The McCain campaign seems to have thrown away any pretense of campaigning on the issues and are doing a Rove turn to the negative and mendacious. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, I suppose, but nonetheless I had hoped for something different this year. They know they can't win on the issues or the record, so they're doing everything they can to throw up a smoke screen on the Rovian theory that the American public is easily duped, especially by a compliant and lazy main stream media. To them, the truth is irrelevant or simply relative and subject to convenient revision, objective reality be damned.

I fear they may be right, given the shift in the polls, this frenzied swoon over this unlikely arriviste Palin, and the way things just "feel." Palin is quite a phenomenon, and I get the sense that the Obama campaign is still struggling to find its tactical footing in her regard. She seems to have simultaneously attracted white women, mothers in particular, per a recent ABC poll (but there is some question about the accuracy and meaning of the data, of course)--who seem to respond to Palin's first-degree identity as a scrappy woman gov from the sticks and just-folks mother of five with a knack for reading a TelePrompTer--and galvanized the evangelical Republican base enough to shake up the dynamic of the race at least for the time being. We'll certainly see very soon whether this is really more than just a flash in the pan and ends up going down as the most brilliantly cynical move in the history of presidential politics.

My guess is that things will boil down to the usual tight margins of red v. blue, the usual suspects in terms of swing states (like Florida and Ohio), and whatever additional energy the Obama campaign can bring to bear from its considerable, largely below-the-radar efforts at grassroots organizing. And we still have the debates, and that may shift things somewhat again, but I'm not confident they'll create any clear breakthroughs. We're headed for another very close election, I think. The American public remains polarized between those who care what's happened to this country these past 8+ years, and those who either don’t give a damn as long as they get theirs or are simply too ignorant to make informed choices in their best interests.

Then again, maybe I'm just over-indulging in hand-wringing and useless fretting. This just arrived in my email, and reminds me to take a page from the oft-forgotten but always worthy Obama playbook:

- dave //

<UPDATED w/ numerous edits and links for further reading>