Daily Tidbits: August 20, 2008

• CBS/NYT poll and NBC/WSJ poll both show Obama leading McCain, 45-42%.  NBC/WSJ lead had been 47-41%.  In the case of CBS/NYT, the last poll had Obama leading 45-39%.  So one poll says Obama hasn’t moved at all, while McCain inched up modestly, and the other poll says Obama dipped modestly, but McCain didn’t move.  Between the two of them, it doesn’t look like a lot of movement.  That’s despite Obama taking a week’s vacation, Georgia, and McCain’s onslaught of attacks.  Indeed, in the CBS/NYT poll, Obama’s favorables actually edged upwards.  The preseason is over.  We are now entering the regular season, with the debates serving as the playoffs.  Obama enters the regular season with a lead, cash and a number of structural advantages.  Now is the time for execution.
• Arnold may skip RNC.
• Attempted McCain Ambush Backfires.  Team McCain puts up foreign lobbyists Scheunemann and Giuliani to launch hatchet job on an Obama supporter, a former ambassador, who went on an ABA-sponsored trip to Syria to encourage it to make progress in its negotiations with Israel.  Apparently, they were hoping to revive the silly “appeasement” line, notwithstanding Israel’s own negotiations with Syria.  But the call was quickly derailed when the first questioner from JTA, the Jewish wire service, asked whether Schuenemann and Giuliani were conflicted due to their own foreign entanglements.  Apparently, Team McCain cut him off, but it nevertheless caused the call to veer off into a lengthy defensive discussion of McCain’s surrogates’ lobbying ties to the Republic of Georgia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.  Oops.
• McCain’s Bad Judgment Called Out.  Richard Clarke and Susan Rice blast McCain’s judgment on deciding, the day after 9/11, to invade Iraq.  They called him “trigger happy”, “reckless” and surrounded by “extreme neo-conservative” policy types.  
• Would You Trust McCain with Your Money?  McCain spent $32M and raised $26M in July.  This is how he got in trouble financially during the primaries.  How risky.  What poor judgment.  If he can’t manage his campaign budget properly, how can he protect us from [insert boogey man's name here]?
• The Root wonders if it makes sense that three old white guys around age 70 (plus or minus a few years), Jim Leher, Bob Schieffer and Tom Brokaw, were the right folks to serve as moderators of the presidential debates in a race pitting a 72 year old white guy versus an 47 year old African American, and following a historically close Democratic primary involving a female candidate.  It’s an issue not only because we’ve seen that Bob Schieffer is completely in the tank for McCain.  It’s because generationally and demographically, they share a single and fairly narrow viewpoint when there’s a whole range of issues in play in the election.

• Denver Post: Despite the media’s hyperventilating months ago, Democrats have met their fund-raising goal for the convention.
• NY Times: Obama goes on the offensive but under radar by running most of his negative and constrast ads on local television, often with a local focus, while running his positive ads on national television.
• NY Times profiles Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as a popular governor who has worked effectively across the aisle in a GOP-dominated state.
• Thomas Friedman reminds us that, despite the McCain and neocon spin, it was Georgia that instigated the crisis by invading a semi-autonomous, pro-Russian enclave. Apparently, Georgia assumed that Russia wouldn’t retaliate militarily, but it was mistaken.
• WaPo reports on Obama’s fiery remarks about McCain at VFW conference in Orlando (full video posted below).
• Economy: Businesses hit by double-whammy: higher wholesale prices and reduced consumer demand. Wall Street reacts negatively to economic data.
• WaPo profiles Team Obama’s “Triple O”: Obama’s Online Operation, which many experienced political observers consider ground-breaking.
• Ezra Klein/American Prospect: A thorough examination of how Obama and his team has been quietly building a serious party infrastructure.
• VP madness begets ridiculous questions.
• MSNBC commits to progressive political orientation in primetime lineup by replacing Dan Abrams with Rachel Maddow, immediately following Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
• WaPo: For voting security reasons, Ohio bans practices of allowing poll workers take voting machines home overnight before elections to avoid the hassle of picking the equipment up early on election day. The amazing thing is Ohio ever allowed such “sleepovers” in the first place.