POLLS:

Elections guru Larry Sabato says that the race is essentially a toss-up. In terms of electoral votes, here’s his breakdown:

Solid: Obama 183 McCain 144
Likely: Obama 200 McCain 174 (includes solid)
Leaning: Obama 212 McCain 227 (includes solid and likely)
Toss-up: 99

But Sabato is full of crap. It’s hard to argue with his picks for ’solid’ and likely’ (but Montana and North Dakota aren’t so likely for McCain), but he goes badly off the rails in the other categories. He says that Missouri is leaning toward McCain, but the polls show otherwise, and Obama is making a much bigger push in Missouri than McCain is.

McCain seems very unlikely to overcome Obama’s big lead in Iowa, and Hispanics in New Mexico will probably punish McCain for his reversal on immigration and for the Republican scapegoating of Hispanics that’s been going since 2006.

And since voter registration in Florida shows a huge swing toward the Democrats, I think it makes more sense to say that Florida is leaning toward Obama, not McCain. Remember that pollsters usually try to make their sample groups demographically mirror the electorate in the previous election, but Obama will be bringing a lot of first-time voters to the polls. That’s going to be especially important in states with large African-American populations like Florida.

And what’s up with putting Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, and New Hampshire in the toss-up category? New Hampshire has been voting more like the rest of New England lately, and McCain is going to get trounced in New England. Detroit is becoming a ghost town, and Denver is starting to look like a forest of ‘For Sale’ signs. One of every ten residents in Ohio is taking food stamps. Those states aren’t toss-ups. They aren’t even ‘leaning Obama’.

The way I see it, Obama has a distinct advantage in states that add up to at least 325 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the national polling continues to be all over the place, with one recent poll showing a dead heat, and another showing a 9 point Obama lead.

OOPS:

A lot of people thought McCain might choose South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to be his running mate. But when asked to name a difference between Bush and McCain, Sanford drew a blank. Unfortunately for McCain, a lot of voters won’t be able to think of any significant policy differences between the two.

Not surprisingly, more and more people are thinking that Romney will be running with McCain.

WTF?:

Obama says that we should be teaching more of our children to speak more than one language. And McCain’s supporters are attacking him for it. Because for them, there IS such a thing as being too smart.

McCain also criticized Obama for refusing to vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which officially designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. But McCain, who has missed more votes than any other senator, also failed to vote on Kyl-Lieberman.

LIES:

McCain has long been fond of saying that when he was tortured in a Vietnamese prison and asked for the names of his squadron mates, he gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ defensive linemen instead. But when he spoke in Pennsylvania recently, McCain said that he gave up the names of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

ECONOMICS:

McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm said that we’re not really in a downturn, we’re in a “mental recession.” All the inflation, debt, unemployment, evictions, and crashing stock prices are just a figment of your imagination. McCain immediately tried to distance himself from Gramm’s remarks, but they sounded eerily similar to words that McCain has been using to describe the current economic morass:

Chris Cillizza points out that this story could be big trouble for McCain later on in the campaign, because it adds to the perception that he is just another out-of-touch Republican Kool-Aid drinker.

***

You have to wonder how McCain decided on his economic team. On the one hand, there’s Gramm and his tendency to produce embarrassing gaffes. Gramm is also the person who, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, pushed through banking deregulation back in the 1990s. How’s that working out?

On the other hand, there’s Carly Fiorina, the failed former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. HP stock jumped 7% the day after she was forced out, and the company immediately began to prosper in her absence. Complicating matters, Fiorina favors tax increases on the wealthy, and Gramm once sponsored a bill that would have required every decrease in tax revenue to be paid for by a cut in spending. But McCain favors cutting taxes on the wealthy even more, and won’t identify any specific spending cuts that he’d make to pay for the cuts.

***

One other piece of embarrassing news about McCain’s economic team: as it turns out, many of the 300 economists who supposedly endorsed the McCain economic plan are actually against it.

THE WEEK THAT WAS:

Mark Halperin of TIME says that last week was a very good one for McCain, but it’s hard to see how. Cathleen Decker and Maeve Reston of the LA Times were more realistic in their assessment:

McCain’s week gave Democrats ammunition. He opened it with a town hall in Denver. His message went awry in the first hour, after a young woman expressed concern that Social Security might not survive for her peers. McCain explained that benefits would not be there for her unless Social Security was fixed, and then he seemed to criticize the system’s operating premise.

“Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today,” he said. “And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace and it’s got to be fixed.” He explained later that by “disgrace” he meant that the system would run out of money.

Barely had Democrats seized on that comment when word surfaced that Carly Fiorina, a McCain advisor and the former head of Hewlett-Packard, had told a political breakfast in Washington that women — a group the senator was courting this week — were upset that some insurance companies covered Viagra but not contraception.

Before long, McCain opponents pointed out that the senator had voted against bills that would have required insurers to cover birth control.

McCain added to the contretemps when he told a reporter that he did not recall his vote. In a squirming response, replete with two long pauses, McCain neither offered the answer his campaign gave — that he opposed all mandates — nor expressed any familiarity with the issue Fiorina had raised two days earlier.

“It’s something that I had not thought much about,” he said in a video reel that played for days on cable and online.

The final difficulty arose the next day, when McCain economics advisor and former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was quoted as saying that the country was whining about the economy. After McCain distanced himself from the remarks, Gramm reiterated them and drew mocking criticism from Obama and other Democrats.

Ouch. Especially the parts about Social Security an birth control.

Bush won in 2004 by being careful not to mention his plans to privatize Social Security. McCain is on record supporting privatization (and opposing it, and supporting it again), and most Americans are opposed to the idea.

And the birth control issue? In this day and age, being against birth control marks McCain as a relic of a bygone era. Most Americans understand that paying for birth control for adults now will save them a lot of money in social services in the future.

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