A little gallows humor about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, courtesy of a commenter at the indispensable Calculated Risk blog:

"FNM and FRE should just have a new single consolidated ticker: FUBAR"

Here’s what Barack Obama told Time’s Karen Tumulty and David Von Drehle earlier this week, when asked what we would learn about him from his vice presidential pick:

Hopefully, the same thing that my campaign has told the American people about me. That I think through big decisions. I get a lot of input from a lot of people, and that ultimately, I try to surround myself with people who are about getting the job done, and who are not about ego, self—aggrandizement, getting their names in the press, but our focus on what's best for the American people.

I think people will see that I'm not afraid to have folks around me who complement my strengths and who are independent. I'm not a believer in a government of yes—men. I think one of the failures of the early Bush Administration was being surrounded by people who were unwilling to deliver bad news, or who were prone to simply feed the president information that confirmed his own preconceptions.

Is there a clue here as to Obama’s pick? Perhaps not--he’ll claim these nice statements would apply to anyone he chooses. But I’m struck by two things. The “who complement my strengths” sounds like a nod to the need for someone with foreign policy/military experience. And the “who are not about ego, self-aggrandizement, getting their names in the press” sounds like his choice may be less well-known than some of the alternatives.

Sounds like Sen. Jack Reed--who, for what it’s worth, I’ve always thought was the best choice among the senators.

The party of John Edwards, Inc. and John and Teresa Heinz Kerry is having quite a field day with John McCain's statement that he's unsure how many houses he owns.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers responds:

“Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans?

“The reality is that Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he’s completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.”

From Reason.com, “The Loser Now is Later to Win” by David Weigel

In this odd yet thoughtful (although sometimes incomprehensible) essay, Weigel diagnoses and seemingly laments Barack Obama’s latest predicament:

The dynamic of the race now is summed up by the usual batch of oddly sexual verbs: McCain is "pounding" or "hammering" or "drilling down" on Obama, while Obama is flustered and defensive. But I try to pay more attention to the ads and messaging in swing states than the groaning of cable news, and there, Obama has been running negative ads on McCain. Here's one. Here's another. Hey, here's another. If you live in, say, Ohio, you're seeing this stuff as often as you see McCain's latest claim that Obama's a celebrity who wants to send tax collectors to put a ball gag in your mouth and lock you in the basement.

But that's just it! Not only are McCain's attacks all about character and weakness; Obama's responses basically validate them. That guy says I've got ladyparts and I hate America and want to raise taxes: In fact, I want to cut some taxes and raise others! Obama, accused of being a wimp, waves his calculator.

What could Obama do, though? There's a character case to make against McCain, whose shifting issue positions and bloated sense of self-importance are almost Obama-like. But every attack on McCain's character comes up against the iron wall of his POW days. This is the irony of that weird meme of a few weeks back that Obama "couldn't take a joke" (after that New Yorker cartoon portraying him as a terrorist): It's McCain who can't be mocked without holy hell unleashing. When the host of one of the Sunday shows accusing a guest of "questioning McCain's integrity" for pointing out that he's changed positions, you've got a problem.

As I intimated up top, I’m not sure whether Weigel is lamenting the “iron wall” of McCain’s POW days or just being descriptive. Regardless, he’s on to something, albeit something so obvious that other people got it years ago.

In politics, character matters. People like to feel they’re voting for a good person. Even Democrats know character matters. That’s why they spent the entire 2004 DNC talking about John Kerry’s short time in Vietnam. They figured this brief but glorious chapter in Kerry’s life would serve as prima facie evidence that Kerry was a good, noble courageous man. Given the short duration of Kerry’s time in Vietnam, the controversy that surrounded his service and the hatred many of his brothers-in-arms felt for him, this was an obvious miscalculation. But still, the point holds – everyone in politics knows character matters, and evidence of your candidate’s good character is a swell thing to have.

Perhaps Weigel would consider it indicative of the sadly boobish nature of the American bourgeoisie, but most Americans feel that spending five and a half years of hell at the Hanoi Hilton while turning down early release provides indisputable evidence of a man’s character. So it’s true – there is an “iron wall” of McCain’s POW days, but the vast majority of Americans feel that iron wall belongs there.

It’s a shame that Weigel didn’t follow his argument to its logical conclusion. While it’s true that McCain is unassailable on character, he like all politicians is very much assailable on the basis of his politics. I should know – I spent the better part of 2007 assailing McCain’s political positions that I found particularly disagreeable.

But here’s the kicker – Barack Obama, because of the kind of campaign he has run, can’t attack McCain on the issues either. By design, the Obama campaign has had a meringue like substance since its inception. It’s been all about hope, change, a new style of politics and bringing people together. Part of bringing people together was avoiding substantive positions that would offend any of the people you were trying to bring together. But as Hugh Hewitt pointed out in a cogent essay last night, there are many issues that defy a bipartisan approach. Indeed, on virtually all the important issues, a veritable gulf separates the two parties.

By tenaciously avoiding substance, the Obama campaign implicitly made everything about character. The central theme of the Obama juggernaut always has been that Barack Obama possesses unique qualities that demand he be awarded the presidency. That’s why we’ve had to endure all this gobbledygook about “judgment” regarding a 47 year-old who hasn’t held a position of authority that required the application of judicious judgment since he ran the Harvard Law Review. The Obama campaign had to say something that supported the notion of his purported special nature.

Having made the campaign all about character, it must indeed seem like a grim irony to Obama and his minions that his opponent is a fellow who can’t be attacked on this terrain. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Republican “culture of corruption” was supposed to belch forth a far juicier target.

So let the lefty blogs blog on about crosses in the sand, $550 loafers and owning too many houses. All of these lame attacks are shorthanded ways for saying John McCain isn’t a good man. But good luck convincing the electorate that his tasseled loafers and multiple homes say more about John McCain than his time in the Hanoi Hilton.

A bunch of people have talked about McCain's edge in being able to pick a VP after Obama. The reasoning goes, McCain can tailor his VP pick as a response to Obama's. I doubt this is realistic if McCain is in fact going to announce his VP the day after the Dem Convention, and there are at least two advantages in getting to hold their convention first.

If the Dems are smart, they'll study how Republicans are going to push back (i.e. bracket, respond rapidly) to the "glitz and glamour" of their convention:

John McCain and the Republican Party have their own plans for next week in Denver, including a parade of high-profile surrogates, a Web site touting new attack videos, and a tagline for the Democrats' convention: A Mile High and an Inch Deep.

Two dozen staffers of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee will head west this weekend to combat the media coverage the nomination of Barack Obama will draw. The slogan for their opponents: Not Ready '08. ...

Unlike the 2004 Democratic convention, when the GOP did little more than arrange a few interviews, this year's activities are an attempt to distract attention from the main attraction.

My guess is the Dems will copy a lot of these moves when the Republicans hold their Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota a week later. But they'll playing catch up unless the wheels are already in motion.

Another advantage of going first is that Obama will likely get a bigger bounce. According to a Gallup Study, the campaign that goes first get a larger boost in the polls. Perhaps this advantage will be mitigated by the fact that both conventions are late and a lot more people have already made up their minds.

From the American Spectator, “Teleprompting Obama” by the Prowler

Not that long ago, even friendlies in the media suggested that I was off-base in observing that Barack Obama is a dreadful extemporaneous speaker. Without a teleprompter guiding him, Obama is the total package of horrors – hesitant, verbally stumbling and stunningly gaffe prone. Even George W. Bush, hardly renowned for his silver tongue, does better. While the president on an off-day can give Obama a run for his money in the “ahs” and “ums” department, he seldom makes the kind of “above my pay grade” gaffe that has come to characterize Obama in winging-it mode.

Now it appears even the Obama campaign has gotten the message:

According to several Democrat political consultants presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama spent part of his Hawaiian vacation working on weaning himself from a heavy dependence on teleprompters. Even in what are staged as "town hall" events for Obama, remarks are scripted or formatted into bullet points that scroll on teleprompter screens. Obama has had several embarrassing events where the teleprompter either malfunctioned or the screens were not fully visible.

"He just locks down and can't get the words out," says one political consultant. "For such a fine speaker, it's really quite remarkable that he's had issues."

Obama's troubles with unscripted moments contributed to his campaign's refusal to participate in town hall format debates or discussions with Sen. John McCain, who feels much more comfortable in the unscripted moments.

I must take issue with the consultant who calls Obama “such a fine speaker.” He’s a brilliant teleprompter reader – I’ll grant that much. But that's not really speaking, is it? It's rather a miniscule subset of speaking. And why exactly is it suddenly remarkable that Obama has had issues when speaking without a teleprompter? Throughout the campaign, he and his staff have worked overtime to limit his extemporaneous comments. If you get the chance to talk to his traveling press contingent, it will take only a beer or two to get them pissing and moaning about how much the campaign limits their access to The One.

In other words, this is hardly a new problem.

From an interview with TIME Magazine:

TIME: One of the biggest moments in the campaign is going to be your announcement of a vice president. What is that decision going to tell voters about you?

Obama: Hopefully, the same thing that my campaign has told the American people about me. That I think through big decisions. I get a lot of input from a lot of people, and that ultimately, I try to surround myself with people who are about getting the job done, and who are not about ego, self-aggrandizement, getting their names in the press, but our focus on what's best for the American people.

I think people will see that I'm not afraid to have folks around me who complement my strengths and who are independent. I'm not a believer in a government of yes-men. I think one of the failures of the early Bush Administration was being surrounded by people who were unwilling to deliver bad news, or who were prone to simply feed the president information that confirmed his own preconceptions.

“Yes-men” like potential Obama supporter and Secretary of State in the “early Bush administration” Colin Powell? I guess Obama has become so intent on acting tough, he’s now even cruelly insulting his rumored friends. One hopes Powell won’t take this slight without registering the strongest possible not to mention public objection.

The latest from Fred Kagan:

* The Russian aim appears to be permanently neutralizing the Georgian military, annexing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and retaining the ability to intervene unilaterally in Georgia to any extent Moscow desires—including deposing the Georgian government.? Nothing the U.S. or NATO has done or has threatened to do appears to have weakened Russian determination in this regard.? Russia has matched every NATO/US move with a counter-move or a counter-threat of its own.? We are de facto in an escalation game with the Russians that they appear to be winning.? Worse still, Moscow does not appear to believe that the West has the will to escalate enough to win in the end.? Russia still hopes that it can split Europe from the U.S., and believes that it can do so.? It does not believe that even the annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia will lead to meaningful long-term pain because Moscow believes that Russia has become an indispensible nation that the West cannot survive without.? We will therefore have to come to terms, ultimately, with whatever the Russians decide they want, according to this view.? There do not appear at this point to be any significant trends within the Russian government’s statements or behavior to suggest that the current Western approach is anything like adequate to prevent further escalation of this crisis.
* Russia has claimed that the U.S.-Poland agreement on BMD sites is aimed at Russia and threatens retaliation.? See below for details and links about this assertion.
* NATO has promised to reconsider Georgian membership in December and offered a variety of immediate assistance, but not military assistance.? The Russians have made it plain that they would regard any sort of military assistance to Georgia as an attempt to “rearm” Georgia to encourage Tbilisi to undertake a new “blitzkrieg” in South Ossetia.
* Abkhazia and South Ossetia have requested Russian recognition of their independence; the Russian Federation Council will hold an extraordinary session on August 25 to consider these requests.? A Russian parliamentarian stated that Russia was quite willing to allow both republics, once independent, to join the Russian Federation.
* The Russian military appears to have declared most of Georgia to be a no-fly zone, at least for Georgian military aircraft, enforcing this declaration by shooting down a Georgian UAV over the airbase at Vaziani, southeast of Tbilisi and well outside not only the boundaries of South Ossetia, but even the boundaries of any expanded “security zone” the Russians might wish to establish.
* Russia claims that its forces will be withdrawn in 3-4 days, but that withdrawal is “conditions-based”—Russia will withdraw from Georgia to the extent that the Georgian military moves back to its permanent bases.? The Russian military has made clear that it views the concentration of Georgian force around Georgia’s capital to be a violation of that agreement and a provocation.
* The Cold War filings are lining up, independent of what the U.S. or Russia does:? Belarussian President Lukashenko visited Abkhazia and South Ossetia; Latvian parliamentarians visited Tbilisi.
* The Russian press, at least, is using the occasion of Bashar al Assad’s visit to Moscow to claim that Russia should expand its ties and military bases in Syria in retaliation for Israel’s support to Georgia.
* Russia intends to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia soon, and subsequently to incorporate them into the Russian Federation.
* Russia intends to deter or prevent the U.S. or NATO from re-arming Georgia even to the pre-war level.
* Russia has generated enough pretexts for continued violations of Georgian sovereignty (beyond Abkhazia and South Ossetia) that it will be able to re-invade or attack from the air at any time for many months to come.

Previous updates can be found here.

Yesterday was one of the truly happy days in my life. My Verizon/FiOS service added something like 50 additional high definition channels, including almost a dozen premium movie channels. The FiOS service now offers not just blazing fast internet service that never crashes but also the Golf Channel on high-def. If heaven doesn’t have these things, I don’t want to go.

These joyous additions have brought back memories of the olden days of my youth. As a child in the 1970’s living about ten miles outside of Boston, we had six TV stations that came in with decent reception. There were the three original networks (Fox had sadly not come into existence), the useless PBS and two UHF stations. When the major political parties would have their quadrennial conventions, the three networks would devote all of their primetime hours to covering the non-events. For a kid, it was hell.

Sorry for the rambling, but there’s a point to these nostalgic ruminations. Pundits keep offering analyses on the kind of convention bounce the candidates will achieve that look at the effects of past conventions. But there never have been conventions held in this kind of media environment. Three decades ago, you couldn’t get away from the political conventions. Somehow I suspect over the next couple of weeks the politically indifferent public will prove quite adept at avoiding the perorations of politicians they’ve hardly heard of and don’t care about.

The only conventions that occurred in an era remotely like our own were those of 2004. All the other conventions were wholly different animals, having preceded the advent of the internet as a major source of news coverage and gathering. So if you want to compare apples to something at least a little like apples, it only makes sense to compare the upcoming conventions to the ones in 2004. John Kerry received virtually no bounce, in spite of the stirring rhetoric in his acceptance speech about how his mother taught him that trees are the cathedrals of nature. President Bush and the GOP ran a better convention and got a modest bounce.

The upcoming conventions are akin to Barack Obama’s global journey. The candidates will receive a bunch of free media, and a fair amount of direct access to the electorate. But these are double edged opportunities. If Obama’s Ivesco oration is as lame as his “citizen of the world” speech was, he’ll damage his campaign.

There’s an assumption out there that Barack Obama will get a big bounce out of his convention. He may; he’s a gifted speaker. But think of his upcoming acceptance speech this way – will he say anything that wouldn’t have fit in with his 2004 DNC speech that put him on the map? If the new material is limited to him whining about how mean John McCain is, it won’t move the ball forward.

If Obama’s convention message remains as stale as it’s been the last several weeks, why will he bounce? There’s not some immutable law of political nature that dictates that just because the parties convene their standard bearers will receive a significant bounce. Just ask President Kerry.

Here is an audio recording of Barack Obama on the floor of the Illinois State Senate in 2002.

I suspect that doctors feel that they would be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations, and that essentially adding an additional doctor, who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments, is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

Here's more of Obama's speech on the senate floor:

It looks like abortion wasn't above Obama's pay grade back in 2002. He had full faith and trust that an abortionist would make an accurate decision as to whether the child he failed to kill was "viable". That's to say nothing of Obama's blithe disregard for the little girls who could not survive outside the womb born-alive non-viable fetuses who gasped for air during the few hours they lived after birth.

Hat Tip: Erick Erickson

Update: This post has been modified since it's original posting. (HT: Hot Air)

The Obama campaign tries to link McCain to Jack Abramoff via Ralph Reed:

The McCain campaign hits back, invoking Bill Ayers:

“Barack Obama’s ad is ridiculous. Because of John McCain, corruption was exposed and people like Jack Abramoff went to jail.

“However, if Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched. Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years, Mr. Ayers has stated, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs … I feel we didn’t do enough.’

“The question now is, will Barack Obama immediately call on the University of Illinois to release all of the records they are currently withholding to shed further light on Senator Obama’s relationship with this unrepentant terrorist?” --McCain spokesman Brian Rogers

During a McCain campaign conference call with the media, former GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani attacked Obama foreign policy adviser Daniel Kurtzer, who met with Syria's foreign minister last month. Kurtzer told the New York Sun that "None of us thought we were being used or abused [by the Syrian regime]. But we will see over time."

Negotiations should only occur "when you have confidence that you're not being used," Giuliani said. "Maybe this is a playing-out of [Obama's] negotiating with dictators without precondition."

I'm surprised that residents of Quebec would let animal rights activists get the better of them on their 400th anniversary:

The Thetford Chicken Massacre is not as well-known as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the controversial Quebec tradition in which participants place bets while decapitated chickens run around is coming to an end.

Organizers of the annual activity in the eastern Quebec town of Thetford Mines defended the pastime but caved in to pressure Tuesday and cancelled the event, which was deemed "barbaric" by animal rights groups.

The little-known event has been taking place for several years on Labour Day when about a hundred people gather to watch decapitated chickens and turkeys flop around on a grid painted on the ground.

Did supporters of the tradition refer to it as the "Thetford Chicken Massacre"? I imagine not, but who knows. Perhaps a good compromise would be allow the tradition to continue one last year, and instead of using chickens, Quebec residents could sacrifice the hybrid animal France gave to them in celebration of their 400th anniversary. Do recall Quebec residents were so unhappy with the animal that the Vachibou was forced into hiding. Why not honor both the Vachibou and Quebec with a hybrid hecatomb?

The Washington Times reported that the McCain campaign will be playing ads during the Democratic convention. My sources on the campaign now tell me that several new ads will premiere, and they will be specifically tailored to the Denver convention. I wonder whether one of the new ads will focus on Obama's answer at this past Saturday's townhall that matters of life and death were "above his pay grade." Perhaps there wasn't time to cut and deliver an ad featuring this line, but I feel statement might provide the opening Team Clinton never got, perhaps doing as much damage as the "I voted for it before I voted against it" line.

Of course, I'm not suggesting John McCain should seek to make abortion the focal point of his campaign. But I do think Obama's answer could be used to raise broader questions about whether he is ready to lead. After all, Obama basically admitted he's not up to the job, and it feeds the theme of being a lightweight the way Kerry's blunder helped bolster the theme that he's a flip-flopper. Even if there's no time to cut a television ad, perhaps team McCain could at least put together one of their snappy web ads about it.

Eli Lake reports that Daniel Kurtzer, an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, took a little junket to Damascus last month:

The next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will make a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement a priority only if the two sides, meeting now in Turkey, make substantial progress before the inauguration.

That is what a foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama told Syria's foreign minister last month while on a visit to Damascus. While the trip was not connected to the Obama campaign, Daniel Kurtzer nonetheless provided Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem with some advice of his own.

"I urged him to move ahead in the Israel-Syria negotiations as much as possible so that whoever is the next president would not start from too far down the track," Mr. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said yesterday in a phone interview. "I did not say anything about Obama or McCain. I said whoever is the next president is not going to want to inherit a process that isn't going anywhere."

Mr. Kurtzer was in the Syrian capital for a conference co-sponsored by the Law Society of England and Wales and the American Bar Association and arranged by the British Syrian Society. That last group is chaired by Dr. Fawaz Akhras, a London-based cardiologist and the father of the Syrian president's wife, Asma al-Assad. The parley was underwritten by a number of Syrian corporations and also by Petro-Canada, a Canadian oil concern.

Wow. An Obama adviser in the pocket of Syrian corporations and big oil? But don't worry, the Obama campaign has drawn a line in the sand: It's okay for advisers to talk with Bashar al-Asad's regime but not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's:

The deputy communications director for the McCain campaign, Michael Goldfarb, quipped yesterday: "If one of Senator Obama's advisers has been to Damascus, we just wonder how many have been to Tehran."

[Obama spokeswoman Wendy] Morigi responded, "That's ridiculous. Of course no advisers have been to Tehran."

The Damascus/Tehran double-standard doesn't make any sense. In Obama's AIPAC speech in June, he said that "Syria continues its support for terror and meddling in Lebanon. And Syria has taken dangerous steps in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction". If Obama advisers shouldn't coddle an Iranian regime meddling in Iraq and pursuing nuclear weapons makes, then Syria should be off limits as well.

The 3,000-word puff-piece on Obama's online operation in this morning's Washington Post is beyond tedious. A sample:

Texting is a two-way street, and staffers and volunteers respond to texts from supporters who send questions such as "Where's my polling place?" He wouldn't divulge how many supporters receive texts, but the strategy was effective enough to be used in subsequent contests. "Help Barack get out the vote in Pennsylvania! If you can get to PA between now and 4/22, REPLY to this msg: TVL and your NAME (ex. TVL Ann). Please fwd msg," read a text sent before the Keystone State primary.

Note the casual reference to the candidate ("Barack"); the request to forward ("fwd") the text; and the timing -- the text was sent two weeks before polls opened, giving it plenty of time to be passed around. Says Goodstein, "We've just begun to crack how valuable texting is."

Ahem. Note also what the reporter fails to note: Obama lost that Keystone State primary by 9 points.

Via Ed Morrissey, the Obama campaign has said that all the tickets to Obama's speech at Invesco Field next Thursday are free, but that's not true:

Political conventions focus public attention on presidential politics like few other events. So it’s not surprising that these quadrennial confabs also can produce significant movement in public opinion. Political scientist Tom Holbrook provides a useful history of convention bounces in this blog post.

A few notable points. First, all conventions are not “bounce”-producing events. But conventions can help candidates lagging in the pre-convention polls (such as Goldwater in 1964 or Gore in 2000) catch up. These bigger surges tend to occur when a candidate is underperforming in pre-election polls.

His research also suggests Obama may emerge with a larger bump. That’s because the candidate with the earlier convention usually gets a bigger bounce:

The earliest convention tends to get a bigger bump, and there is some evidence that going appreciably earlier exacerbates this effect. One reason for this is that the first convention is held by the out-party, whose candidate [is] generally less familiar to the general public. Another possible reason is that opinions are generally less well-formed early in the campaign and may be more easily shaped by the first convention. In the data presented above, the first convention bump was the larger than the second in seven election cycles, smaller in three (1988, 200[0], 2004), and essentially tied in one (1980).

So, will a bigger Obama bounce prove fatal to McCain? Not necessarily. Holbrook has this caveat.

It should be clear that the magnitude of the convention bump is not a great predictor of election outcomes. For instance, Goldwater got a huge bump and went on to a miserable defeat, Nixon got a huge bump and narrowly won in 1968, and Reagan got a very small bump and still won the 1984 election by a wide margin. My sense is that the size of the bump doesn't matter so much as whether the candidate gets the bump he is expected to get.

Via Mike Allen, the Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that Barack Obama gained more news coverage than John McCain even when Obama was on vacation:

For the ninth time in 10 weeks, moreover, Obama generated more coverage than his rival, even during a week when he was vacationing. The Democrat registered as a significant or dominant factor in 63% of the campaign stories studied, compared with 50% for McCain.

In all fairness, I'm sure that John McCain bodysurfing would generate a lot more news than whatever Obama is doing on any given day. Cowabunga. Dude.

From Talking Points Memo, “Fibbin’” by Josh Marshall

Here’s the post in its entirety:

From a Republican pal ...

“You didn't get this from me, but use it as you will. Is it just me -- as a Republican knowing how we've played this game before -- or should there be genuine puzzlement why Obama isn't unleashing Democratic veterans (Jim Webb, Jack Reed, John Kerry, BOB Kerrey perhaps, etc. Some Democratic generals, whatever) to go after McCain on this ‘cross in the dirt’ stuff? I mean, if there was one issue tailor-made for ‘Swift-Boat’ payback, I can't think of anything else."

It ain't bean bag.

As Byron York points out, this story is unlikely to go away. Obama supporters actually think they have a winner in disputing a story John McCain has told about his years in the Hanoi Hilton and that his bunkmates have corroborated. It’s a brilliant plan – how could the American public not warm to a campaign that calls some of our most highly decorated Veterans liars while bringing increased attention to John McCain’s wartime heroics? Besides, it’s not like Obama didn’t show amazing courage himself as a younger man while intrepidly prowling the notoriously rough lecture halls at the University of Chicago Law School. Just for the record, as a fellow Republican (though not a pal of Josh Marshall), I heartily endorse the notion of Obama embracing this strategy.

What’s especially interesting here is how John McCain has responded to these attacks, or rather hasn’t responded. Yesterday, in replying to the much milder barbs that he has received, Barack Obama alternated between unsuccessfully talking tough and successfully whining. At one point, Obama told a friendly audience they shouldn’t worry because they had a candidate who didn’t “take any guff.” I swear, I thought it was John Wayne talking for just a moment. Yet at another appearance, Obama pleaded for John McCain to “acknowledge” that he wants to serve America’s national interest. (One might wonder why Obama so needs the approbation of his rival, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Regarding the cross in the sand allegations, McCain hasn’t felt the need to respond to this rubbish, and why should he? Obama responds to every slight, real or perceived, because he feels the need to show that he’s tough enough to be president and not just some Ivy League egghead with few tangible accomplishments. McCain’s experiences speak for themselves as far as the toughness department is concerned. I’m quite certain we’ll never hear John McCain say anything so magnificently lame as “I don’t take any guff.” As for the subject of potential presidents whining, perhaps McCain’s life lessons have taught him better than Obama’s that whatever your situation and whatever unfairness life has hurled at you, pouting seldom makes it better.

On a related note, virtually every new poll that comes out seems to bring more bad news for Obama. How could that be?

McCain leads Obama by 5 points in a new national Reuters/Zogby poll.

McCain leads Obama 46 to 41 percent among likely voters, which the poll found is outside the margin of error. Reuters/Zogby had Obama ahead by 7-points as recently as mid July.

And Rasmussen shows McCain up by 5 points in Ohio:

McCain attracts 45% of the vote in Ohio while Obama earns 41%. That’s little changed from a month ago when McCain led 46% to 40%.

When “leaners” are included in the totals, McCain leads Obama 48% to 43%.