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- A new round of Quinnipiac University swing state polls show Obama ahead in Florida, 46-44, Ohio, 46-44, and Pennsylvania, 49-42. Nate Silver observes that "This is a weaker performance for Obama than in June, but a better performance for him than in any month but June. Our model weights those two factors, and concludes that the status quo has more or less been preserved."
- Voteboth.com, a group dedicated to getting Hillary Clinton on the Obama ticket, has officially shut down. In related news, it seems likely that she will likely be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in the Tuesday night slot, which seems to me not only appropriate but an excellent way to foster party unity.
- Barack Obama responded to John McCain's "celebrity" ads from yesterday with a new ad, "Low Road," and a corresponding fact-checking web site. Obama also asked McCain, "Is that the best you can come up with?"
- Politico reports on the sometimes contradictory "cacophonous cabinet" McCain has assembled for his campaign advisory team.
- Writing in Business Week, David Kiley reports that "What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was ... wait for it ... using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents -- a lie." Quite an honorable campaign indeed.
- The Columbia Journalism Review notes that a group of ten Ohio newspapers who rate campaign ads on a scale of one to ten (from "misleading" to "truthful") have given McCain's ads a zero.
- Clearly McCain is trying to gain some traction by accusing Obama of being an elitist. But as Jake Tapper, Chris Hayes and Andrew Romano point out, McCain is much wealthier, has much less connection to the middle class, and promotes economic policies that benefit wealthy elites at the expense of the middle class. I would add that the type of elitism the left is pointing to -- a material elitism -- is quite different from the type of elitism McCain is charging Obama with, which is cultural elitism.
- Kathleen Hennessey argues in Time that Ron Paul might prove to be a more effective candidate than John McCain in the Mountain West. No argument here.
- And finally, Patrick Ruffini gets all excited at the Next Right over McCain's "celebrity" ad, saying it "hits a triple," and reacts to news that Bobby Jindal will likely get the GOP convention keynote speech by remarking that "Who better to counterprogram Obama than someone who's like Obama in many ways, except with accomplishments?"
--Mori Dinauer
