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- Weekend Update: The New York Times reports on Obama's strange negligence of Arkansas as an electoral target despite it's demographics potentially favoring Democrats. And and examination of John McCain's post-9/11 foreign policy worldview. See also Tim and Adam on the latter.
- Barack Obama raised $51 million in July. It's not a record-breaking amount by his standards, but it's almost twice the amount raised by McCain in the same period. Additionally, the DNC outraised the RNC for the first time this election cycle, $27.7 to 26 million.
- Joe Biden, who went to Georgia as an Obama surrogate over the weekend, is the current VP frontrunner according to the D.C. gossip machine, in a week where Obama is certain to make the pick public. Or he might do it during the convention. Or right before. But soon, we promise! In other grist for the rumor mill, the pick, whoever he or she is, is already staffed up in Chicago, according to The Washington Post's Sleuth blog.
- I think the significance of the Saddleback McCain/Obama/Warren Q&A this weekend is being overstated -- certainly a minority opinion amongst my TAPPED colleagues. However, Taegan Goddard has an excellent question for McCain: "During his weekend interview with Rev. Rick Warren, Sen. John McCain said that if he were president he would have never nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter or John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. McCain wasn't a senator when Stevens was nominated, but why did he nevertheless vote to confirm Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter?"
- I've always suspected that field organizing, voter registration and the turnout ground game were Obama's ace in the whole, and this Post story on voter registration in Virginia in the last four years validates, in my mind, Obama's recognition and expansion of the 50-state strategy Howard Dean has crafted as DNC Chairman.
- Politico's weekend story quoting Rep. Loretta Sanchez saying Hillary Clinton could have at least half of the House delegation in her pocket at the Democratic National Convention next week is pretty much all hot air, as DemConWatch helpfully points out in this post. In other convention news, John McCain plans on running advertising during the DNC, in a move that breaks with recent election tradition.
- Things are definitely tightening up in the polls. Both Colorado and Ohio -- one of which Obama has to win to get 270 electoral votes -- are trending towards McCain, with a new Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] of Ohio showing a 45-45 dead heat between the two candidates, 11 percent undecided. In Colorado, a Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll has McCain ahead 44-41.
- In their ongoing efforts to dominate how we get our information, Google now has an 2008 Election page that allows users to track the political conversation in a comprehensive and fairly sophisticated manner.
- And Finally, LA Gov. Bobby Jindal, would be savior of the GOP, can't name one big new idea the Republican Party or John McCain are offering the country during a Meet the Press appearance. I suppose his non-answer is at some level an honest one. In related news, Newt Gingrich, intellectual lion of the conservative movement, claims that Obama's encouragement of proper tire inflation actually serves to "enrich big oil" because selling air has "a higher profit margin than selling gasoline." Now that's some solid conservative populism.
--Mori Dinauer
