by Evie Stone

Good morning. Our phone remains sadly devoid of any Obama VP text messages. We will bravely soldier on.

Two more polls today (NYT/CBS and NBC/WSJ) show McCain gaining to within the margin of error with Obama — commensurate with what we saw yesterday from Q-pac and LAT/Bloomberg.

We've yapped ad infinitum about the meaninglessness of national horserace numbers (and the NYT itself states — in its national poll writeup — that a head-to-head national matchup "is not predictive this early"). So we'll give you some internals, which are much more interesting: NBC/WSJ finds that the vast majority of voters (nearly 8 in 10) think McCain would stick with President Bush's policies, and only 18% think the country is headed in the right direction. NYT/CBS finds a less dramatic association between McCain and Bush (slightly less than half) but finds that voters are most worried about economic issues — an area in which they claim more confidence in Obama.

Given that information, why is McCain gaining ground?

 

One explanation could be that voters favor him on foreign policy, and in the wake of the Georgia crisis, those issues are front-of-mind. Another could be McCain's barrage of negative ads attacking Obama as an out-of-touch celebrity who will tax the middle class to a fare-thee-well. There's the fact that, according to the NBC/WSJ poll, only about half of Hillary Clinton's supporters have lined up behind Obama. And then there's the NYT/CBS's findings of general voter doubt about Obama's readiness for the job:

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is still closely associated with the deeply unpopular President Bush...But voters, by a wide margin, view Mr. McCain as better prepared to be president than Mr. Obama, and as more likely to be an effective commander in chief.

The overall message here: this race is still wide open. Voters are waiting to be convinced — that McCain will work for them on important issues, and that Obama is ready to be President. Case in point: the NYT's profile of rural Raccoon Township, PA, where many voters have yet to be won over by either candidate. Both McCain and Obama have lots of room to make up ground in the next two and a half months, and they've both got enough smarty-pants advisers around that if they make the right moves they could pull off the victory. This is just going to keep being interesting.

Meanwhile, in a sitdown with Politico, McCain says he won't take a single-term pledge. But yeah yeah whatever because in the same interview he also says he doesn't know how many houses he and his wife own. On the scale of zero to organic arugula, that gets a 10 for 'out of touch', with an extra bonus point for saying it during a mortgage crisis. Cue the DNC press releases!

And finally, this morning we're sad to report that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones died last evening at the age of 58 after suffering a brain hemorrhage while driving. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has this remembrance.

Some elected officials endure the political side of the job; Tubbs Jones embraced it. She loved the handshakes and hugs, the speeches and the cheers - perhaps because she knew how amazing it was that the daughter of a factory worker and skycap might grow up to be a judge, a county prosecutor and a five-term member of Congress.

Tubbs Jones was a five-term Congresswoman from northeast Ohio. She was the first black woman elected to Congress from Ohio, and the first to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee. She was also one of Hillary Clinton's most vocal supporters during this year's Presidential primaries.