Palin says election result rests in God’s hands

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin describes herself as a “hard-core pro-lifer” and expresses confidence that in spite of disheartening polls, “putting this in God’s hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

 

In an interview with evangelical leader James Dobson that aired Wednesday, Palin said she thought Republican presidential candidate John McCain would implement the GOP platform if elected — “I do, from the bottom of my heart” — but McCain doesn’t support the platform on three issues important to evangelicals: abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research.

The platform calls for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, an issue McCain says should be left to individual states. Similarly, the platform seeks a constitutional ban on all abortions; again, McCain supports allowing states to decide the question. McCain supports research using embryonic stem cells, which the platform opposes.

Palin called it a “strong platform” and told Dobson, “They are there, they are solid, we stand on them and, again, I believe that it is the right agenda for the country at this time.”

The Alaska governor talked by phone with Dobson for about 20 minutes Monday while she was in Colorado campaigning. Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program aired the interview Wednesday.

Dobson asked whether Palin was discouraged by polls showing the GOP ticket behind.

“To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder,” Palin said. “And it also strengthens my faith, because I’m going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God’s hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4. So I’m not discouraged at all.”

Palin has not focused on her faith on the campaign trail, but it clearly has energized evangelical leaders like Dobson, whose radio show reaches an estimated 1.5 million Americans daily.

Dobson has come around to supporting the McCain-Palin ticket after previously saying he could not in good conscience vote for McCain. He endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee late in the primaries.

Palin thanked Dobson and supporters for their prayers and — when Dobson inquired about the importance of faith in her life — said: “It is my foundation, yes, my Christian faith is.”

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McCain-Palin promise no bailouts like Freddie-Fannie

Republican White House hopefuls John McCain and Sarah Palin slammed the federal rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as “outrageous” but needed in a joint editorial published Tuesday.

“The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is another outrageous, but sadly necessary, step for these two institutions,” after years of mismanagement, the pair wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Given the long-term mismanagement and flawed structure of these two companies, this was the only short-term alternative for ensuring that hard-working Americans have access to affordable mortgages during this difficult economic period.” Presidential candidate McCain and his running-mate Palin called for permanent reform of the mortgage firms, saying that legislative failure led to “crisis management rather than sound planning.” If the Republican ticket were to win the White House, “we will make sure that they are permanently restructured and downsized, and no longer use taxpayer backing to serve lobbyists, management, boards and shareholders.” The pair warned that all federal spending would face scrutiny at the start of a McCain-Palin administration if they were to win the November 4 vote. “In the first 100 days of our administration, we will look at every agency and department and expenditure of the federal government and ask this simple question: Is it serving the needs of the taxpayer? If it is not, we will reform it or shut it down, and we will spend money only on what is truly in the interest of the American people,” they wrote. Under the plan announced at the weekend, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will get government-appointed chief executives and shed their mission of shareholder profit. The Treasury agreed to inject 100 billion dollars in each if needed. As expected, shares in the two firms were nearly wiped out in trade Monday — Freddie Mac plunged 83 percent to 88 cents and Fannie Mae slid 89 percent to 73 cents in closing trade. Overall stocks were higher, however. Fannie Mae was originally a government agency created during the Great Depression to help provide liquidity for housing. It was privatized in 1968 and Freddie Mac was chartered by Congress in 1970 to provide competition. advertising

Palin trounces Biden in poll

More Americans would cast ballots for Republican Sarah Palin than for Democrat Joe Biden if they were able to vote for a vice president independent of their presidential choice, a US poll released Tuesday found.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll of 1,022 adults taken September 5-7 found that if voters were allowed to vote just for president in November, the result would be a statistical tie between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, at 49 and 48 percent respectively. The poll’s margin of error was three percent.

 

In a hypothetical separate vote just for vice president, Alaska Governor Palin beat Senator Biden, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by 53 percent to 44 percent, the survey showed.

Obama scoffed at the Republican duo’s claims they are “original mavericks” who would stand up for hard-pressed voters on the MSNBC news channel on Monday.

“They are not telling the truth,” he said. “When you have somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.”

Obama was responding to Palin’s boast that she had intervened to kill a controversial federally-funded “bridge to nowhere,” a project she initially supported

Palin agrees with Bush even more than McCain

As he wrapped up his interview with Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama this evening, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and whether she is ready to be president. Obama demurred on that question, but told Countdown’s host that he has a different problem with Palin — he thinks she would be even more inclined to continue the Bush administration’s policies than McCain would be:

Olbermann: “One more campaign question. It pertains to not knowing someone or something. This is a question I have not really heard asked directly of anybody in a position perhaps to answer it, let alone answered.

“In your opinion, is Governor Palin experienced enough and qualified enough to become president of the United States in the relatively short-term future?

Obama: “Well, you know, I’ll let you ask Governor Palin that when I’m sure she’ll be appearing on your show.

“But rather than focus on a resume, I just want to focus on where she wants to take the country.

“As far as I can tell, there has not been any area, economic policy or foreign policy, in which she is different from John McCain or George Bush.

“In many ways, in fact, she agrees with George Bush even more than John McCain. So if John McCain agrees with Bush 90% of the time, maybe with her it’s 97%. And so my — the thrust of our argument is going to be that the McCain-Palin ticket is offering the same stuff that has resulted in the middle class struggling, not seeing their incomes go up, seeing their costs go up, falling deeper into debt, at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure, unable to save or retire.

“Those are going to be I think the issues that ultimately matter to the voters, and that’s why I’m trying to offer to them a very clear set of prescriptions, very clear ideas about what we intend to do, how we want to change the tax code, stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, give 95% of Americans tax relief.

“Have an energy policy that is serious about climate change, is serious about weaning ourselves off of Middle Eastern oil, investing in solar and wind and biodiesel so we’ve got energy independence and creating jobs here in the United States, having a health care system that makes sure that we don’t have 47 million people without health insurance.

“That message of possibility is, I think, the one that the American people are looking for.”

Part two of Olbermann’s interview airs tomorrow night at 8 p.m. ET. As we noted earlier, the interview Obama taped with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly for The O’Reilly Factor also continues tomorrow and Wednesday evenings, also at 8 p.m. ET.

Obama accuses Republican rivals of dishonesty

Barack Obama broadly accused his Republican rivals of dishonesty Monday, citing former lobbyists working for John McCain, Sarah Palin’s shifting stance on the “Bridge to Nowhere” and their promise to change Washington.

With national polls finding the Democratic presidential nominee trailing or in a dead heat with McCain, Obama began the campaign’s final eight-week push by criticizing McCain’s popular running mate as much as the Arizona senator himself.

He said Palin has an interesting biography — “Mother, governor, moose shooter. That’s cool,” he said — but the election should be about who can change people’s lives for the better. He said that won’t come from a Republican ticket that almost always supports the same positions as President Bush even though they say they will bring reform.

“I mean, you can’t just make stuff up,” Obama said of a new McCain ad that says Palin “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.” “You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.”

Obama wouldn’t go so far as to say McCain and Palin are lying, even when the audience tried to goad him into it, but he began showing an ad Monday that did.

“Politicians lying about their records?” an announcer asks over a shot of McCain and Palin boarding a plane. “You don’t call that maverick. You call it more of the same.”

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responded to the charges of dishonesty by saying: “Barack Obama should familiarize himself with the honest facts: John McCain and Governor Palin have actually reformed government to root out money in politics and fought wasteful spending — Sen. Obama has not.”

Obama’s ad was a response to the new McCain commercial called “Original Mavericks” that claims Palin stopped the bridge, a $400 million proposal to connect an island off Alaska with just 50 residents and an airport.

She originally voiced support for it during her campaign for governor, although she was critical of the size, and later abandoned plans for the project. She used the federal dollars for other projects in Alaska.

Obama said McCain’s claim that lobbyists will no longer run Washington when he’s president “doesn’t seem very plausible.”

“Sounds pretty good until you discover that seven of his top campaign managers and officials are — guess what? Former corporate lobbyists. So who is he going to tell?

“What they are going to try to do is what they always do, which is attack, go on the negative, distort, mislead, assert,” Obama said, as members of his invitation-only audience of 350 began yelling “Lie! Lie!” Obama just cocked his head in response as if to say he wasn’t going to go there.

Michigan has supported Democratic presidential candidates in the most recent elections, but it is up for grabs this year and is one of the few blue states Obama could be in danger of losing. Monday’s stops in Flint and Farmington Hills marked his third visit to Michigan in nine days, a time when Palin’s addition to the ticket has resulted in a bounce in the polls for the Republican ticket.

McCain won Michigan in the 2000 Republican primary but lost it to Mitt Romney in January, partly because of his unapologetic assessment that not all of Detroit’s lost auto industry jobs would be recovered.

Obama never competed in the state during the primaries as the national party punished Michigan and Florida for holding early contests, stripping them of their delegates. The Democratic presidential candidates largely bypassed the states.

The automotive manufacturing state has been especially hard hit by the economic downturn, and Obama spoke in front of fuel efficient hybrid vehicles that he says he would help Michigan produce to create jobs. The Illinois senator stoked frustrations among residents of the Flint area where the unemployment rate is more than 12 percent — double the national average.

“You don’t have to tell the people of Flint or the people of Michigan that our economy is not in good shape,” Obama said to shouts of “Yeah!” from the audience. “You do need to tell John McCain — because just a few weeks ago he said the economy was fundamentally sound.”

Obama said McCain can’t bring change when he votes with President Bush so often.

Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a “per diem” allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

This Story
Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home
Footing the Bill
Travel Authorization – State of Alaska
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

 

Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official “duty station” is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.

The governor’s daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel, and many of the trips were between their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.

Gubernatorial spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said Monday that Palin’s expenses are not unusual and that, under state policy, the first family could have claimed per diem expenses for each child taken on official business but has not done so.

Before she became the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, Palin was little known outside Alaska. Now, with the campaign emphasizing her executive experience, her record as mayor of Wasilla, as a state oil-and-gas commissioner and as governor is receiving intense scrutiny.

During her speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Palin cast herself as a crusader for fiscal rectitude as Alaska’s governor. She noted that she sold a state-owned plane used by the former governor. “While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor’s office that I didn’t believe our citizens should have to pay for,” she said to loud applause.

Speaking from Palin’s Anchorage office, Leighow said Palin dealt with the plane and also trimmed other expenses, including forgoing a chef in the governor’s mansion because she preferred to cook for her family. The first family’s travel is an expected part of the job, she said.

“As a matter of protocol, the governor and the first family are expected to attend community events across the state,” she said. “It’s absolutely reasonable that the first family participates in community events.”

The state finance director, Kim Garnero, said Alaska law exempts the governor’s office from elaborate travel regulations. Said Leighow: “The governor is entitled to a per diem, and she claims it.”

The popular governor collected the per diem allowance from April 22, four days after the birth of her fifth child, until June 3, when she flew to Juneau for two days. Palin moved her family to the capital during the legislative session last year, but prefers to stay in Wasilla and drive 45 miles to Anchorage to a state office building where she conducts most of her business, aides have said.

FACT: Palin For The Bridge to Nowhere

A new ad from John McCain’s presidential campaign contends his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.” In fact, Palin was for the infamous bridge before she was against it

THE SPIN: Called “Original Mavericks,” the ad asserts the Republican senator has fought pork-barrel spending, the drug industry and fellow Republicans, reforming Washington in the process, and credits Palin with similarly changing Alaska by taking on the oil industry, challenging her own party and ditching the bridge project that became a national symbol of wasteful spending.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton came back with fighting words. “Despite being discredited over and over again by numerous news organizations, the McCain campaign continues to repeat the lie that Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere,” he said.

Burton said McCain would merely carry on supporting President Bush’s economic, health, education, energy and foreign policies, and that means “anything but change.”

THE FACTS: Palin did abandon plans to build the nearly $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport. But she made her decision after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska, and after she had appeared to support the bridge during her campaign for governor.

McCain and Palin together have told a broader story about the bridge that is misleading. She is portrayed as a crusader for the thrifty use of tax dollars who turned down an offer from Washington to build an expensive bridge of little value to the state.

“I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere,” she said in her convention speech last week.

That’s not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.

“It’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” Palin said then.

Palin indicated during her 2006 campaign for governor that she supported the bridge, but was wishy-washy about it. She told local officials that money appropriated for the bridge “should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done.”

She vowed to defend Southeast Alaska “when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative” — something that McCain was busy doing at the time, as a fierce critic of the bridge.

Even so, she called the bridge design “grandiose” during her campaign and said something more modest might be appropriate.

Palin’s reputation for standing up to entrenched interests in Alaska is genuine. Her self-description as a leader who “championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress” is harder to square with the facts.

The governor has cut back on pork-barrel project requests, but in her two years in office, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. And as mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

MCCAIN THE MAVERICK

John McCain has an impressive personal story. Imprisoned by the North Vietnamese for five and a half years, mostly in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” he showed great courage, resilience and reservoirs of strength. It is the central narrative of his life, a theme he returns to again and again.

In choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, McCain picked another politician with an interesting personal narrative. Hers isn’t heroic — as his is — but it is still inspiring. A mother of five, she overcame long odds to oust the entrenched Republican governor in 2006. When she and her husband learned their fifth child would be born with Down syndrome, they didn’t terminate the pregnancy. That’s a decision I and many other Americans find admirable.

McCain hopes those compelling biographies will be enough to take him and his running mate over the line in November. Since personality matters as much as (and sometimes more than) policies — George W. Bush was elected in 2000 because he was Mr. Congeniality — the Arizona senator has decided to give short shrift to issues and go all out on charming personal stories.

“This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates,” his campaign manager, Rick Davis, told The Washington Post last week.

So it’s no surprise McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday night was heavy on biography and short on policy prescriptions. The short film that introduced him offered a romantic, Hollywood-esque arc: A rambunctious young man trying to earn his place in a family of war heroes goes off to the Naval Academy and becomes a fighter pilot; he is chastened by the torture he endures at the hands of his enemies; the young hero not only survives but triumphs, winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. It’s quite a tale, with the added dimension of truth.

McCain seemed most comfortable when he was speaking of the ideals he embraced in those years — honor, service, courage. But he was oddly lifeless and unconvincing when he rattled off a laundry list of domestic issues, touching on “school choice,” health insurance and taxes. That’s clearly not where his heart is.

Even less persuasive was his attempt to snatch the mantle of change from his rival, Barack Obama. (How many times did he use the word “change”?) McCain is 72 years old; besides, he is a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, which has held power for the last eight years. It’s hard to run as an insurgent if you’ve been part of the establishment.

The aging war hero apparently believes that he is still the “maverick,” the daring, even swashbuckling, senator who bucks a Republican machine to serve the interests of the people above the party — a “Mr. Smith” played by John Wayne instead of Jimmy Stewart. But that McCain gave up the good fight after his crushing defeat at the hands of Bush forces in the 2000 Republican presidential primary. Since then, the “maverick” has set about ingratiating himself to the same establishment he now vows to fight. He has adopted nearly every one of Bush’s failed policies.

Don’t be fooled by Palin. She’s just a fresh face to rev up the culture wars. She opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest; she urged an Alaska librarian to ban books; she believes “creationism” should be taught in public schools; she asked ministry students at her former church to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it “God’s will.” In choosing her, McCain caved in to the rigid Christianists who now form the core of the GOP.

Still, his gamble could well pay off. Even in a year when voters say they agree with Democrats on most issues, the polls still show the presidential contenders virtually tied. It’s a very close race.

No wonder. The John McCain on display as he closed his speech, speaking passionately of duty and sacrifice, is still a compelling figure. That McCain, who has not always been on display this season, is a man who wants to resist partisanship, a man who wants to clean up corruption, a man who would shrink from the vicious attacks his campaign has, in fact, run against Obama. If voters believe in that McCain and think that’s all the country needs, he wins.

But if the campaign is fought on the issues, McCain loses. That’s why he stays away from them.

Obama VS McCain: 7 Things To Watch

As Barack Obama and John McCain go barreling neck-and-neck into the homestretch, advisers for both men know one thing for certain: Nothing is.

More so than any presidential race in recent history, this one may be determined by forces beyond the control of either candidate.

How far will housing values fall? How far will oil prices rise? Will violence in Iraq erase the gains of the surge? Will Israel attack Iran? Will one of the Big Three automakers go bankrupt? Which neighbor will Russia attack next? Which bank will fail? Will terrorists strike the United States again?

It’s impossible to predict much about this race, but here are seven things to watch as the unknowns become knowns:

1. Will Obama profit from pain?

Voters say the economy is their number one concern — and in nearly every poll Barack Obama enjoys a substantial, but not commanding, 10- to 15-point advantage on economic issues.

He’s doing better than John Kerry or Al Gore did on the economy, he fares best in battleground states. A Democracy Corps survey taken during the GOP convention gave Obama an 11-point edge on the economy nationwide but a 15-point lead in swing states including Ohio, Nevada, Florida and Virginia.

But Obama hasn’t been able to translate that advantage into big leads over McCain in the states hit hardest by the economic downtown. In fact, the race has tightened in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and hard-hit Michigan — despite McCain’s support of unpopular free trade agreements, his less-than enthusiastic support of the housing bailout, his own profession of ignorance on economic matters and ample connections to Big Oil.

Race and class issues are probably sapping Obama’s support. But he’s also been hurt by nagging questions about his leadership experience as the GOP tries to shift the election from a referendum on Republican economic policies to a test of whether Obama is up to the job of president.

“The two immoveable objects in this campaign are that Bush takes the blame for the economy and that the economy favors the Democrats,” says Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center. “But it’s now coming down to the question of Obama’s leadership and capability . . . . McCain doesn’t have to win on the economy, just mitigate its impact, and reframe the issue as one about leadership.”

Added a Democratic pollster: “Don’t look at the unemployment rate. The key metric is the percentage of voters who think Obama is ready to lead. So far, that’s been around 50 to 58 percent. If that number stabilizes in the mid-50s, he’ll win.”

Then there’s the “bitter” pill. The Illinois senator spent his teen years on Food Stamps, but he’s had real trouble making white blue-collar Democrats believe that he feels their pain. And Republicans aren’t letting voters forget his claim that working-class voters are so “bitter” they cling to God and guns.

2. Has Palin Peaked?

Sarah Palin’s addition to the ticket probably exceeded her running mate’s wildest expectations: McCain has turned an eight-point deficit in the Gallup daily tracking poll into a three-point lead.

But McCain’s campaign has so far been able to protect Palin from any downside. Palin appeared before adoring crowds in the lower 48 last week, but she did so with the help of TelePrompters and under the protection of a journalist no-fly zone. On Sunday, the McCain campaign – facing increasing pressure — announced that Palin would have a sit-down with ABC’s Charlie Gibson.

How will the Alaska governor hold up under a grilling about the future of NATO, the mortgage securitization crisis or Troopergate? Joe Lieberman is reportedly giving her a rushed tutorial on foreign policy, but the potential for embarrassment remains significant despite Palin’s poise, sense of humor and innate smarts.

Some GOP analysts fret that her popularity has nowhere to go but down, as moderate women become more familiar with her staunch anti-abortion stance. And some are concerned that the conservative evangelicals who make up the party’s base — so jazzed by Palin’s selection — could sink back into a funk when they remember that Palin was just an appetizer while McCain remains the main course.

3. Can Joe Biden avoid the curse of Rick Lazio?

Palin’s biggest test comes on Oct. 2 in St. Louis, when she faces Joe Biden in what is certain to be the most eagerly anticipated and probably the most-viewed veep debate ever.

Biden hopes to portray the Alaska governor as a neo-Dan Quayle, an out-of-depth amateur unfit to serve as president. But perils abound for the verbose, occasionally overbearing Biden, who must negotiate a gender minefield Rick Lazio blundered into during his disastrous debate against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000.

“I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Joe Biden’s dressing room that night,” says Michael Franc of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “They are really going to coach him to restrain himself.”

4. The presidential candidates debate, too.

Until McCain picked Palin, the trio of presidential debates — scheduled for Sept. 26 at Ole Miss, Oct. 7 in Nashville and Oct. 15 in Long Island – seemed likely to the defining moments in the fall campaign. They still are.

“The margins are so tight and voters have so many questions about both guys. The potential for a major, game-changing slip-up is huge,” says Democratic consultant Jefrey Pollack.

Adds former Clinton pollster Geoff Garin: “The debates are the story this year… Voters need to take [the candidates’] temperature.”

Neither candidate is exactly a master of the form. McCain does best when he’s cracking collegial jokes, but he’s prone to missteps and shows unattractive flashes of anger from time to time. Obama is a polished performer but sometimes comes across as condescending or professorial. He makes his own share of mistakes, including the comment — during the recent Saddleback Forum — that a question about when life begins was above his “pay grade.” Over the weekend, Obama said his response to the question had been too flip, and that what he really meant was that he doesn’t “presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”

5. Will Hillary really help?

Obama needs Hillary Clinton on the trail – less to offset Palin than to deliver working-class whites who became her base during the primaries.

Exactly how much she’ll be used is up in the air. Obama’s people have presented Clinton with a list of places and dates. She’s amenable – under two conditions. First, she refuses to be a “Sarah Palin attack dog,” according to a person close to her. Second, she wants Obama campaign events to coincide with fundraisers to retire her $20 million-plus debt.

And what role will Bill Clinton play?

6. Wright back at you.

Obama complains that he didn’t much in the way of economic solutions at the Republican Convention. There’s something else he didn’t hear much: the name of Reg. Jeremiah Wright.

That won’t last.

It’s possible that McCain himself will attack Obama over his longtime relationship with the firebrand former preacher, but it’s far more likely that independent groups will run ads and barrage white, working-class voters with Wright-Obama emails during the homestretch.

And those same groups won’t be shy about dwelling on Obama’s more tenuous link to former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers.

7. Will Mount McCain erupt?

When Democratic operatives were gaming out a race against McCain earlier this year, one thing seemed certain to work in their favor: At some point, McCain would blow a gasket and undo months of political anger management.

A lot of Democrats still think it will happen, citing high-profile McCain blow-ups like his May 2007 tussle with Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn and noting that McCain seems to get more irascible when he’s fatigued.

“The anger issue raises questions about his age – and when you get right down to it, that’s Obama’s greatest weapon against him,” said a Democratic consultant.