Ignore the imagery and listen to the "Obama Obama Obama" soundtrack in McCain's ads. Do you notice what's missing? The pause for breath between "Obama"s. In this classic use of visceral response in conditioning, you become uncomfortable, both because there is something unnatural about a crowd that doesn't need to breathe to chant, and even more because you empathicly feel you can't breathe yourself - just to the extent you identify with the chanting crowd.

The visual imagery and the narratives are all a distraction to set this up: the feeling that the very name "Obama" is suffocating. Because this conditioning happens below consciousness, it will color future footage in crowds chant for Obama with normal pauses for breath. It's insidious, a move by the McCain camp to win not through conscious message, but by a very crude sort of conditioning.

Are psych ops specialists helping produce this stuff?

When the number of points in the spread are politically important, and the race is between two people, the reporting should not be to the nearest percent, but the nearest percent / 2. So PA is 54.5% for Clinton to 45.5% for Obama - correctly showing the 9 point spread, when rounded to the nearest point. Yes, no one cares about 45.39% compared to 45.5%, the rounding beyond the .5% is not significant to the political discussion. But it would clutter neither or minds nor the page to add those .5's to the figures, and round to them.