Recently in Fall Election Category

One of the things that makes Washington a particularly strange and difficult to understand place is how people communicate. Like a dysfunctional family, the political and chattering classes hold plenty of assumptions that are rarely discussed in public. When they do, there can be hell to pay -- as Charlie Black, a veteran GOP operative and top aide to John McCain, just found out.

Interpreting the plethora of polls we see is always difficult, but never more so than this year, when race is added to the potential for misconstruing the real intentions of voters, many of whom resent talking to pollsters in any event. That's why it's worth the effort to try to understand the ABC/Washington Post poll on race released this weekend.

 

Barack Obama's campaign theme is "Change We Can Believe In." For the rest of the election, it might well be "Millions More to Raise."  That's in dollars, not people. 

Obama's decision to skip an earlier pledge to forgo public financing for the general election if his opponent did so will probably allow the Illinois fundraising phenom to outspend John McCain 3-to-1. But it also raises questions about his keeping commitments, especially when commitments made earnestly and early on turn out to be inconvenient. This sounds like old-style political gamesmanship and calculation, not the message of change Obama had been preaching...

With John McCain and Barack Obama both promising to run their campaigns on the high road, expect both of them to accuse the other of taking the low road. And when either of the candidates or their campaigns do, skip over the charge of going negative and look carefully at what caused them to complain in the first place. Sometimes the accusation might be fair...but often it will be a way of trying to duck a legitimate jab.

You couldn't help feeling a little sorry for John McCain last night when the cable networks broke away from his speech to focus on the historic conclusion of the Democratic campaign. But the abrupt departure -- and the far more enthusiastic audiences that greeted Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- is indicative of the problems the GOP nominee faces in the months ahead. The speech he gave shows he's well aware of the challenge.