My personal guess is that this feeling that Obama "should" be doing better comes from a variety of things.

One is that he's got the chops and supple intelligence, and character, to handle crisis and still not lose sight of the far horizon. But he looks younger than he is, and that skinniness doesn't help the impression of someone just out of college. I don't believe that's fair, but it underpins the "experience" question. It relates to image and bearing.

The other thing is that gnawing worry that Americans have been so numbed and dumbed down by a few hundred lying advertising messages we can't avoide, each and every day, that they no longer care or can distinguish between lies and the truth. We've been compromised by the consumer culture, and Obama's message is for a return to older, higher standards of public life.

And the third has to be the rotten whiff of how people think about race, how insidious it is even in people who don't think they're influenced by subtle prejudices. I have the feeling that this election, among other things, is a referendum on just how we feel about race these days. I think it's sad that more people didn't make the move to Obama until this latest financial crisis affected them personally. It's too bad that most people are so incapable of seeing the general good past their own self-interest, that questions about race hung (and hang) in the air so long. Given our history, perhaps I shouldn't have expected more to happen this soon.

That said, it is reassuring to me that the WaPo poll is showing some movement in O's direction. However, that also means that the McCain campaign now has fewer options than ever before, and that they will have to go deeper and deeper into the negative campaign trick-bag. I suspect that'll backfire

Unless McCain really does mean that he'll put country before self, and tell Steve and the other Rovian disciples to go fuck themselves. I'd love to hear the real maverick, who would be able to say "If we lose, we lose, but we won't drag the country down with us."

Of course, that is the one thing that could turn his campaign around. Absent a complete change of campaign staff, I think it's too late and hope he doesn't take my amateurish advice.

Actually, Gore won and Kerry probably did too.

If the election is close we will lose again because the way the Republicans see it, they have the right to steal votes in a close one and thus keep power. Florida in 2000. Ohio 2004. All they need is a close election and it's their's to steal again.

This morning on NPR, they played a clip from a blue collar Obama supporter in PA lamenting that Obama was going to take away everyone's guns. Why didn't they say "but he's said he's not going to take your guns. His position is that you can keep uzis out of the hands of inner city gangs without preventing law abiding citizens from owning guns for hunting and home protection"? Because they want a close election, that's why.