Barack Obama outlines the McCain campaigns strategy for the next 3 months.  You might remember this speech from a different context (the 'race card' drama) but it takes on whole new levels of insight now.  As seen on americablog

http://www.americablog.com/2008/10/obama-predicted-gops-attack-strategy.html

damn straight barack.

In his op-ed for the NYTimes, Kristof worries about all the people who view Obama as an "Other".  Like those people on Lost.

seriously. This may be true for a certain centrally located portion of the US population, but in my opinion is pessimistic and limited perspective.  One thing that polls and people like kristof fail to take into consideration when they panic about all the ignorants out there are the massive amounts of new people that are registering to vote:  1. the youth vote- obama is obviously going to kill it here, and the 18-25 demographic in the US is huge. i think this youth base will be more influential in this election than in the past because people are actually excited about obama, as opposed to 2004 election w/ kerry, where it was more of "we have to stop bush".  2. the black and lower class vote- democrats are holding massive voter registrations across the country, especially in swing states.  they have already registered thousands of people.  Republicans are trying to combat new registration on charges of voter fraud.  guess who these new voters are going to vote for? (by the way, this is totally a message the the dems should be getting out)

if this election is as close as people think its going to be, it isnt hard to imagine states being decided by under 5,000 votes, and these new voters will make a difference.  There's a lot of talk of people who dont identify with obama, who think he's a muslim, but these people are never going to vote democrat anyway. What is more important are the people who DO identify (ie the new voters) with him, because whereas the ignorant bible belters have and will always be there (and are therefor easy to quantify), new voters are a much less cohesive group and this makes them more difficult to appraise.  

How much of an effect they will have is yet to be seen, but in an election that is so clearly "old" vs "new" i think that it is safe to count a vast majority of new voters as supporters for the "new" candidate.  

pure gold

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiOIEGM7XEs&eurl=http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/09/17/more-fun-with-retro-palin.aspx

Where's Joe Biden?  Apparently, he's been giving some great speeches, acording to The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn. 

Jason Zengerle, also at TNR, agrees and presented a great argument for why Biden will prove to be a successful choice after all the people begin to tire of the Sarah Palin story and regain interest in actual issues (a process that has hopefully been expediated by the Wall St. crisis)

Joe Biden is an effective ground weapon for the obama campaign and he is being put to good use.  i look forward  to watching him tear Palin apart in the VP debate.  Sarah Palin just isnt very knowlegable on many issues that are important on the nation level.  By the time the debate finally rolls around i expect thatshe will have been well rehearsed for her performance, but at least at that time she will have lost a good part of her star power.

there's been talk about the obama campaign using a rope a dope strategy of sorts this summer against the GOP political machine that engineered successful attack campaigns against john kerry, al gore and michael dukakis.

i hope that it's the case, because right now obama is in a great position with all the controversy catching up with mccain. the spotlight is finally on him and it's a little hot.

With this speech obama laid out his plans on the key issues and clearly differentiated himself from mccain in policy and campaign tone. this is a strong statement that turns the corner onto the final stretch of the campaign in aggressive and professional manner.

It's important to play the momentum cycles in an election and the mccain team made a large bid during the past couple of month with their attack campaign and their sensationalist vp selection. they have hit one peak and now it is time for obama take the momentum back in the other direction by finally opening up his full offensive like he did today in this speech.