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- The Washington Post runs a long profile on John McCain that goes into the mind of the candidate and Politico has a story on the "paper gap" in McCain's policy proposals.
- Conventional Wisdom Watch: The negative campaign that has been ratcheted up by the McCain camp in the past week has already soured Joe Klein. Now, Howie Kurtz laments the "tabloid" focus McCain's ads have taken on.
- Campaigning in Florida, Barack Obama deals with some hecklers who ask what he's doing for the black community. Also, Obama rolls out an economic stimulus proposal funded by a tax on the "excessive profits" of the oil industry.
- Republican Senator Gordon Smith, running for reelection in Oregon, puts out a spot that praises his relationship with both Obama and John Kerry. There's just one problem, as Eric Kleefeld points out: Smith campaigned hard against Kerry's 2004 presidential bid, remarking that Kerry "looks French" and saying "John Kerry to me represents socialism." Truly bipartisanship at its finest.
- Nate Silver digs deep into Gallup's daily tracking numbers -- where Obama is tied with McCain today, 44-44 -- and observes that Obama is outperforming Kerry's 2004 exit poll results in every demographic except Democrats, whose support will certainly coalesce around the candidate by Election Day. A good companion post would compare McCain's level of support in these subgroups to Bush's in 2004. Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman has an interesting take on the "why isn't Obama blowing McCain out of the water in the polls?" problem, concluding that in modern presidential election history, the incumbent party rarely gets trounced, usually losing by only a few percentage points.
- Polls: Pew's [PDF] national poll has Obama ahead of McCain by five points, 47-42, Rasmussen has McCain and Obama tied in Montana (with leaners), 47-47, and Rocky Mountain News [PDF] has McCain ahead in Arizona by only five points, 43-38.
- Jon Chait argued in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times yesterday that Obama should go negative on McCain so the campaign isn't all about Obama. Ed Kilgore puts late campaign style changes into historical perspective.
- Turns out that McCain is spending fully one third of his entire television advertising budget -- about $140,000 a day -- on the his Obama "world celebrity" spot in eleven battleground states.
--Mori Dinauer
