As Jeralyn pointed out yesterday, the McCain campaign has gone beyond negative. It's latest ad is filled with disgusting lies, most prominently its accusation that Barack Obama sponsored an Illinois bill to teach "comprehensive sex education" to kindergarten students. The bill, which Obama did not sponsor, would have allowed teachers to give kindergarten students enough information to protect themselves from sexual predators, while reserving "medically accurate" information about sex to be taught to older students in higher grades.

Almost as troubling is the advertisement's false claim that this bill was Obama's "one accomplishment" in the field of education. [more ...]

A slew of state polls have been released but I am not going to pay attention to them. Here's why - they all came too close to the GOP Convention. I am going to concentrate on the national tracking polls for a few more days. We have 3 to follow - Ras, which has a tie, Gallup, which has McCain by 4 (though I have expressed my problems with the Gallup tracking results), and Hotline, which has McCain by 2.

At this point, the race seems to have stabilized to a virtual tie/small McCain lead. I believe the fundamentals still strongly favor Obama and believe he should remain the strong favorite to win the election. But he really needs to look to change the current Media narrative. The disagreement between Jeralyn (and the entire Left blogosphere apparently) and I on Palinpalooza need not be rehashed in this post. I merely suggest again the following - Barack Obama can grab the Media narrative by the neck if he would spend a few days campaigning together with Bill and Hillary Clinton, especially if he makes a strong economic appeal in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan. I strongly recommend Obama take this tack next week.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

David Letterman reports:

Barack Obama revealed Wednesday that former President Clinton, once the presidential nominee's nemesis, will campaign for him during the weeks leading up to Election Day. "There's nobody smarter in politics," Obama said on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman." "And he is going to be campaigning for us over the next eight weeks, which I'm thrilled by."

The two were scheduled to have lunch Thursday at Clinton's office in New York. Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said the former president would campaign for Obama at a yet-to-be announced site in Florida on Sept. 29, with plans for more fundraising and events in the works.

If I were running Obama's campaign, I would have Obama campaign with Bill Clinton next week in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan for a few days.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Sen. Barack Obama got in a little campaigning on the David Letterman show Wednesday night:

Ultimately what we’ve seen over the last week is a concession on the part of the McCain campaign that this election is going to be about change. You’ll recall, you know, for the last two years, we’ve been talking about needing to change how Washington works, how the country is managed and people were saying, ‘No, it’s about experience, experience, experience,’ and over the last week and a half I think they recognized that, no, the American people want something fundamentally different and for a good reason. Because when you travel, it doesn’t matter whether you’re here in New York City or a tiny hamlet somewhere in the Midwest, what you find is people are just having a tough time right now.

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The Republicans are leaving no dirty stone unturned in their attempt to win in November.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

There are no words for how low they will sink.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin. He gets it exactly right. Hope you will send it on. Here's the link.

This is an open thread.

The Washington Post reports on the smear campaign on multiple fronts Sen. John McCain has launched against Sen. Barack Obama. Most are clearly swift-boating.

Take this one. In the Illinois Senate, Obama voted for a bill that allowed school boards to determine appropriate sex education courses. It didn't specify what kind of program or what ages would receive it.

Kindergarten teachers were given the approval to teach about appropriate and inappropriate touching to combat molestation.

The McCain advertisement calls it "Obama's one accomplishment" in education: "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners." "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama, wrong on education, wrong for your family," the ad concludes.

So, John McCain opposes teaching kindergartners how to recognize molestation. John McCain doesn't care about preventing sex assaults of children? If I were a parent of a kindergartner, he wouldn't get my vote based on that alone.

Let's face it. These attacks only matter in the swing states. McCain already has the evangelicals, the radical right and Republicans.

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Sorry, BTD. Dan Schnur assures us that Big Ten states will control the outcome of the election.

[A]s the election draws closer, expect the travel itineraries of Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama to mirror closely that of the Northwestern Wildcats. ...

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Gov. Sarah Palin is dividing the country. The airwaves are filled with those who can see past McCain's cheap ploy to get his campaign moving.

McCain put his desire to be President above the best interests of our country. He deserves to lose.

Aside from all the reasons Palin is a danger to the country because of her lack of qualifications remotely relevant to any high national office, from foreign policy to education to the economy to social security to health care, there's her record, her lack of a record, her ties to the radical right, her position on issues, her distortion of her record and the pending investigation into abuse of her office.

She has become so polarizing a figure that she's now a threat. The radical right is so excited that it might get a chance to direct the pick of our next Supreme Court justices, it cannot contain its glee. The rest of the country is terrified (except for a small number of women who think the race should still be about Hillary and sexism.)

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Obama criticizes McCain's blatant attempt to swift-boat him over the lipstick comments.

"Spare me the phony outrage. Spare me the phony talk about change," Obama said at the start of an education event in Norfolk, Virginia.

"We have real problems in this country right now. The American people are looking to us for answers, not distractions, not diversions, not manipulations. They want real answers to the real problems we are facing.

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Via Todd Beeton:

So I was happy, if unsurprised, to learn from a source that Barack Obama called Hillary Clinton yesterday to thank her for what she's doing on behalf of the campaign. During their conversation, I'm told he thanked her specifically for what she was saying on the campaign trail. The fact is the Obama campaign is working closely with Hillary Clinton on her role in the campaign and will continue to do so until election day.

This is not surprising in the least. Hillary Clinton's message has echoed the Obama campaign's concentration on McCain as Bush' Third Term. Credit where due to the Obama campaign, they realize that fixating on Sarah Palin is a losing political strategy.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

For the fourth day in a row, the Gallup tracking poll has McCain up, now 48-43:

The Sept. 7-9 average -- spanning interviewing conducted Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday -- finds little substantive change in the shape of the race compared to earlier this week, although each of the two candidate's level of support has dropped a point compared to the Tuesday's reported average. Nine percent of registered voters say they are undecided, refuse to state their preference, say they will vote for neither McCain nor Obama, or indicate they are voting for another candidate.

Here is a strange demographic factoid from Gallup's poll - Obama leads among women 49-42 while trailing among men by 49-44. And yet Gallup has McCain up 5. In a word, that simply is incredible. This Gallup poll seems faulty to me.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only