From TPM Reader JS ...

I wish team Obama would drive the elitism point home by doing the math on how much of a tax break John and Cindy McCain would get from McCain's plan vs the avg American (at the US median household income). And then for good measure show what would happen with Obama's plan.

This would keep the theme of McCain's elitism and Republican elitist economics in the press for a while longer.

Another reader continues the thought ...

It might be nice to use the McCains' income to model the tax cuts, but that would require their disclosing how much they make. To get a sense of the difference, though, one need look no further than the NYTimes Magazine piece this Sunday on Obama's economic policies:

"McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush's tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners -- those making an average of $9.1 million -- by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

It's hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it's also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama's tax increases on the wealthy -- about $500,000 of that $800,000 -- would simply take away Bush's tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn't nearly
reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled."

That's a good ballpark estimation. Obama would raise McCain's taxes by roughly $800,000; McCain would cut them by about $200,000. That's a million dollar spread. No wonder McCain is so hostile to Obama's economic agenda.

But here's what's really interesting. Obama's proposals would raise his own taxes by hundreds of thousands of dollars, in order to cut the taxes of people who are less fortunate than he is. McCain would cut his own taxes even further than they've already been reduced. And that's everything a voter needs to know about these two men.

Late Update: Our full staff doesn't work weekends. But I think the graphic we want here has John and Cindy on the right and the average American family on the left, with two bubbles next to each family -- one for the impact of each candidate's tax plan. Somehow graphically you also want to add in the middle class to rich threshold at $5 million annual income.

Biden: "Your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night after you put the kids to bed and you talk about what you need. That's not a worry John McCain has to worry about. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at."

Ron Fournier riding hard on the tire swing.

Robin Leach comes to John McCain's defense on luxe multi-house lifestyle.

Pundits and yakkers start rapping McCain for non-stop POW, POW, POW.

About four years ago I described what I called the Republicans' 'bitch slap' theory of electoral politics. Stuff like the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry and McCain's Celeb/P Diddy assault on Obama aren't really about the attacks themselves. In themselves, they're often too cartoonish to be believed in any literal sense. What they're about is smacking the other guy around and making him take it. There's no better way to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength than to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. That not only makes the other guy look weak. It also transforms him into an object of contempt, which together are politically fatal. It's this meta-message of weakness that resonates far beyond the literal claims. And it's this that Democrats so often seem to miss -- explaining the factual inaccuracies of the claims, demanding that the attacks stop, all the while reinforcing the intended message of the attacks in the first place.

You can even catch a hint of the mentality in the McCain camp's huffing and puffing Thursday afternoon. The new and somewhat improbable line from the McCain camp is that they've actually been doing their best to go easy on Obama, to hold back the stuff that would really make him suffer. But now that Obama's gone ahead and raised McCain's inability to remember how many houses, now he's really gonna get it with a super-mean Rezko ad and maybe even Reverend Wright. "He's opened the door to this," a McCain official told Marc Ambinder, in a campaign version of the wife-beater's "You brought this on yourself!" As if McCain and his Rove lieutenants paid much mind to closed doors.

In effect, the devastating Rezko ad McCain says it never wanted to have to run is pretty weak. Which is pretty much what you'd expect for an ad put together in three or four hours by a campaign shell-shocked by a media firestorm they couldn't put out by screaming POW, POW, POW.

What we'll see now is whether Obama keeps McCain on the run with a continuing line of attacks or whether they'll let up after this one reactive pick-up from McCain's mistake. The House? gaffe exposes two of McCain's biggest vulnerabilities -- 1) the contrast between his old soldier pseudo-mystique and the pampered life he's led for almost 40 years and 2) the age-related wobbliness which has his campaign aides keeping him largely off limits to the traveling press. These dovetail with his loose-cannon approach to critical foreign policy questions.

These issues -- particularly 2 and 3 -- are substantively critical issues. 1 is to the extent that it sheds light on McCain's general ignorance and indifference to bread-n-butter economic issues and his willingness to flip between progressive and Bushite tax policy over the course of a couple years. But the tempo of this election and the fall out from the 'celeb' attacks will be determined in large part not by factual particulars but by whether Obama can show that when someone hits him hard he hits back twice as hard. Not cowering, ignoring or complaining. This is about the score and not the libretto.

I get asked a lot about the relationship between old media and new media, on the editorial and publishing side. And my usual line is that I think the relationship is much more symbiotic and convergent than people often realize. But when folks ask what scrappy little outfits like TPM would do if the big papers with their cadres of reporters went under, I have to wonder, what would big papers like the Washington Post do if TPM went under and they didn't have our exclusives to steal and run as their own stories on A2 on the following day?

For today's example see Kate Klonick's Thursday exclusive at TPMMuckraker about the US Commission on Civil Rights hiring Bush administration minority voting suppression expert Hans von Spakovsky and the Post's citation/credit-free retread in today's paper.

TPM Reader TP is shocked ... not shocked, shocked, but shocked ...

OK, I've been involved in politics in PA for a decade but I was still shocked by the media love-fest at McCain's Ranch. I knew things were different in DC but this is like finding out your sister in the big city who seems to date a lot is actually a streetwalker. In response I hereby coin the term "Swinging on the Tire" to describe a reporter who has gotten way too cozy with a politician and has had their supposed objectivity affected.

Please feel free to use this term or even making it into an award like one of Sullivan's.

I think we are beginning to see some reporters start to question McCain's statements and perhaps more importantly, they are starting to question if the John McCain they knew and adored was the real John McCain. They've given him a pass on just about everything up until now but I think you will slowly start to see that change. Once the truth starts to come out, I think the polls will swing back to Obama.

Before John and Cindy McCain bought the two luxury condos in downtown Phoenix and combined them into one mega-condo for $4.6 million they lived in this Phoenix mansion. They sold it in 2006. But now it's on the market again for a cool $12 million. And here's the real estate listing at Yahoo Real Estate, with pictures and virtual tour.

The blurb ...

Former home of Sen John & Cindy McCain. Situated on over 2.5 acres. Totally remodeled in Old World style complete w/7 bedrooms in main house & 6 bedrooms in guest houses. Hardwood & travertine floors throughout. Master suite has huge walk-in w/private cantera stone patio w/spa and fplc. Gourmet kitchen has travertine floors, granite counters, comercial SS apliances w/large catering room/butlers pantry off kitchen. 2 guest houses. His/her dressing cabana. Finest entertaining backyard in the Valley - 3 ramadas (2 w/full bar set-up), BBQ, play house, cantera stone decking, pavillion, spa and large lap/play pool. 7 car detached garage...

An interesting tidbit from the end of a piece in the Politico on McCain's 8 homes. (They've decided it's eight.) From 2006 to 2007, the McCain's budget for household staff went up roughly 50% from $184,000 to $273,000 ...

The McCains increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain's tax returns.

The additional cash supports an "increase in the number of employees," the McCain aide told Politico. The aide did not answer a question about whether the growing staff stemmed from addition of new properties to the family's real estate portfolio.

This guy's got an idea ...

Late Update: This other guy's already put together a special McSame #7 House keychain you can buy for your very own.

Later Update: Now there's a whole set -- one for each house.

A 527 group tied to the McCain campaign wanted to go up on the air with an ad tying Obama to the 9/11 attacks. But even Fox is apparently refusing to run the ad.

McCain's latest response: They're not my homes! They're Cindy's!

The McCain memory/housing glut story is a lot of fun. And I suspect it will do McCain a lot of damage. But let's not forget that there's an even bigger story today in the presidential race -- at least in terms of substance and possibly politically too, at least over time. John McCain has staked his whole campaign on opposing Barack Obama's call for a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. His very support of the notion, to McCain, illustrates his naivete and unfitness for the job of commander-in-chief. And yet today, the US and Iraq have agreed on a "timetable", using that very word, for leaving Iraq. Reality, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government have jointly endorsed Obama's position and left McCain a relic. Once the fun of the house story settles down from a boil to a simmer, the Obama camp must pivot off this development.

NYT squeezes off the headline of the day: "Talk of McCain's No. 2 Concerns Conservatives"

I didn't know there was any footage of the day the McCains hosted the DC press corps at that barbecue at their Sedona estate. But it turns out that McCain's daughter, who blogs at McCain's website as the 'McCain Blogette' put up a Youtube video of all the fun. It even includes the special moment when the Politico reporters brought Cindy McCain flowers to celebrate the event. Another interesting detail, they also show the family who serve as caretakers of the estate when the McCains aren't in residence. Presumably they live in one of the six houses on the estate ...

Special thanks to TPM Reader MS for the catch.

And special bonus, the audio of McCain forgetting how many houses he owns ...

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers: "The reality is they have some investment properties and stuff. It's not as if he lives in ten houses. That's just not the case. The reality is they have four that actually could be considered houses they could use."

Notably, if you look at the dateline, the piece appears to have been filed from the McCain estate in Sedona.

You start to see one of the reasons why there are so many different estimates of how many houses the McCain's own when you look closer at the Sedona multi-home estate.

On the one hand, the AP reports that "includes four single-family homes and is worth nearly $1.8 million." On the other hand, back in March McCain told CNN that he "built the first house on his property 24 years ago and now there are six houses on his lot."

Here you can see an aerial view of the estate, which is on from 15 to 20 acres of land, depending on the report. (Click on the image to see a larger picture.)

We're a little unclear if this covers the entire estate and which of the things there are the four or six houses. But if anyone can help us on that, that'd be great.

So one, four, six, hard to tell. Hard to remember. And that's just on the estate. Doesn't count the Phoenix condos, San Diego beach front houses, or McCain's pad outside DC.

McClatchy was apparently getting tired of their reputation as one of the finest print-based news organizations in the United States. So they decided to run this headline: "Obama strikes some as a pompous elitist."

And Possible Veep candidate Tim Kaine earlier in the day ...

I will not stand by and watch the Obama camp try to claim McCain owns seven homes when he owns at least ten.

At first we thought this spread in Architectural Digest was about the ranch/estate in Sedona with the multiple homes. But it's actually the home in Phoenix, which I think isn't even the primary home. That's the condo in Phoenix, which you can see here.

Late Picture Update: We thought these pictures were from the Sedona estate, but they're from the Phoenix mansion ....

Hard to Keep Track Update: It now seems like the McCains stopped living in the Phoenix mansion in 2006 when they sold it. The place is now back on the market for more than $12 million and Inside Edition has this look at the place ...

Late Memory Hole Update: The McCain campaign actually had Youtube videos up on their site of a Fox News Greta van Susteren report on the McCain Manses. But they appear now to have removed them from Youtube.

I've done some initial looking into the McCain house list question -- how many homes he owns, how swank they are, why he's not sure how many he owns, etc. And the question seems more interpretive than investigative. In other words, there appears to be a relatively straightforward list of the properties the McCain's own. The question is how to enumerate them in terms of homes, especially in cases where a single McCain estate contains several different 'houses'. Another complexity comes in the McCain's primary residence, the $4.7 million condo in Phoenix. In that case, McCain bought two separate condos (i.e., two homes) and combined them into one mega-home.

One group, Progressive Accountability, counts 10 homes. And for now we're treating that as the baseline enumeration.

Late Update: The Obama campaign now has an ad up hitting McCain's gaffe. Interestingly, in what might be a sign of the new politics, the Obama campaign decides to go with what I think is the lowest possible enumeration - a mere 7 houses. Probably this is from counting the multi-home estates as single homes. But I'm not sure.

Later Update: The house issue also puts in a new context McCain's suggestion that you're only 'rich' when you're making an annual income of $5 million.

Getting Up In John McCain Number of Houses Update: Here's the best list of McCain cribs I've seen so far.

Jake Piles on Update: Jake Piles On.

Rice and Iraqi counterpart agree on "timetable" for leaving Iraq.

(Hint to Obama campaign: might be another nice pivot.)

In these hard economic times, a lot of people have house problems. John McCain's is that he doesn't know how many he owns.

Late Update: Thinking about it, this might suggest a contest. Help John McCain remember how many homes he owns. I've heard estimates from 6 to 12, with an apparent consensus in the 8 to 10 range. But where are they? And can we get to one number? If you find articles about particular homes, can you send them in to me by email?

A good summary of the danger, from Max Bergmann at DemocracyArsenal ...

The big concern with a McCain presidency - a concern which I am surprised has not been vocalized more fully - is that the U.S. will lurch from crisis to crisis, confrontation to confrontation, whether it be with Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. The danger is that McCain's pundit-like rhetoric will entrap the U.S. in descending spiral of foreign policy brinksmanship. Just think about the very likely scenario of McCain giving Iran/Russia a rhetorical ultimatum and Iran/Russia ignoring it. Now we are stuck - either we lose face by not following through on our threats or we follow through and go to war. We can't afford such a reckless approach after the last eight years. For the next eight we need a president not a pundit.

Read the whole post.

For anyone who had eyes to see, Georgia was a perfect illustration of this. He totally flew off the handle, ramping the situation up dramatically with his unstable rhetoric.

Will the McCain as trigger-happy hothead work? I suggest a different calculus. Is it true? I would suggest that it definitely is, both in personal temperament and policy prescriptions. And I believe that is the better metric, both practically speaking and morally.

Morally, the case is pretty straightforward. McCain really is a hothead. Everyone seems to agree that's true on an interpersonal level. But I don't really care about that. I don't care who he swears at. But over his time in the senate and now as would-be president, he's shown a tendency always to jump to the most confrontational and military-based responses to foreign events, often to almost ridiculous levels. And I think because of that temperament, he's fallen in with and become a useful tool of the DC neoconservatives who view acting crazy and getting people killed as a matter of principle.

I've watched the Bush presidency very closely. I've watched McCain closely for the last decade or so. And I either know or know a decent amount about a lot of the people advising him on foreign policy. And in terms of the physical safety and future of my wife and two sons, let alone the country, I would much prefer four more years of the Bush presidency to a McCain presidency.

The pragmatic reasoning follows from the moral. People speak and argue much more coherently about things they believe in their bones, things that are true. And people with open minds are much more inclined to believe things that are ... well, true, rather than cooked up for maximum polling advantage. In any case, it's very difficult to know what will and won't 'work' in the abstract and in advance. Going with the truth is a more reliable guide.

Don't ever demand someone stop attacking you. Doesn't work. Don't do it. Sounds weak. Sounds pathetic. And a lot else.

Look at John McCain attacking my patriotism. It's sad what he's become. He'll do anything to get elected. Attack my patriotism. Change all his positions. Get in bed with the same people he used to say were the worst thing in politics. He'll do anything to get elected ...

Or

Look at John McCain. He knows people are fed up with the politics he and George Bush support. So instead of saying what he's for all he can think of to do is silly stuff like attacking my patriotism.

I'm not a message person so I'm sure a real one could come up with much better. But the point is. Don't demand or beg or please or even ask. It's silly and weak and achieves nothing. McCain's weakness is that he's abandoned everything he always said he believed in, just to be president. Against Bush/Rove attacks? Now they run his campaign? Reform? Now he's for all of President Bush's economic policies. It's the mix of flip-flops and moral failures that made his one time admirer diagnose him with a "severe character defect." A lot of people can see McCain's moral and character problem. But it needs bringing to the surface. Obama should come at it soft and his surrogates hard. It has the deep virtue of being true. Whatever else, STOP BEGGING.

From TPM Reader JB ...

Although your Republican friend suggests going after McCain for the sand in the cross story, denying this claim is impossible and turns quickly into a he said - she said issue. A surrogate may question its validity, but I think that puts us in shrill Ann Coulter territory and will make some people wonder why we are picking on him for his most vulnerable period when he was a hero.

That said, I think McCain's cross in the sand story should be used as a point of positive comparison to now. In fact, it can be used to neutralize his POW sainthood. Someone needs to compare working with the Rove proteges to working with the Vietnamese torturers. The construction can go like this: John McCain said that Karl Rove deserves a special place in hell for the false accusations against him in South Carolina. I think this place in hell also holds his Vietnamese torturers and, in fact, anyone who uses tortures. Well, John McCain is now working with Karl Rove's people to get elected. The very same people who slandered him. I guess he would work with anyone, maybe even his Vietnamese torturers to get elected. We should judge a man by the company he keeps when times are tough. Like John Mcain and the ones who should be in a special place in hell.

I've actually had a similar thought. But I came at it a bit differently. McCain is always talking about victory and never surrendering. Andrew Sullivan said a few days ago that McCain has a penchant for underdogs. But I see it a little differently. Bush and Rove gave McCain the biggest political lashing of his life. He was sullen for a while, tried to fight them. But after a while he could it wasn't going to be easy. So he decided to join up with them.

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.

I'm still liking but not hearing this. From Chuck Schumer: "I would answer back hard. What do you mean [Obama's] not one of us? It's John McCain who wears $500 shoes, has six houses, and comes from one of the richest families in his state. It's Barack Obama who climbed up the hard way, and that's why he wants middle-class tax cuts and better schools for our kids."

A friend of mine just wrote in arguing, essentially, that the McCain character narrative is unstoppable. You can change the terms of the debate. But there's no way you're going to change people's minds about Mccain, warrior, tough guy, maverick, going to protect your family no matter what. My answer would be, with some people, especially a lot of them in DC but certainly elsewhere too, that's right. With others I'm not so sure. And that's why I really wish there was some independent group out there telling the full story of McCain's life prior to his POW captivity and especially after. $500 shoes. Thinks you're rich after your making $5 million a year. Has 9 or 10 houses.

It's not for everyone. But the guy's pampered. And he changes his beliefs every few years.

TPM Reader MR disagrees ...

I think we'll look back on August as when Obama won the election. August was when John McCain had the chance to define Obama and so cement a negative view of him that he could never recover. Now his time is almost up, the conventions are about to begin and we get into the full swing of the campaign. And what did McCain get out of his month? The Gallup tracking poll barely budged; most polls show Obama still with a modest lead, only slightly less than where he started a month or so ago. Obama's negatives are up somewhat -- no surprise after the pummeling he took -- but hardly up to critical levels. Unlike with Kerry, no single message has stuck -- he's a flipflopper! No, he's a scary leftist! No he's an empty celebrity! With no single negative image, the effect is likely to diffuse over time, especially with a successful Democratic convention. I think Obama's played this just right so far. Yes, lots of folks are complaining he hasn't gone after McCain enough but it simply wouldn't have worked. McCain has not been the story -- Obama has been. Unfair, sure, but that's the way it is. Obama's the new guy in town and everyone is trying to figure him out. So instead of fecklessly launching attack after attack on McCain only to have them disappear into the ether, he sat back and played rope-a-dope waiting for his moment. Now his moment is coming. The VP choice, the convention, the post-Labor Day sharpening of people's attention, the debates and the full onslaught of ads, money, and organization. Can he blow it? Sure. He's new to this. He can make the wrong VP choice. He can give an empty, if soaring, acceptance speech (or it could rain!) Hillary and Bill (especially Bill) could add a sour taste to the convention and make that the story. He could fall short of expectations in the debate. But all (or most of those) are under his control. I would *so* rather be Obama heading toward November than McCain. It's his for the taking if he just executes it right.

From TPM Reader JT ...

Obama has a frustrating problem. He has arguably run one of the best branded websites and campaigns of any in American history. He's consistent on tone and graphic design. But that's where his branding advantage ends. While he has done an okay job at branding himself, he has failed dismally at branding John McCain.

You mentioned several ways that Obama can improve his messaging, but I'm skeptical any of these will be effective. Your suggestions focus on Bush's policies, and by proxy McCain's. But the arguments are all intellectual appeals to reflect on policy points having very little to do with John McCain, the man. Obama needs to own the branding of John McCain, the man. That's why Karl Rove's assessment about Obama at the country club works. It's a prototypical branding schema from which the entire message of John McCain's campaign is based. It's simple, and it speaks to the heart, not the mind.

To that end, I think the essence of Obama's campaign needs to be "John McCain will do anything to get elected." He will exploit his time as a POW and make up stories about his military "experience." He will flip-flop on any given number of issues -- Afghanistan, immigration, torture, tax cuts, etc. He will use racist appeals and attack Obama's patriotism to get elected.

"McCain. The candidate who will say anything to get elected."
This is short. And it's easy to remember. And it counters McCain's own branding of himself as a Maverick.

I confess I don't know why this point hasn't been hit harder or hasn't caught on more even irrespective of the campaign. Because here you've got a guy who's literally abandoned everything he supposedly used to believe in, all to be president. There really is nothing he wouldn't do.

TPM Reader CD, meanwhile, is very downcast ...

Just read your latest blog post, and am afraid to admit that I feel the same way as you. The only thing that has given me comfort recently --and I'm not able to find the quote exactly, so I'm paraphrasing -- was Plouffe saying "people need to understand much of the electorate decides very late in the game. In other words, I'm not concerned with polls." That makes me think they're hedging their bets, biding their time, etc. until the convention. That's my hope.

But my feeling is far less enthusiastic now. What's really bothered me has been McCain's celebrity ads, or rather, Obama's lack of vigilance in refuting the claims in these ads. The ads are working. How do I know? Because they're working on me. I'm a huge Obama supporter, and he's the first candidate I've given significant money to, and his lack of push back on the celebrity issue has planted the seed in my mind: "is he really so arrogant to think he doesn't need to refute these claims?" I'd like to see some conviction, some insult taken by Obama at these attacks. He is the outsider, he is the change candidate, and he does have more work to do to introduce himself to the voters.
Letting this celebrity-line-of-attack go so unchallenged, to me, is the worst way to go about doing that. He's letting McCain introduce Obama.

However, when he has taken the opportunity to respond to attacks, specifically Corsi's book, his responses have been so long-winded that I myself get bored of them. There is no sound bite, no decisiveness, no energy to the responses. A 42 page response to the book? While I'm sure it was exhaustive, how do you expect news media to cover that?
Where is the quick fatal blow in 42 pages? Supreme Court decisions are shorter.

Maybe it was the timing of his vacation. Hopefully he actually starts to saturate the country at/after the convention. But where is this money advantage? Where is this expert campaign that guided him through a rather monumental upset in the primaries? He coasted out the last remaining primary contests against Clinton, while she "found her
voice." It certainly feels, at least right now, that McCain picked up right where Clinton left off, and Obama is still coasting.

I'm a big believer in Obama's message. I think Bush is a criminal. I think our nation is in a truly perilous state. But for the first time since his campaign started, I'm truly worried and disappointed by him. He looks outclassed, outgunned, and outspun.

I'm an average American, I would say, and I believe I want what most Americans want: a fighter. I don't like to see, nor do I think the country likes to see, someone who isn't up for a fight, and right now Obama just doesn't appear up for a fight. This doesn't just worry me in terms of the political race, it worries me in terms of his ability to actually be President. Me, a progressive mind if there ever was one. That I have this perception should scare the bejesus out of the Obama campaign, because if there's one thing I've learned, I am not unique in these matters.

But then again, I'm not the expert, and Obama and Co. have knocked it out of the park before, so I wait and see.

There's been a lot of chatter about the state of the race over the last week or two. Some fretting on the part of some Obama supporters; some McCain supporters thinking for the first time that he might have a shot at winning this thing. There's been some movement in the polls in McCain's favor in various key swing states and nationwide. But it's mainly a matter of cutting into Obama's lead.

Small shifts in polling numbers are very difficult to make sense of in August.

So I want to set that all aside and take stock of where the campaign seems to be in terms of each campaign's message. On this front, McCain's message is pretty clear and essentially twofold: 1) Obama is, in so many words, a frivolous phony, someone who really doesn't have any business running for president. 2) McCain is a strong leader who can defend the country. There are all sorts of sub- and secondary themes -- Obama's an outsider, questionably American, etc. But all the nitty gritty points are subservient to those two interlocking messages.

From Obama, honestly, I don't sense a really clear message. There are attacks on McCain, some of which are quite good. There are positive uplifting commercials. And there are ads/messages targeted to particular states -- like Yucca Mountain in Nevada and the DHL layoffs in Ohio. But it's hard for me to come up with a clear cut Obama message in way that it's pretty simple for me to do with McCain. Even the 'change' message, which is the basis of Obama's campaign, seems much more diffuse to me than it was during the primaries.

It's true that I'm not living in one of the key states -- so there's a lot of atmospherics that I'm not seeing that voters would see in Ohio or Michigan, for instance. But I do run this site, that follows politics pretty closely. So I feel like I shouldn't need to be following things more closely than I already am.

Now, this is a key time to take stock because it's really only with the conventions that the battle is joined. Obama's been on vacation for a week. So when we'll really get a sense of message is the show that each candidate puts on in his party convention and then the campaign they run through September and October.

Beating up on McCain is critical. But it's not a message in itself. And the Obama campaign needs to deepen people's trust in Obama. Not because of all the smears because an outsider running to overturn the status quo always faces trust issues. But, again, not a message. For my money, the essence of this campaign is -- Are you happy with the way the country's been run for the last 7.5 years. Has our foreign policy left us better off? Republican economic policy? You can go through all the different facets. But it's clear that the public overwhelmingly thinks the Bush presidency has been little short of a disaster. And do you want four more years of that? If that's the frame of the election, McCain will be crushed. People know they don't want four more years of Bush. McCain will be another four years of Bush. It's time for change, etc. That's the essence of the campaign. But the message, right now, seems very muddled.

I've misjudged and underestimated Obama at several points in this cycle. And sometimes the public mood leans so overwhelmingly in one direction -- that the electorate gets the message themselves without any help. (This is clearly at least very close to the situation in the public mood at the moment.) But at the moment this is how it looks to me.

As you probably know, there's been a lot of chatter over the last couple days about whether or not John McCain's cross in the dirt story may have been lifted from the life of Alexander Solzenitsyn, the famous Russian novelist and dissident who died earlier this month. Well, whatever the origin of McCain's story, it didn't come from Solzenitsyn because it never happened to him either. The whole thing turns out to be an urban legend, apparently cooked up by Watergate felon Chuck Colson.

We're getting geared up for our coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions coming up over the next couple weeks. And for our evening coverage, for the first time, we're going to be streaming live video from the scene with technology from qik.com. In today's episode of TPMtv, we bring you a preview ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Simply defies comprehension how stupid this is. But you can say anything on Fox.

From NBC's FirstRead ...

Is Obama having a Jon Lovitz-as-Dukakis SNL moment: "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy"? Well, Obama isn't losing -- he still has a small single-digit lead in most national polls, and he's ahead narrowly in current electoral-vote projections. But his tone changed a bit campaigning in Reno yesterday, his first full day on the campaign trail since his vacation. To put it simply, he was much more aggressive on the attack. As the AP writes, "So much for hugging in church... [A]fter praising the Arizona senator as a 'genuine American patriot,' the Democratic presidential hopeful got back to business -- methodically tearing into McCain's health care, tax and energy policies and criticizing his advisers. More: "The Illinois senator also criticized McCain's advisers as 'the same old folks that brought you George W. Bush. The same team.' He noted many had been lobbyists in Washington before McCain asked them to sever all lobbying ties." We've been hearing for a few weeks that the Obama campaign believes it hasn't been tough enough on McCain. Might we have seen a preview of a rougher treatment of McCain from Obama at his Reno stop yesterday? And does this mean the convention week will be tougher on McCain than either Gore or Kerry were on Bush?

I just noticed that CNN is saying that Biden's the big buzz for VP down in DC political circles today. So I'm trying to process what I think of Biden as a potential pick.

On the one hand, it's not the most exciting choice. He doesn't bring a state. Delaware's going to go Democratic. And it's barely a state at that. And I'm not sure you'd rate it as a first: "history is made -- first sixty-something white senator with deep foreign policy experience chosen to be vp nominee!" Biden clearly thinks well of himself and likes to talk. But he's been a US Senator for pretty much his entire adult life. (He's 65 today and was elected at 30.) So I'm not sure you can expect anything different. Finally, Biden also occasionally says something really whacked, which we'll probably find out more of if he's the pick.

On the other hand, wholly separate from the cosmetics and electioneering calculus, I think he'd be a good choice. On substance, maybe a really good choice. Most senators grasp of foreign policy is fairly thin -- and it tends to be heavily influenced by whatever lobbyists or power players are in their orbit. But Biden has a pretty deep knowledge of pretty much every big foreign policy question. And his ideas and judgment strike me as fundamentally sane.

Back in 2004, when I was writing a piece for The Atlantic about John Kerry, I did long interview with Biden in his office on Capitol Hill. And I remember coming away thinking, this is the guy you'd want to have making big decisions on the key foreign policy questions. To the extent that we think Obama needs someone with deep foreign policy knowledge in a constitutional office (i.e., non-fireable) to add ballast to his foreign policy vision I'm not sure I could think of a much better person.

From TPM Reader AG ...

I find it disconcerting that Obama, after all this time, is still playing with kid gloves with McCain on issues of security and national defense. If Obama thinks he can win with McCain cornering the market on security issues, he and Kerry will have lots to talk about next year in the Senate Cloakroom.

McCain's first reaction to the Georgia crises was to urge action that would commit the United States to war with Russia (by having Georgia immediately admitted to NATO). Obama needs to point out that, in this test for whether McCain is ready to be commander in chief, McCain grossly overreacted. Indeed, several days later, after McCain had time to cool down, he retracted his statements, saying that military intervention should not be considered. McCain fundamentally does not understand the purpose of NATO. Obama needs be repeating this series of events like a broken record. McCain overracted, and then changed his mind 3 days later. A President has no such luxury. McCain is no
match for the calm and calculated actions of a player like Putin. Words such as "confused," "hot headed," "overreacting" and "indecisive" need to become synonymous with the Obama campaign's portrayal of McCain. Don't just answer back with Celebrity ads.
Don't whine that McCain had previous exposure to Warren's questions. Drive the debate into his territory.

McCain is playing his Georgia actions as a victory in every speech, and unless unanswered, it will become common wisdom. We keep waiting for Obama to do what we were promised he'd do: take McCain down at the knees on his one point of perceived strength. It is so much harder to do this after the narrative continues to harden.

With so many instances of corruption and influence-peddling around him and whatever problems with the candidate that are keeping the campaign from letting reporters interview him anymore, John McCain is now again charging Obama with what amounts to soft treason -- wanting to lose the war in Iraq in order to make himself president. The lack of any consistent lines of attack against McCain is becoming palpable.

The McCain campaign wants an apology from NBC for failure to fluff.

As a side note, we keep hearing that McCain is 'reluctant' to talk about his POW experience. But he sends out his press spokespeople to use it to deflect questions about his honesty. Said Nicolle Wallace: ""The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous."

New Public Policy Polling survey: tied at 45.