Although it has required an almost unbearable amount of restraint, I am not going to comment on John McCain's political grandstanding today. I'll get to it tomorrow, I promise.

Instead, we have the return of our in-house cartoonist! While it may have appeared to the public that CWCunningham was in an undisclosed location these past few months, he and I were actually colloborating on a video, in an effort to get (you can't make this stuff up) a liberal lobbying firm on K Street interested in our idea. But, sadly, it came to naught. But this week's financial meltdown proved to be too hard for him to resist, so we proudly present his take on the situation.

About the Cartoonist  |  Reprint Policy

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Going on the assumption that the presidential campaign will indeed continue (whether John McCain participates or not), we turn back to the polls to get a sense of what's going on out there. Now, today was a banner day for Obama in the national polls (especially the one that puts him up nine points, 52/43) -- but they are largely meaningless, since that is not how we elect our president. Given the facts of the Electoral College, we have to go down to the level of the state polls to more accurately judge the race.

[Program Note: Since I started this series of columns back in June, I've been writing them about once every three weeks. But we're now in the homestretch of the campaign, so they will be appearing weekly, every Wednesday, right up to Election Day. Links to all articles in this series appear in the Data section at the bottom.]

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One can't help but wonder if President Bush is thinking to himself: "It wasn't supposed to be like this." Now, there's a whole passel of issues which might make him feel this way, but in particular I'm talking about his negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki over the United States' continuing troop presence in Iraq. Because it is increasingly looking like Bush is simply not going to get what he wanted. But since what he wanted was to tie the hands of the incoming president, this is actually a good thing.

I've been following the saga of these negotiations for almost a year now, and written about them on many occasions. Bush's basic plan was to agree with Maliki that the United Nations mandate for American forces in Iraq would end on December 31, 2008. Neither country wanted another extension of this mandate. So, Bush reasoned, he would get a bilateral agreement from Maliki for the American troops to stay, and Maliki would agree to pretty much whatever Bush proposed.

It didn't work out this way. Maliki, with domestic political pressures of his own, decided that the more he stood up to Bush, the more his own public supported him. So he began leaking the details of Bush's demands to the press. This caused some major backpedaling from Bush, and Maliki was able to almost immediately gain solid advantages in the negotiations. Maliki can read a calendar, and he knows when our elections are. Time is on his side, and he knows it.

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I know I'm supposed to be commenting on the details of the new economic bailout/recovery plan here, but in fact, I know my own limitations. And one of those limitations is admitting that economics on a national or international scale is beyond me. My actual belief is that it's beyond anybody -- that the "science" of economics is nothing short of voodoo.

Consider: on any given day, you can find an economist who will tell you the future looks great, and another one who is predicting doom and gloom. Looking back later, you can find economists who accurately predicted what was going to happen, and other economists who were wildly wrong. The problem is they're not consistent. One economist who gets things right in one crisis will likely be wrong in the next one.

That's not science, that's throwing a dart at a wall. If it truly were "scientific" then you would expect to see some sort of verifiable results, but time and again the markets surprise the professionals who are supposed to be watching them.

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Back in Volume 36 of this Friday Talking Points column, I pointed out what seemed to me to be an obvious observation -- that the media was going a lot lighter on John McCain than they were on Barack Obama. This earned me a fair amount of ridicule at the time (and also some support, I should say). Now, however, I can definitively say that this situation has been rectified. Whether it was McCain's campaign cutting off virtually all access to McCain (and literally any access to Palin), whether it was McCain's mudslinging and lies in his ads, or perhaps whether it was McCain manipulating the media after his running mate choice, and then savagely attacking them -- for whatever reason, the mainstream media are now closely examining everything McCain says.

This is quite a change from letting him slide on gaffe after gaffe after gaffe. I wrote on this subject earlier this week in more detail, but since the subject arose here in FTP first, I thought I'd mention it.

But we've got to move along, as there are many things to cover this week. Maybe, since we're in the second year of this column, we should create a motto... something like "longest blog post ever!" or maybe "our readers aren't afraid to read more than three paragraphs!"

Ahem.

No, no, we've got to move along, as I said. No time for such frivolity.

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[This is really an addendum to yesterday's article on state polls, but it's just going to be a quick update.]

Yesterday, I did a roundup of the state polls and the electoral math outlook for the presidential race. Today, I checked the numbers as I do every morning, and over thirty states had new poll numbers -- an astonishing amount of data for one day. Even Washington, D.C. got polled, for the first time ever in this election cycle. It's easy to see why D.C. doesn't get polled much, since the outcome isn't exactly in doubt -- the spread in this poll is greater than any other state at 82% for Barack Obama and a paltry 13% for John McCain.

But with this flood of data coming in, I thought it'd be worth a quick note today on the movement these new polls show. At first glance, it looks like more bad news for Obama, since McCain is back over the magic number with 274 electoral votes, while Obama only has 243. But when you look closer, you can see what could be the beginning of a very good trend for Obama. Perhaps. As always, nothing's written in stone.

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Barack Obama has had a hard few weeks in the polls. In fact, this week's check of how the electoral math plays out may (hopefully) be his lowest point during the campaign.

I say this not out of unbridled optimism, but because of a basic fact -- what we examine here are state polls, not national polls; and the state polls always trail the national trends by a few days to a week. And the national trend for Obama may have turned around in his favor in just the last couple of days. So even though things look grim here, Obama is already starting to bounce back.

The last time we looked at these graphs was just before the convention. Since that point, Obama got a bounce from the Democrats' convention, and McCain got an even bigger bounce from the Republican convention (and from naming Sarah Palin as his running mate). But, as with all convention bounces, what goes up usually comes right back down. Leaving us (on the national level) pretty close to where we were before we started. But on the state level, the McCain/Palin bounce still shows up very strongly. But it may have peaked.

Examining state polls is always tough, because until every state is polled every day there just isn't enough up-to-the-minute information to accurately portray where all the states are at. Ten states haven't been polled in a month, for instance (listed at the very end of this article, in the "data" section). But overall, state polling has gotten more intense, with more polls out there and with polls in battleground states coming every few days. So the information flow has improved a bit over the numbers we were seeing this summer. No poll is perfect, but more information coming in is always better.

We start, as always, with the overall picture of the electoral vote, if it were held today and if every state voted the way the polls show (for all of these images, click on them to see a larger version):

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The past week may have been a crucial turning point for the presidential hopes of John McCain. Because finally -- finally! -- the mainstream media (including some very right-wing sources) have realized that it is not "McCain 2000" who is running this year, but "McCain 2008" -- a whole different breed of cat. This may have been McCain's biggest hidden asset, but ever since he hired the Karl Rove-trained campaign staff he's got now, he has carelessly tossed this potent secret weapon aside.

Now, I will fully admit up front that the jury is still out on all of this. McCain may win. His tactics may be politically brilliant. But somehow, I don't think this is going to be the case.

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What a difference a weekend can make! Barack Obama's campaign is strongly defending themselves in the air wars, and taking the fight to John McCain. Joe Biden has found his voice on the campaign trail, giving some rousing stump speeches. And Obama himself seems to be learning the "bumpersticker" rule of political slogans; keep it short and simple! But the real highlight of the weekend had to be CBS' Face The Nation, where Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- a former Hillary Clinton supporter, it should be noted -- showed everyone else what a surrogate is supposed to do. She had her facts ready, she knew her issues, and she was absolutely relentless in making her points. Her performance was so strong and so well focused that it would be foolish not to immediately send her out on the campaign trail and/or to as many television interviews as she can squeeze into her schedule.

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Surprise! It's our first anniversary column!

But before we get to that, I have to pass on this information, in the hopes nobody will get stung by a virus making the rounds which uses Obama's name. So we pause for the following public service announcement:

[VIRUS ALERT: Before we get to the column today, I have to post a virus alert (full details at VirtualBlight). If you get an email titled "Barack Obama sex story with a girl" from the sender "obamasex@obama.com" -- don't click on any links in it, delete it immediately! Clicking on links in this spam email causes a virus to be loaded on your computer which will try to get your bank information. You have been warned!]

OK, on to the celebrating!

Yes, Volume 47 of the Friday Talking Points column is actually our one-year anniversary. The very first installment of this indomitable column aired on September 14, 2007.

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