent of the vote--Obama doesn't need to persuade McCainiacs to jump ship. He simply has to prevent his softest supporters--and a few undecideds--from reverting to his rival. Like Powell, many of these folks are Republicans--some from military communities--who still deeply respect McCain. He's well-qualified to speak to them--and on Sunday, that's exactly what he did.

Powell delivered his argument in two parts. First, he sought to dispel--or preempt--any doubts about Obama. Worried about Obama's inexperience? Don't be, said the general: "he will be ready to take on these challenges on January 21st." he's ready to be president on Day One." Suspect that Obama's tax policies are "socialist"? Nonsense, said the Republican: "there's nothing wrong with examining... who should be paying more or who should be paying less, and for us to say that makes you a socialist is an unfortunate characterization that isn't accurate." Heard that Obama might be Muslim? "He's not," said the familiar, respected figure--but "what if he [wa]s?" "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" Powell asked. "The answer is 'no.' That's not America." These are the three issues--experience, taxes and "otherness"--most likely to drive uncommitteds away from Obama on Election Day. Powell was essentially saying, they don't bother me--so they shouldn't bother you.

The pro-Obama part of Powell's endorsement has received the most media attention--and understandably so. But from a political perspective, the other part--the anti-McCain, anti-Republican part--will probably prove more impactful. After praising Obama, Powell questioned McCain's decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate ('I don't believe she's ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president"). He criticized McCain's response to the ongoing economic crisis ("almost every day there was a different approach to the problem... he didn't have a complete grasp of the economic problems that we had"). And he denounced the negative tone of McCain's campaign ("what they're trying to connect [Obama] to is some kind of terrorist feelings, and I think that's inappropriate"). Here, Powell echoed the key concerns about McCain among uncommitted voters--Palin, the economy and "politics as usual"--and confessed that he's bothered by the same stuff. Ultimately, it's easier for undecideds to justify siding with Obama--and harder for them to consider reverting to McCain--when someone like Powell, who they tend to trust, respect and agree with, has said he shares their doubts.

Traditionally, endorsements don't sway voters. Powell's won't be any different. Solid Republicans will dismiss it as predictable, or vengeful, or race-based, or whatever. But Powell doesn't have to persuade solid Republicans. He merely has to help Obama hang onto his softest supporters--i.e., maintain the status quo. That lower bar--combined with the right message and the right messenger--could very well make Powell's endorsement the first one in recent memory that actually matters. 
 

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

THE POWELL ENDORSEMENT: HURTS MCCAIN, HELPS OBAMA
(Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic)
In that order, I think. (1) It deprives McCain of a day to win the news cycle. There are sixteen left. (2) Powell is a "man who I admire as much as anyone in the world," McCain has said. He was an informal adviser to the campaign early on. And the content of the endorsement acknowledges what McCain's accomplished, studies it, and judges that it is insufficient for the modern world. (Powell is closer to McCain than Obama on Iraq.)  McCain would be a maverick, Powell says, but America needs a transformation figure. (3) McCain might take this as a personal rejection, and he might wear it on his sleeve. (4) Powell is a culturally individuated African American hero; to the extent that there remain white voters who have inchoate worries about Obama's race, it helps to have him associated with a man whose race they've already gotten over.  I do think this cohort of people is tiny. 

DEMOCRATS SEE OPPORTUNITY IN OUTER SUBURBS' TROUBLES
(Alec MacGillis, Washington Post)
For all the emphasis on Sen. Barack Obama's chances with working-class voters in declining Rust Belt cities, the biggest swing vote in the presidential election is likely to be in outer suburban communities, where Democrats hope to capitalize on economic unease and demographic shifts to overturn traditional Republican strengths. Republicans have long dominated in the fast-growing exurbs, which President Bush won by an even larger margin in 2004 than in 2000. But Democrats made inroads in these areas in the 2006 congressional elections, part of a broader trend that has seen the party gain among college-educated suburban professionals. And this year, many exurbs that grew rapidly in the past decade are being hit particularly hard by the economic downturn. These exurbs, home to an increasing share of the electorate, will help decide who wins states such as Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, which are emerging as battlegrounds in the final weeks of the election while Republican chances of reclaiming industrial states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have waned. Nowhere, though, are the exurbs more relevant than they are in Virginia, where Loudoun and Prince William counties are likely to be pivotal.

THE RIGHT'S CLASS WAR
(John Heilemann, New York)
With the prospect of defeat for John McCain growing more likely every day, the GOP destined to see its numbers reduced in both the House and Senate, and the Republican brand debased to the point of bankruptcy, the conservative intelligentsia is factionalized and feuding, criminating and recriminating, in a way that few of its members can recall in their political lifetimes. Populists attack Establishmentarians. Neocons assail theocons. And virtually everyone has something harsh to say about the party’s standard-bearer. Election Day may still be two weeks away, but already the idea-merchants of the right have formed a circular firing squad. When the weapons of choice shift from pistols to Uzis after November 4, the ensuing massacre will be for Democrats a source of political opportunity, not to mention endless entertainment. But for Republicans it will be a necessary passage toward either the revival or reinvention of conservatism. Nobody serious on the right doubts that the overhaul is at once required and bound to be arduous—but it may take longer and prove even bloodier than anyone now imagines.

MCCAIN IS NO SALESMAN ON TAX PROPOSALS
(Clive Crook, Financial Times)
How is it... that Mr McCain has been so thoroughly outmanoeuvred on tax policy? Both candidates have offered complex tax proposals. Proliferating alternative baselines (with or without the extension of the Bush tax cuts, with or without a “patch” for the alternative minimum tax, and so forth) deepen the confusion. Unable to fathom the details, voters are left to weigh the competing slogans. Mr Obama promises to cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. Mr McCain says the rich need a tax cut, too. Guess who wins that argument. Here is a fact you might not have noticed. It certainly seems to have slipped by most Americans. The typical US household would get a bigger tax cut under Mr McCain’s proposals than under Mr Obama’s. I know a few politicians who could do something with that. Broadly speaking, Mr McCain proposes to leave the Bush tax cuts in place. Mr Obama proposes a big increase in taxes on people earning more than $250,000 (€187,000, £145,000) a year, in order to cut taxes and increase subsidies at the bottom; for the middle, he too would mostly keep the Bush tax code. Middle-income households do come out slightly ahead under the Obama plan – but only if you leave out the effect of Mr McCain’s healthcare proposal. The question is, why would you do that?

JOHN MCCAIN AND AN ARMY OF JOES
(Byron York, National Review)
In recent days, the Joe the Plumber phenomenon has taken on a deeper meaning for McCain’s audiences, for two reasons. First, he is a symbol of their belief that Barack Obama is going to raise their taxes, regardless of what Obama says about hitting up only those taxpayers who make more than $250,000 a year. They know Wurzelbacher doesn’t make that much, and they know they don’t make that much. And they’re not suspicious because they believe that someday they will make $250,000, and thus face higher taxes. No, they just don’t believe Obama right now. If he’s elected, they say, he’ll eventually come looking for taxpayers who make well below a quarter-million dollars, and that will include them. The second reason Joe the Plumber resonates with the crowds is what his experience says about the media. Everybody here seems acutely aware of the once-over Wurzelbacher received from the press after his chance encounter with Obama was reported, first on Fox News, and then mentioned by McCain at last week’s presidential debate... As the people here in Woodbridge saw it, Joe was a guy who asked Barack Obama an inconvenient question — and for his troubles suddenly found himself under investigation by the media.  

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

UPDATE: It's a yes. Here's Powell speaking to reporters after his appearance this morning on "Meet the Press," where the former Secretary of State and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Republican, declared his support for Barack Obama and chided John McCain for the negative tone of his campaign:

Original item follows: 

My fellow NEWSWEEK blogger Howard Fineman says... well, maybe:

Is Gen. Colin Powell getting ready to endorse Sen. Barack Obama on "Meet the Press" this Sunday? Two sources close to Powell, speaking on the condition of anonymity, predict that he will. On the record, a third, Ken Duberstein, a Washington lobbyist and former White House chief of staff, didn't flatly deny it. "You can say what you want," he told me, "but I didn't tell you that and neither did Powell."

OK, true enough. If Powell does endorse Obama, racial pride will have something to do with it, which is understandable. Powell has been a trailblazer himself, and he admires Obama's unflappability and skill in rising so quickly through the ranks of American politics. While Powell is personally close to McCain, and has been for many years, he seems to have taken a special interest in making himself available, behind the scenes and from time to time, to discuss foreign policy and defense issues with the novice Illinois senator...

However, if Powell does endorse, it will have less to do with American sociology than world affairs. Powell simply has no use anymore--if he ever had any--for the neo-con cowboys he thinks misled the country (and him) into a mistaken and costly war in Iraq. Powell has been careful in public not to criticize his colleagues in the Bush administration nor bluntly call the war a mistake... An endorsement of Obama would be an indirect but powerful way of expressing his resentments and regrets: refusing to support a fellow Republican who has very Bush-like ideas about how to make America more secure in a world of terror. "It's not so much about race as it is about foreign policy," a friend of Powell's told me. "He thinks Obama has a lot to learn, but that he has the capacity."

READ THE REST HERE.
 

During a fundraising breakfast at Manhattan's swanky Metropolitan Club yesterday morning, Barack Obama delivered an unusually dour message to some of his top contributors. "For those of you who are feeling giddy or cocky or think this is all set, I just have two words for you: New Hampshire," he said. "I've been in these positions before when we were favored and the press starts getting carried away and we end up getting spanked." Obama was referring to his nearly three-point loss to Hillary Clinton in January's Granite State primary, which came after the final pre-primary polls showed him ahead by an average of 8.3 percent. The senator felt so strongly about the analogy, in fact, that he repeated it this afternoon on a conference call with his staffers. "Run scared," he said. "Remember New Hampshire." It's worth nothing that some Republicans have told me the same thing. Ignore Obama's seven-point advantage in the national polls, they say. He could get always hit with another New Hampshire.

These warnings--which imply that current polling averages could be off by ten or more points--serve obvious political purposes. For Republicans, they help keep hope alive amid a daily flood of surveys that, collectively, show Obama ahead by an estimated 190 votes in the Electoral College. For Democrats, they help ensure that no one--staffers, volunteers, potential voters--takes anything for granted down the homestretch. Both parties are, in effect, encouraging supporters to show up on Election Day no matter how bad (or good) the polls may look.

But here's my question: Is it reasonable to believe--based solely on what happened in New Hampshire--that Obama could wake up on Nov. 4 with a seven- or eight-percent lead and wind up losing to McCain by a couple of points?

The answer: I don't think so. The first problem, of course, is that comparing primary polling to general-election polling is a total apples-and-oranges maneuver; you're talking about two different electorates (Democratic primary voters vs. Democrats, Republicans and everyone else). Setting that consideration aside, however, there's simply no reason to use New Hampshire--as opposed to the other Democratic primaries--to predict what could or couldn't happen on Election Night. Given that we talking about a national election, a more rational approach would involve comparing Obama's actual primary performance to pre-primary polling trends across the entire spectrum of primary states. Luckily, the indispensable Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight compiled these statistics back in August. What he found is that New Hampshire was the exception, not the rule. Over the course of the entire primary season, Obama actually outperformed the polls by an average of 3.3 percentage points. In the West, he did 1.1 percent better than pollsters predicted (on average). In the Midwest, he surpassed the surveys by 3.1 percent. And in the South, he exceeded expectations by a whopping 7.2 percent. The only region where Obama underperformed, in fact, was the Northeast; there, he finished about two points below the pre-primary trendline. That said, Obama is currently winning every northeastern state--including New Hampshire--by more than 10 points; he'd probably be willing to trade a few points in New England for a few points in Virginia, Colorado, Ohio or Florida. 

That's not to say that Obama couldn't lose his lead on Election Day. It's just that the Democratic primary results--again, including New Hampshire--give us no reason to believe that he will. In fact, they suggest (if anything) that the senator could outperform the polls by a point or two on Nov. 4. That said, things could always change. According to Blumenthal, the most compelling explanation for what happened in New Hampshire isn't that Granite Staters lied to pollsters about race--i.e., the Bradley Effect--or that pollsters didn't screen for likely voters as well as they should have. It's that there was simply a last-minute shift toward Clinton. Now, that's much less likely to occur in the general election. Back in January, 80 percent of New Hampshire's Democratic primary electorate approved of all three major candidates--Obama, Clinton and John Edwards--which meant that switching sides wasn't much of a leap. The general electorate, on the other hand, is sharply divided (and largely decided) on Obama and McCain. Still, if the polls narrow in the final weeks of the presidential race--as they're wont to do--a defining moment could move the needle in McCain's direction. (Remember Hillary's tears?) Ultimately, says Blumenthal, reminding voters of New Hampshire is an "entirely prudent thing for Obama to do. There's enough uncertainty about this race that it would be foolish for anyone to say it's done."

Even if New Hampshire itself is sort of irrelevant.

UPDATE, Oct. 18: In the comments section, reader "Philosopher" floats the theory that Obama only overperformed in caucus states. This isn't true. In fact, only Iowa and Nevada were polled heavily enough to be included in Silver's analysis; otherwise, the numbers above are based entirely on Obama's performance in primaries.
 

By Joanna Heath
 
The U.S. election is less than 3 weeks away, but some believe it’s a done deal--and are willing to bet more than $1.3 million on it.
 
On Thursday, Paddy Power PLC, Ireland’s largest betting agency, announced that it was so confident in the outcome of the election that it would pay out over 1 million euros ($1.3 million) on bets already made that Barack Obama will become the next president of the United States.
 
Should it get its prediction wrong--and it has made mistakes before--Paddy Power will be obliged to honor bets also made in favor of John McCain (currently running at odds of 5-1 against) in addition to Thursday’s payout, risking big losses for the firm.
 
However, according to Darren Haines, a representative of Paddy Power, the company isn’t taking any risk at all. “The combination of the three presidential debates, and then the differences between McCain and Obama’s handling of the economic crisis, has led us to believe that really there’s only going to be one winner now. One of them looks like a president, and the other one not so much.” With Obama’s odds of winning at 1-9 (meaning punters betting $90 would only make $10 if he won), bets have dried up. According to Haines, it is now a “one-horse race.”
 
Haines denies any kind of political motivation for the decision: “Americans can’t bet with us anyway, so there’s little use in us having a political viewpoint. It’s purely from a betting and entertainment point of view. Having a bit of fun with our betting, no more than that.”
 
Fun or not, Paddy Power’s widely reported move will only add to the air of inevitability starting to surround the Obama campaign, which is leading in many national and state polls.
 
In any case, if McCain is hoping for the proverbial luck of the Irish to help his ailing campaign, it is all in vain--they’re too busy collecting money from their bookies.
 

UPDATE, Oct. 18: So I see that MSNBC has linked to this item under the headline "Is the Old McCain Back?" For the record, I don't have anything to do with MSNBC's editorial decisions, and if you read the piece, you'll see that I never actually pose that question. But just for fun, I'll answer it. Do I think the "old McCain" is back? No. In fact, that was the point of my item. Seeing McCain on Letterman and at the Al Smith dinner reminded me of what's been missing from his bid in recent weeks: humor, spontaneity, confidence, comfort, selflessness, etc.--i.e., the things that once made him so popular.

In other words, I was using McCain's night in New York to point out how far he's drifted from his center of gravity--not that he's returned to it. I think bringing the "old McCain" back, whatever that means, would be a good thing. But I don't think it's going to happen (or even that it could happen at this point). Either way, it certainly hasn't happened yet.

FYI, I wrote earlier this week about how the media is itching to create a McCain comeback narrative--even though the polls provide no evidence of a bounce. Funny how I've now been drafted to help with that effort.

Original item follows: 

As Sinatra once said about New York, "if [you] can make it there, [you] can make it anywhere." So why does the opposite seem true for John McCain?

Last night, McCain made two appearances here in the Big Apple: one at the Al Smith Dinner, an annual white-tie Catholic charity event that honors the former Empire State governor and first Roman Catholic presidential nominee, and the other alongside David Letterman on the "Late Show." Watching him in both settings, I couldn't help but be reminded of the man who was once the Most Popular Politician in America®--and marvel at how little the candidate who showed up at Wednesday's debate resembled him.

McCain's performance at the Waldorf-Astoria--a roast, essentially--was crisp, smooth and confident; he easily earned more laughs than Barack Obama, who followed him to the podium. The senator's trump card, I think, was self-deprecation--an ability and willingness to mock his own foibles (and the absurdities of the politics he's engaged in) that's he's kept pretty well hidden for the past few months. He joked that he'd "dismissed [his] entire team of senior advisers" and filled "all of their positions" with "a man named Joe the Plumber." He made light of his own wealth, revealing that Joe had "recently signed a very lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to handle the work on all seven of their houses." He acknowledged his slip in the second debate--referring to his rival as "that one"--by explaining that Obama "even has a pet name for me--'George Bush'." And he closed on a gracious note. "I can't wish [Obama] luck," McCain said. "But I do wish him well."

More impressive, though, was his performance on Letterman. At the Al Smith Dinner, McCain was working off a well-written script. On Letterman, he was improvising--and facing off against a rather unfriendly interrogator. Clearly peeved that the senator had skipped out on his last scheduled appearance, Letterman pressed him hard--as hard as I've seen him pressed, in fact--on a wide array of topics: his campaign suspension; Joe the Plumber; Osama bin Laden; the extremists who attend his rallies; Sarah Palin's qualifications; William Ayers. McCain was forced to revisit much of material that was covered in his three debates with Obama. But gone was the smirking, the blinking, the seething; gone also were the disorienting, awkward transitions from one talking point to the next.

When McCain tried to be funny, he was funny. "I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation," he said at one point. Later, he joked that Ayers and Obama--in a line that seemed to mock his own campaign's relentless harping on their "relationship"--"may be going to Denny's together." "Who knows?" he added, citing "the Grand Slam" as an important factor to consider. When the moment called for candor, McCain was candid. "I know Gordon Liddy," he admitted (Letterman had asked whether voters should see Liddy as McCain's Ayers). "He paid his debt. He went to prison, he paid his debt, as people do." And McCain even managed some self-deprecation--again, a quality sorely lacking in his debate performances. "I screwed up," he said of his decision to skip the show. "'It’s only Dave. There’s only a few million who’ll be watching. What the hell? Who cares?'" You may not have agreed with him on everything--I still think, for example, that he's wrong to harp on ACORN and Ayers--but you couldn't help respecting him. There was none of the nastiness or defensiveness that marred his debate performances. He seemed like a human being again--as opposed to a politician.

Over the past few months, McCain's popularity has suffered a precipitous decline. I think that as a lot to do with the contrast between how he and Obama presented themselves in Oxford, Nashville and Hempstead. A more appealing McCain may show up at the occasional town-hall meeting. But when everyone was watching (and by everyone, I mean, like, 100 million Americans) he let his self-regard and resentment get the best of him--which, in turn, let Obama look like the only human being in the race. John Heilemann hits the proverbial nail on its proverbial head in his latest New York magazine column. "McCain gave off a vibe of profound and all-encompassing solipsism [at the debates]," he writes. "In his complaints last night about Obama’s negative ads ... he came across as aggrieved, self-pitying, whiny, entitled. The unspoken sentiment behind his words and bearing was, 'This fatuous, line-jumping, all-talk-no-action punk is about to take the job that was supposed to be mine! Can you believe this s--t?!' The issues he incessantly chose to harp on--earmarks, ethanol, Colombian free trade--are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic and pet-peevish. In other words, it’s all about him." For a man who has given his entire life in service to the country--and who is most comfortable and most compelling when calling people to serve a cause greater than themselves--that's exactly the wrong impression to give. In the debates, McCain squandered his greatest resource. It's why a little self-deprecation would've gone a long way.

Obama, in contrast, spent "all three debates labor[ing] mightily to turn every disquisition back to the concerns of you, the voter." When the subject shifted to stuff that the voters don't care about--at least in Obama's estimation--he'd immediately remind everyone that he'd rather be addressing "what really matters" (i.e., the economy). This, of course, is pure political theater. But it's working. Fifty-four percent of viewers said McCain seemed more like a typical politician during the Hofstra debate; only 35 percent said the same about Obama. Sixty-six percent viewed Obama favorably--versus only 49 percent for McCain. At the start of debate season, both candidates enjoyed a 17-point net favorable rating in national polls. Since then, Obama's number has soared to 21.8; McCain's has plummeted to eight. Today, many Americans probably see Obama the same way conservative columnist David Brooks sees him: "self-contained, self-controlled and maybe even a little dull." Translation: "presidential." 

Obama, of course, has the advantage of a lead. He can afford to float above the fray. McCain, on the other hand, has to scrap and scrape if he hopes to catch up. But I'm starting to wonder if the Arizona senator will reach a tipping point and decide that the costs of pursuing a conventional underdog strategy--that is, trying to tear Obama down--outweigh any imaginable benefits. If he does, expect him to start sounding a lot less like he sounded in Oxford, Nashville and Hempstead--and a lot more like he sounded last night in New York. It's highly unlikely--how 'bout them robocalls?--and it won't be enough to make him king of the hill or top of the heap. But it could be better than the alternative.
 

Expertinent is a regular Stumper column featuring interviews with experts on the news of the day. 

There are 19 days until Nov. 4. Barack Obama is leading by nearly 200 votes in estimates of the Electoral College. Experts expect the Democrats to pick up 20-25 seats in the House and six to eight seats in the Senate. If you're John McCain's top strategists--the people tasked with putting the Arizona Senator in the White House--what do you do? Increasingly, it seems that the answer is a) stop pretending the GOP can reclaim Congress and b) start arguing that McCain is the only thing standing between the American people and unrestrained Democratic rule.

Call it the "Divided Government Rationale." On Sunday, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis raised the specter of an all-Democratic D.C. on FOX News. "Do we really believe that the American public is going to feel safe by having both the head of the Congress and the head of the White House from the same party that has had so many challenges with the way they’ve run Washington over the last couple of years?" he asked. A few minutes later, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty chimed in as well. "I don’t think the country is going to like the Democratic Party running the table on taxes, on education, on health care and have kind of the liberal, unchecked, imbalanced approach to all of those issues," he said. "Having John McCain as president to balance that out and be able to work across the aisle as he has throughout his career to get things done would be a good compromise." Finally, Mitt Romney outed himself as a "divided-government" man at Wednesday's debate. "If they put forward a major tax increase, is he going to veto it? If it's nationalized health care, is he going to veto that?" Romney asked. "We need to say, 'you may not like the Bush administration, but how about the Pelosi administration?'... They would lead [Obama] by the nose, alright, because of their experience."

It's an interesting argument. But the question is whether it's a political winner. Wanting to find out more about the history of divided government--and to get a sense of whether McCain's new argument will connect--I called up Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science at Stanford University and the author of "Divided Government." Here's what he had to say:

STUMPER: Some conservatives are now arguing that the American people need to keep the potential excesses of a Democratic Congress in check and elect someone like McCain, who's got a history of bipartisanship but also obvious disagreements with Reid and Pelosi. Is there a historical rationale for this argument?
FIORINA: David Mayhew at Yale did a big study that showed that legislation was just as likely in divided-government times as in unified-government times. There's been a lot of controversy--people say, "How about important legislation, etc." But basically you can't see much difference. Some conservatives certainly argue that one institution can check the excesses of the other. So the arguments have been out there for ages. But there isn't any definitive evidence on one side or the other that division helps or hurts. I said this a long time ago, though, and I said it again on a panel last week: that we're going to see ads urging voters not to hand government over to these wild-eyed liberal forces of Pelosi and Reid and to have somebody in the White House to check them. Clinton did the same thing McCain is doing now. He ran on a divided-government message in 1996, even though he was certainly going to win. The 80s was probably the high point. It seems like we always had a split. If you asked people in polls what they preferred, majorities would typically say divided government. So it's a common argument.

Looking back, when has a divided Washington helped or hurt the workings of government (even if it's a wash overall)?
Think about welfare reform. Now it's regarded as a major policy achievement. But at the time, it was something that Republicans forced on Clinton. Clinton extracted some concessions and took credit for it. Or if you look at the bipartisan budget adoption under George H.W. Bush that contributed to the prosperity of the late '90s and balanced budgets. Go back to the Social Security revision of the '80s with Reagan, Tip O'Neill and Dole. There have been some pretty big things done in divided government periods where the parties got together and negotiated--legislation that was arguably more measured and effective than it would've been under one-party rule.

How about the corresponding argument? Instances where one-party rule led to great excesses?
Look at the George W. Bush years. The prescription-drug bill, what the Republicans were able to push through: no negotiating with the drug companies. I think you can look over the last administration and see a lot of really raunchy legislation that only exist because it was a unified-government period. You have to go back pretty far to find similar excesses on the Democratic side. Maybe some of the Great Society programs, where people would say they failed because they weren't vetted well enough and weren't based on motivation or any ideas that had actually been proven to work.

Isn't there another side to that coin, though--namely, that a unified government means less friction, which could mean a more responsive Washington, which could (in theory) prove useful in times of crisis?
Absolutely. FDR had 14 years of unified Democratic government. Of course, it fell apart in the late 1930s with the rise of the Conservative Coalition, the Southerners branching off. But that's why he was able to respond so swiftly to the Depression. By the same token, though, when you think back to Reagan, who was elected with a Democratic Congress, he got a lot done in his first few years. So I think generally during a period of what's considered to be either national emergency or when there's been a major electoral upheaval--any time the president comes in with what looks like a mandate, whether the government is unified or not--he can get a lot done. I mean, the Democrats in 1981 were just running scared. They just thought "this may be a new world, we'd better not get in this guy's way"... so it took a year or so for them to realize that, OK, the world isn't that new. McCain won't have that mandate; Obama might.

Is there an audience for McCain's divided-government message? Is this what voters want to hear?
We actually asked a question on a recent AP poll. The way we phrased it was, What would you prefer after the election? Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress or Barack Obama and a Republican Congress? Same with McCain: McCain and Democrats, McCain and Republicans. Most people preferred unified government. Barack Obama and Democrats was about 40-some percent, while McCain and Republicans was 30-some percent. But there was about 20 percent who still wanted divided government constellations. And there was more McCain-Democrat than Obama-Republican. So there is a set of voters out there that has this as their most preferred outcome. So if you added that set to the set that prefers a unified Republican government, you got about a tie. So if the McCain people have the same kind of data, that's obviously a place to go fishing.

But how powerful is fear of Reid and Pelosi? There's a difference between preferring a divided dynamic in theory and voting solely on that basis, right?
That's right. The big problem is that while you might prefer this in the abstract it's probably not enough of a motivation to make you cast your vote one way or the other. No one's going to vote against Obama just because they expect Democrats to control Congress. Ultimately, I doubt if McCain's argument is compelling. Part of the reason is that I think it's more convincing to go the other direction: to say, "Vote for me as a Republican congressman because Obama's going to be president." I think that would be more compelling to some voters than "vote for president because congress is going the other way." People key off the top office.

Imagine for a second that the government were divided, though--a Democratic congress with McCain as president. In what ways could that theoretically help the workings of government?
Given the current financial crisis, I have difficulty seeing how anything anybody does can help at this point. Obviously, the Democrats will be able to stop anything McCain would want, including Supreme Court appointments and so forth. To extend any tax cuts he's got to come to Congress and negotiate, because they sunset without Congressional action. So no. I think we're in for hard times. In some ways, Democrats run the risk of being really disappointed. If you have big majorities in Congress and Obama as president, he can't do health care, he can't do other things just because of how bad the economic situation is. It's going to be hard no matter who wins.

That makes a lot of sense: Democrats won't be able to indulge their most excessive impulses, even if Obama wins the White House.
That's absolutely right. The divided government argument is basically irrelevant given the current economic constraints.

I hereby request that you divert your attention from Stumper--difficult, I know--and check out three excellent articles that have cropped up on NEWSWEEK.com in the past 24 hours.

First up is my fellow blogger Howard Fineman's insightful new post over at Race to the Finish. Called "The Real Debate," it explains why "this presidential contest is down to a clash of two 'effects:' the Bradley Effect and the Facebook Effect." Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Yes, there are white voters, especially older ones, who will hide their prejudice until, alone in the voting booth, they vote against a black candidate because of his race. That apparently happened to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who was ahead in the final polls for California governor in 1982 but lost the election. Depending on the poll, the difference was perhaps 6 percent. No one knows how big that “Bradley” number right now. There may be some Bradley voters lurking among Obama’s supporters, but it’s more likely the Bradley types are hiding among the allegedly undecided. If you are a white person 50 years or older and you say you are still undecided, my guess is that you probably are not going to vote for Obama---or maybe (if Obama is lucky) you won’t vote at all. 

But this year there is another force at work: young voters, especially those under 30... Obama is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to organize and turn out these young voters, many of whom got con-nected to his campaign through social-networking sites such as Facebook. Now he has to turn them out---make them do something in real space as opposed to digital space. Pollsters do not have accurate “turnout models” for this new cadre of voters. Obama has registered millions; how many will actually vote remains to be seen.

Next up is Sarah Kliff, who reports on whether the mother's-health exception to bans on late-term abortion is being abused as John McCain suggested in the Hofstra debate. A preview:

Using air quotes in any serious conversation is risky. Even more so during a presidential debate when the topic is abortion. So it was perplexing to many women when John McCain inserted them into a discussion on Wednesday about whether late-term-abortion bans should include exceptions for the mother's "health." Senator McCain's point was that health exceptions, which his rival Senator Barack Obama supports, have "been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything." But then, while describing what he called his opponent's "extreme pro-abortion position," McCain made air quotes when referring to the "health" of the mother... So what exactly is a "health exception" in abortion legislation, and is it the "extreme pro-abortion position" described by McCain?...

McCain is correct when he suggests that the law does not specify which conditions or complications should be included in the legal definition of what constitutes a threat to the mother's health. That decision is left up to the doctor. Pro-life groups have long complained that the Supreme Court's definition is too vague and includes too many provisions... Still, state-level bans of late-term abortions reflect the Supreme Court's position supporting health exemptions. Of the 36 states where bans exist, 28 provide exceptions for the mother's health and life, four states provide for the mother's physical health and life and four for the mother's life but not health, according to statistics compiled by the Guttmacher Institute.

Last but not least: Tony Dokoupil's dispatch on "The Vanishing Male Voter":  

Over the last 40 years, some 16 million men—a population roughly the size of Michigan and Indiana combined—have stopped pulling the lever. That's a hole five times the size of George W. Bush's margin of victory in 2004. How did it get so bad? Since 1964, when a record 72 percent of voting-age men and 67 percent of voting-age women pulled the lever for president, participation rates have tumbled for both sexes—but far more steeply for men. By 1980, civics-class dropouts had flipped the gender gap. And this November, men are again the odds-on favorites to no-show at the polls.

In his piece, Dokoupil identifies a few key factors that have contributed to dearth of dudes at the polls: "men are simply more likely to be dead come Election Day"; men "are less likely than women to attend church, consume news, trust authority and believe that people are generally good," according to recent studies; and, finally, "education and employment. Graduating from college is one of the top predictors of voting, and increasingly men are falling behind their female counterparts." It's a fascinating read.

Spread the wealth, I say. It's good for everybody.

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

POLLS CAUSE CAMPAIGNS TO CHANGE THEIR ITINERARIES
(Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times)
Confronting an increasingly bleak electoral map, top aides to Senator John McCain said Thursday that they were searching for a “narrow-victory scenario” and would focus in the final weeks on a dwindling number of states, using mailings, telephone calls and television advertisements to try to tear away support from Senator Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s advisers said they would use the remaining 19 days of the campaign to focus mainly on capturing states that President Bush won in 2004; he is going to Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia, over the next three days and spending two days in Florida next week... By contrast, Mr. McCain is spending the next three days campaigning in states that Mr. Bush won in 2004 and that earlier this year Republicans had considered relatively safe: he will visit Florida on Friday, followed by North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio. Republicans said their hopes of capturing any state the Democrats won in 2004 appeared to be dwindling... By every indication, Mr. Obama entered this post-debate period in a significantly stronger position than Mr. McCain, with broader support in polls, more options for an Electoral College victory and voters increasingly fixated on the economic crisis, to the decided advantage of Mr. Obama.

OBAMA AHEAD IN CRITICAL COUNTIES
(Alexander Burns, Politico)
Sen. Barack Obama holds leads in four key counties that will go a long way toward determining the eventual winner in four important swing states—Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—according to a new Politico/Insider Advantage survey... In Bucks County, a politically competitive but historically Republican suburb that shares a border with Philadelphia, Obama is running ahead of McCain, 47-41 percent. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry carried the county by a slim 51-48 percent. Obama bests McCain 50-42 percent in Prince William County, a Washington, D.C. suburb that voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004. Between 1976 and 2004, Prince William County supported Republican presidential candidates by an average margin of 18 points.  Obama also has opened up a wide 53-37 percent advantage over McCain in suburban St. Louis County, which does not include Missouri’s largest city, St. Louis. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry carried St. Louis County, the most populous county in the state, 54-45 percent. In Ohio’s Franklin County, the state’s second-most populous county after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, Obama leads by a narrower 45-40 percent margin. Kerry carried Franklin County 54-45 percent in 2004. 

AS MCCAIN'S ROAD GETS STEEPER, OBAMA WARNS OF OVERCONFIDENCE
(Dan Balz and Shailagh Murray, Washington Post)
The global financial crisis, coupled with Obama's steady performance through the three presidential debates, has left McCain with an extremely difficult path to the White House. Absent his ability to pick off any state won by the Democrats four years ago, he must prevent Obama from winning any of half a dozen Republican states that now appear vulnerable. Republican strategists see trouble almost everywhere, facing the prospect of not only losing the White House but seeing Democratic majorities in the House and Senate grow as well. That could force a competition for resources during the final weeks, but strategists said a McCain comeback would be most helpful in relieving some of the pressure on other GOP candidates... Obama sought to pump up his supporters with a stern message not to take the race for granted. "For those of you who are feeling giddy or cocky or think this is all set, I just have two words for you: New Hampshire," he told top contributors... "I've been in these positions before when we were favored and the press starts getting carried away and we end up getting spanked."

THE END OF THE REAGAN ERA?
(Ronald Brownstein, National Journal)
Reagan's commanding victory 28 years ago marked what many historians see as a hinge in American history -- a moment that was a transition between political eras. If the Democrats win a victory of comparable breadth on November 4, the obvious question will be whether 2008 marks another transition... [But] even if Democrats win big next month, they will face the challenge of understanding what kind of victory they have won. Large Democratic gains unquestionably would reflect a severe judgment on George W. Bush's performance as president. Although history may commend some of Bush's twilight decisions (including the financial rescue package and the "surge" in Iraq), his failures far outnumber his successes. And he is approaching Election Day with the highest disapproval rating (71 percent) the Gallup Poll has recorded for any president. Less clear is whether a big Democratic win would represent an ideological pivot like 1980. Many Democrats believe that a breakthrough next month, coming after a financial meltdown that has discredited unfettered markets, would represent the public's repudiation not just of Bush's performance but of Reagan's small-government ideas... Conservatives are dubious.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

As you've probably ascertained by now, the real star of last night's debate wasn't Barack Obama, or John McCain, or Bob Schieffer. And it certainly wasn't the financial crisis, or Mess 'o' Potamia, or Bill Ayers, or ACORN. Instead, it was some guy named Joe Wurzelbacher--a.k.a. "Joe the Plumber"--who confronted Obama on Sunday in Holland, Ohio, about his tax plan. At McCain's prodding, the candidates wound up mentioning Wurzelbacher 26 times at Hofstra. For comparison, the economy came up 16 times. The war in Iraq? Six.

Thanks to the MSM's raging "real person" fetish, Wurzelbacher's 15 minutes of fame have extended well into today. Intrepid journalistic investigators have discovered, for example, that Wurzelbacher, 34, voted in the Republican primary, doesn't have a plumbing license, still owes $1,200 in unpaid income taxes and is actually named Samuel. Financial crisis! What financial crisis? McCain, meanwhile, was happy to let Wurzelbacher dominate what would've otherwise been a bad news cycle for him. "The real winner last night was Joe the Plumber," he said this morning in Downingtown, Pa. "Joe's the man." This morning, Wurzelbacher coolly fielded questions from the frantic press swarm stationed outside his home. Cable reporters spent the afternoon milling around in his yard. To paraphrase Russell Hammond of Stillwater, "You, Joe, are what it's all about. You're real. Your room is real. Your friends are real. Real, man, real. You know? Real."

But while it's fun to while away a day obsessing over a random Ohioan, few commentators are actually focusing on why Joe the Plumber is worth obsessing over. It's not just that Team McCain is casting him as a symbol of its superior tax policies. It's that, upon closer inspection, Wurzelbacher could just as easily serve as a symbol of why some voters may prefer Obama on the tax issue. As such, Wurzelbacher is like this year's entire tax debate distilled into one perfect Rorschach test of a person. His Republican registration, nonexistent plumbing license and $1,200 in unpaid levies are totally irrelevant. But what he represents in terms of taxes is not.

Here's why. On Sunday, Wurzelbacher told Obama that, after 15 years of working as a plumber, he's now preparing to purchase a company that makes more than $250,000 a year. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" he asked. As anyone who's been following the election knows, Obama plans to cut taxes for everyone making under $200,000, to leave tax rates for those making between $200,000 and $250,000 alone and to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 to pre-George W. Bush levels. In his answer, Obama assumed that Wurzelbacher was currently earning more than $250,000 and went on to explain his plan. But the thing is, Wurzelbacher admits he isn't actually making $250,000--and he won't be anytime soon. "Would you be in that [above-$250,000] category?" CBS's Katie Couric asked Wurzelbacher last night. "Not ... presently," he said.

So how much is Joe making? Right now, he's still a plumber, so he's probably raking in about $40,000 to $50,000, according to government estimates. When he buys that small business, he's likely to earn more--but not $250,000. That's because $250,000 is the amount of revenue the business is said to pull in; after expenses--equipment, employees, etc.--his personal income (salary plus profits) will be significantly less. Let's say a still-healthy $100,000.

How, you ask, would each of candidates change Wurzelbacher's tax bill if elected president? According a recent study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Institute--which broke down Obama's and McCain's proposed tax plans by income bracket--Joe the Plumber (the guy making, say, $50,000 a year) would see his taxes slashed by $319 under McCain and $1,042 under Obama. That's a $723 difference. Meanwhile, Joe the Small-Business Owner (the guy making $100,000 a year) would pay $1,009 less under McCain and $1,290 less under Obama, for a difference of $181. 

This presents us with an interesting--and illustrative--case study. Whether or not Wurzelbacher buys his business, he's guaranteeed to get a larger tax cut from Obama than McCain--and yet he still prefers McCain's plan to Obama's. Ultimately, then, we end up with two potential voting blocs. First there are the people who earn less than $250,000 and want the largest possible tax cut for themselves--a group that doesn't include Joe the Plumber OR Joe the Small-Business Owner. Then there are the people--like Joe--who earn less than $250,000 a year, but are willing to turn down the bigger tax cut for one of three reasons. Some are trickle-down/free-market adherents who believe that larger tax cuts for those richer than themselves will best serve the economy. Others simply don't trust Obama to keep his word. And then there are those who identify with the wealthy, believe they're bound strike it rich someday and don't want to pay higher taxes when they do.

Both groups--Group Joe and Group Non-Joe--have valid positions. But the question facing McCain--who hopes to make taxes the centerpiece of his closing argument--is which group is bigger. All told, voters making less than $250,000 a year represent 98 percent of the electorate, so they'll be picking the next president. Traditionally, many of these folks resent the idea of having to pay more money if they ever become part of the other two percent, so they side with Republicans on taxes. After all, that's why George H.W. Bush closed the gap with Bill Clinton in the final days of the 1992 race. McCain may still benefit from a similar shift. But one has to wonder whether the traditional GOP message on taxes has lost some of its luster amid a financial crisis that suddenly makes it significantly easier for people like Joe the Plumber--if not Joe himself--to picture themselves earning much less in the future, not much more. In which case Obama--who offers more people more money more quickly--would stand to gain.

Developing, as they say ...

UPDATE, Oct. 17: The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman has more detail on the company Wurzelbacher hope to buy someday:

The company, A.W. Newell Inc., with two employees, Al Newell and Mr. Wurzelbacher, reported sales this year of $100,000. On sales of that volume, a firm that size could expect to earn about a 6% profit, or $6,000, after salaries and costs are taken out, according to Lee Smither, managing director of FMI Corp., a Raleigh, N.C., management-consulting firm for construction contractors. The average income of plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters in 2006 was $48,002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Earlier, I'd taken Wurzelbacher's claim that A.W. Newell, Inc. "makes" more than $250,000 a year to mean that sales exceed $250,000. Turns out Wurzelbacher's statement was misleading: $250,000 is the net worth of the company. Sales are only $100,000. Which means that Joe the Small-Business Owner won't rake in anywhere near $100,000; he'll simply net an additional $6,000 (i.e. the company's profits) on top of his old salary of about $40,000. Ultimately, then, Joe the Small-Business Owner would be in the same boat as Joe the Plumber: that is, getting a tax cut of $1,042 from Obama and $319 from McCain. For Wurzelbacher to take home the $200,000-$250,000 required to trigger Obama's proposed tax increases, according to the Journal, "a mom-and-pop plumbing company like Newell would have to clear $5 million in annual sales."
 

Pop quiz, hotshot: Whose peepers are peeking out at us over the words "America Must Look Evil in the Eye" on this new mailer from the Republican Party of Virginia?

Not sure? Either am I. And that's probably the point. 

The mailer hits "Democrats who want to control Washington"--translation: Barack Obama--for wanting to appease terrorists and rogue leaders, so it's natural that some readers would conclude that it's Barack Obama in the picture. Then again, the pamphlet also boasts glamor shots of Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hugo Chavez, so others might assume it's Osama bin Laden. Either way, when TPM's Greg Sargent asked Virginia GOP spokesperson Gerry Scimeca whether the photo was bin Laden or Obama, "he couldn't immediately say." Based on side-by-side images of the two figures, both guesses seem reasonable. 

That ambiguity is sneaky--to put it mildly. Virginia Republicans could've chosen to use a full facial photograph on this page of the mailer--just as they did with Chavez, Kim and Ahmadinejad. That would've cleared up any possible confusion. Referring to either Obama or bin Laden in the text, like the party did with "the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea," would've accomplished the same task. Given that they didn't--deliberately, I'm assuming--I only see three possible readings of the photo:

1) It's an image of Obama cropped to evoke bin Laden (no mouth, no hair, no identifying characteristics)--in which case the Virginia GOP is explicitly equating Obama with "evil." Strikes me as highly unlikely.

2) It's an image of a random, unidentifiable dark-skinned individual--in which case the Virginia GOP is implying that anyone with darker skin (a group that would include both Obama and bin Laden) is an "evil" threat. Still not sold.

3) It's an image of bin Laden cropped (and darkened, much like Time magazine's famous O.J. Simpson cover) to plausibly pass as Obama--in which case the Virginia GOP is explicitly (and appropriately) equating bin Laden with "evil" while implicitly (and inappropriately) equating Obama with bin Laden. By far the most likely explanation. 

Again, the Virginia GOP could've easily preempted any confusion by either a) showing a full headshot on this page (just like they did with Chavez, Kim and Ahmadinejad) or b) identifying either Obama or bin Laden in the text (just like they did with the other people pictured). That they didn't--and, when asked, refused to confirm or deny that it was an image of Obama--suggests that the ambiguity was intentional. There's already a small group of right-wing extremists who seem attached to the idea that the Illinois senator is, in fact, an evil Islamist. McCain supporters have shouted "terrorist!" at rallies; the Sacramento County GOP ran a "The Only Difference between Obama and Osama is BS" web ad. With that in mind, it's hard not to conclude that Virginia Republicans are deliberately appealing to the worst elements of their party here.