Do the math

James Forsyth 11:32am

The crucial number on Tuesday night is 270, that’s the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency. The Obama campaign has multiple options for getting to 270. Karl Rove’s map, which is based on public state by state polling, has Obama with 311 supposedly solid electoral college votes with another 70 too close to call.

Realistically, it is hard to see McCain winning every toss up state and peeling off Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire from Obama’s column which is his quickest route to 270. McCain needs the race to change nationally, to be reframed around who would be an effective Commander in Chief—a question on which he still leads.

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Could McCain's Pennsylvania gamble be paying off?

James Forsyth 12:52pm

Last night’s Barack Obama infomercial was a typically high-quality, well produced Obama product. There wasn’t much in it that was audacious but it sold the Obama message effectively and made him appear a safe choice. But this morning, spirits will have been raised in the McCain camp by a new poll which shows him within four points in Pennsylvania, a blue state that McCain now probably has to win to get to 270.

This is the first bit of good polling news the McCain campaign has had in a while....

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The Republicans musn't do a Hague with Jindal

James Forsyth 5:52pm

If, as the poll are suggesting, John McCain goes down to defeat on Tuesday then the Republican infighting is going to be brutal. The three wings of the party—social, economic and national security conservatives—have little in common these days and worst of all blame each other for the party’s problems.

There is, though, one figure who all wings of the party respect and would be a credible presidential candidate in 2012: Bobby Jindal. Jindal ticks the conservative ideological boxes, is whip smart—he was a Rhodes scholar and is proving to be a...

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Quietly effective

James Forsyth 12:51pm

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The McCain campaign's final week gets off to a bad start

James Forsyth 1:48pm

Mike Allen reports that in conversation with him “a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description [of Palin], calling her “a whack job.” Now, this is—to put it mildly—unhelpful. The idea of Palin ‘going rogue’ is catnip to the press and this quote will dominate at least the first news cycle of the day.

The McCain campaign is down in every key battleground state with a week to go. They are going to have to turn in one of the great final week performances in campaign history to turn this round. They cannot afford to lose news cycles to distractions like this. Instead, they need to remind the electorate that the next president will inherit two wars and will probably have to work out how to stop Iran going nuclear in his first term.
 

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The press and Obama

James Forsyth 11:13pm

Jack Shafer has a typically cutting piece about the press and how it will deal with an Obama victory:

“But if Obama wins, these scribes know that they'll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They've all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama's candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can't file garden-variety pieces about the "winds of change" blowing through Washington. They're convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time? they're asking

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McCain has let his party restrict him too much

James Forsyth 8:45pm

No commentator has been as consistently worth reading this election season as David Brooks. His column today sums up how the McCain campaign has failed to match McCain’s record in public life:

“McCain would be an outstanding president. In government, he has almost always had an instinct for the right cause. He has become an experienced legislative craftsman. He is stalwart against the country’s foes and cooperative with its friends. But he never escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times. And that’s

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The main reason why McCain is losing

James Forsyth 5:55pm

The post-mortems are already beginning on John McCain’s campaign. There is plenty for folk to get stuck into—the lack of a domestic policy message, the Palin pick, the failure to distance from Bush until so late in the campaign—but McCain is trailing principally because he is a national security candidate in what has turned into an almost exclusively economic election.

As Steve Hayes notes, back in 2007 the most important issue in picking a president for both Republicans and Democrats were national security related—terrorism for Republicans, Iraq for Democrats....

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The cost of Palin

James Forsyth 6:54pm

David Frum has a comparison which brings home to you just how much the RNC spent on a new wardrobe for Sarah Palin:

“The median monthly mortgage payment in the US in 2007 was about $1500. In other words, Sarah Palin spent very nearly as much on clothing in a single month as the typical American family will spend on housing over the next ten years.”

While the New York Times reports that for the first two weeks in October, Plain’s travelling make-up artist was the best paid person on the McCain campaign.
Now, I appreciate that it is more expensive to be a female candidate in these respects than a male one. But at a time when the McCain campaign is being outspent by Obama this really doesn’t seem like the best use of the campaign’s cash.

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What should McCain's final roll of the dice be?

James Forsyth 5:48pm

The state polling numbers are grim for McCain right now. One poll today even had Obama up by 10 in Indiana, a state Bush won by 20 points. McCain clearly needs to do something to shake things up. Mike Murphy, who worked on McCain’s 2000 campaign but in recent months has been a critic of the style of McCain’s campaign, has an intriguing idea:

“There is no state by state way to break out of the campaign's current spiral. Trips to Iowa will not do it. McCain has to go global...

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