Gallup's daily tracking poll has the candidates on Obama 48%, McCain 44%, a slight narrowing -- while Obama makes gains in a raft of new CNN polls in battleground states.
As the world digests the Senate's 74-25 bailout vote and awaits the verdict of the House tomorrow, here's a super-informative blow-by-blow narrative of the current crisis from the New York Times, and a telling moment from the Senate floor last night from CQ Politics: Obama crossed over to where McCain was chatting with his allies and "stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain. McCain shook it, but with a 'go away' look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama..."
Tonight's much, much, much-anticipated vice-presidential debate in St Louis, Missouri, is full of hazards for both candidates. But I know the question that's weighing most heavily on your mind, and the answer is: yes, I'll be liveblogging it here from a little before 9pm eastern time. [Politico]
Sarah Palin told a conservative radio show yesterday that she's looking forward to "getting to speak directly to Americans, without that filter of mainstream media trying to, I think, maybe, censor some of my comments." In a new poll, six in 10 voters think she's unprepared to be president. But could a few well-rehearsed quips tonight "go a long way toward making Sarah Palin a serious player the next time her party needs a presidential candidate"? You have been warned. [New York Observer]
"What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought," writes Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books. "When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks... Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it's a winning technique." [LRB]
"Amtrak Joe" Biden, meanwhile, has his man-of-the-people credentials questioned in a New York Times profile. Turns out that the gaffetastic Delaware senator has been able to "dip into his campaign treasury" to splash out on home landscaping, and (yes) to pay for some of those Amtrak tickets. [New York Times]
The Obama campaign has bought an entire channel on the Dish Satellite Network in order to play one ad on the economy, over and over again. An inspired bid for the channel-hopping vote? Or a bit North Korean? (Michelle Malkin, who hates everything, hates it.) [Ben Smith]
Stephen Colbert launches his "voter abstinence" campaign: "It's OK to like somebody, but you don't have to vote for him..." [Comedy Central]
