New polls from North Carolina and Florida show Barack Obama edging slightly ahead of John McCain.

Hey, if Florida -- the least Southern of the Southern states -- goes for Obama, that’s it for McCain. But I still think Virginia is the most likely Southern state to flip. And if North Carolina goes to Obama -- and the Obama camp remains very excited and quietly confident about that proposition -- that almost surely means Virginia does, too.

Meanwhile, I wanted to recommend to readers the fine Salon piece by Dan Hoyle about Obama’s Hispanic-dependent Southwest strategy and his prospects for winning Nevada. If Obama wins there he probably holds Colorado and New Mexico, which he’ll need to do if those Southern states do not turn blue.

There was a strange coalition of nay votes on the House bailout bill Monday. Aside from obvious ones (e.g., members facing tough reelection fights), it was an odd bedfellowship of liberal Democrats and small-government conservatives, both worried about placing the costs of the bailout squarely on the backs of working-class taxpayers.

Enter Obama. "To the Democrats and Republicans who opposed this plan yesterday, I say: Step up to the plate and do what's right for this country," Obama said in Reno, Nev., earlier today. "And to all Americans, I say this: If I am president of the United States, this rescue plan will not be the end of what we do to strengthen this economy. It will only be the beginning."

Obama is making a gutsy gamble here. A lot of Americans are wary about the bailout, which is why there were too few "ayes" on the floor yesterday. As I suggested yesterday, Obama could demonstrate his leadership skills by figuring out a legislative solution that would keep the current coalition together and add 10-20 more votes. There are several black and Hispanic Democrats who voted nay, and they are as good a group as any to approach first. (Most come from safe districts.)

If he's going to lend his voice to the bailout plan, he might as well put his back into it, too. Yes, the Republicans are going to try to prevent him from taking too much credit. But if Obama can negotiate a plan that would add those final dozen or so votes to give it a clear winning margin, he could own the moment.

On the other hand, given the bailout's unpopularity he could suffer some blame. Again, it's risky. But he is also politically insulated because John McCain supports the bailout, so his point of differentiation is not on his position but, rather, on the demonstration of political effectiveness and presidential-caliber leadership in advancing that position.

Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent has some thoughts of his own on the matter.

The past two years we have witnessed the transformation of John McCain from a maverick to a mimic. Still smarting from his 2000 primary loss to George W. Bush, and after soiling his reputation in 2004 by rushing to the president's reelection defense, by 2007 McCain realized that the only way he could make it to the White House was to change his stripes and adopt the reckless ideology and empty platitudes that brought Bush to power.

But let's be fair about McCain's historical voting pattern: If you look at McCain's National Journal voting history since he arrived in the Senate in 1987, he is a moderate. "In the first eight years after his 1986 election, McCain was typically among the more conservative GOP senators," writes the Journal. "But starting in 1995, he became more moderate." And his voting record most of this decade was pretty consistently down the middle. This was the old John McCain, the guy who once opposed Bush's tax cuts and supported immigration reform and campaign finance reform.

Of course, McCain missed so many votes in 2007 while running for president he didn't even earn a National Journal score last year. Once he set his sights on the White House, the former POW went MIA.

A related note: You might notice from the same link above that Barack Obama was ranked most liberal senator in 2007. This is the source of the Republican talking point you hear all the time. But Obama was not the most liberal in either 2005 (16th) or 2005 (10th). And while there is a strong case to make that Obama will in fact be the most liberal candidate ever elected to the presidency, should he win, if McCain trots out the "most liberal senator" line in the next two debates Obama ought to just say, "Well, at least I was around enough for the National Journal to give me a rating ... whereas you, Senator, have missed so many votes you don't have a rating." (On the other hand, I'm guessing Team Obama doesn't want to draw any more attention than necessary to that 2007 "most liberal" rating.)

Last week Salon published a pretty good round table on the subject of presidential debates that featured Democratic advisor Mark Fabiani, Republican consultant Russ Schriefer and the Atlantic's Jim Fallows.

In Time magazine this week, former John McCain advisor Mike Murphy offers his thoughts on how to have a successful debate performance. The most applicable part of Murphy's advice, especially as it might pertain to vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, may be this section:

A lot of debate prep is given over to mastering another basic rule: never make the rookie's mistake of actually trying to answer the question you are asked. Candidates are told instead to quickly "pivot" into their central campaign message whenever possible.

Question: "Governor, why is your hair on fire?"

Answer: "Nobody understands fire better than America's brave firefighters, which is why I'm so proud to say that the heroes who make up the National Firefighters Association took one look at my 11-point plan for comprehensive national health-care reform and strongly endorsed me as the only candidate in this race who is standing up for working, middle-class families who need health care now." Also, always keep talking until the moderator is forced to stop you with a foghorn blast or by reaching for an elephant gun under the desk. Airtime is gold.

Palin is going to be doing this a lot -- turning a question as quickly as possible onto the safe ground of a prepackaged answer. To be fair, she will hardly be the first or last candidate to do so.

But I wonder if the "airtime is gold" rule applies. The longer she is on-screen, the more she talks, the better it is for her? Maybe. Maybe not.

On a related note, Joe Biden might do himself a world of good by stopping at one point during the debate (but only once) to say he yields the balance of his response time on some question to Palin. The media would like nothing more than a sound bite in which Biden, who has a reputation for living by the the airtime-is-gold maxim, goes silent without prompting -- and in which Palin, perhaps caught off guard, has to think quickly on her feet to deliver a non-prepackaged answer.

Update: According to a new Marist poll, Americans are very curious about Thursday night's debate. Forty-five percent expect Biden to win; 36 percent, Palin. But be careful, Joe: By a whopping 65 percent to 23 percent margin, those surveyed think Palin will come across as more likable.

The crafty dodger is at it again. The McCain campaign is using a Clinton to criticize Barack Obama, but this time it's Bill, not Hillary. Check out the new ad, "Rein," in which Senator Deregulation attempts to use Bill Clinton's words to blame the financial crisis on Obama and the Democrats.

Is there any bottom to the McCain campaign? Seriously: Is there?

Monday, John McCain was lamenting the demise of the bailout plan. "I was hopeful that the improved rescue plan would have had the votes needed to pass," he said. Today, the Republican National Committee's independent expenditure unit has gone up with an advertisement that appears to attack that same plan.

As Ben Smith reports, the ad was sent out before the plan failed -- the spot seems as if it was designed to attack its successful passage. As Christopher Orr has noted, though, the ad seems to be proof that the independent arm of the RNC and the McCain team aren't illegally coordinating their activities. (The RNC and the McCain campaign are legally allowed to coordinate, but this independent entity may not legally coordinate with either the RNC or the McCain camp.) Unless, of course, it's all part of a clever plan to leave voters utterly confused about where the Republican Party and its presidential candidate stand on the economy.

After the bailout bill tanked Monday, some commentators, including several on the right, wondered if the Democrats shouldn't abandon the attempt to cobble together a rickety centrist compromise, and simply use their majority power to ram through a more progressive bill. On the right, the Corner's Jim Manzi wrote, "If I were a senior Democrat right now, I'd introduce a Democratic alternative tomorrow and pass it on a party line vote." Conservative blogger Noah Millman echoed him: "Tomorrow, the Democrats [ought to] introduce their own bill, pass it on a party-line vote, and dare the Administration to veto." (For a liberal making the same suggestion, see Matthew Yglesias here.)

But, as always, the blogosphere contains voices of doubt as well. Ezra Klein writes,

The defecting Democrats look to be Blue Dogs -- which is to say, somewhat conservative, generally vulnerable, Democrats -- and members of the Black and Hispanic caucuses. A more liberal bill might get the latter two. It will lose 90 Republican votes. It won't get the Blue Dogs. And you'll lose a few dozen more Democrats who needed the bipartisan cover.

But even if such a bill could pass, it's important to remember that those voices on the right urging the Democrats forward are focused on the potential political reward, not the risk. Populist anger from both right and left seems to be running rampant against the bailout, meaning that the foot-dragging Democrats in Congress are more in tune than the party leadership with popular opinion. In the much-quoted USA Today/Gallup poll that pegged support for the bailout at only 22 percent, 81 and 80 percent called caps on CEO pay and support for homeowners "very" or "somewhat" important. That's why a moderate freshman Democrat from a red-tinted district like Kirsten Gillibrand can vote no, arguing against the bailout from the left. The issue for recalictrant Dems may not be not whether any bailout bill passes on a party-line vote or with broad support from both parties. The Blue Dogs aren't looking for bipartisan cover -- they're looking for populist cover. They want to be able to go home and say, "I voted to bail out Main Street, not Wall Street." It's perverse, but the Blue Dogs and the progressive and minority Democrats -- the right and left ends of the party -- seem to have opposed the bill on essentially the same grounds.

If it was unfamiliar before the titanic primary clash between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the so-called Bradley effect no longer is: It is the disconnect between the higher percentage of people who, in the interest of giving the socially acceptable answer, tell pollsters they will vote for a minority candidate and the (lower) share who, in the privacy of the voting booth, actually do.

Political scientists today who study what's called the "new racism" say, however, that while the underlying stereotypes remain, what's new is how they are expressed (or rather not expressed) publicly. Because social scorn attends public expressions of overt racism, neoracists are more subtle: For instance, they may talk about "welfare spending" and support "school choice" as a substitute for saying "Let's not give public funds to black people"; or they trumpet "family values" as code for expressing their belief that minorities don't have them.

The downside of all this is that the underlying sentiments persist -- although I like to think and truly believe that the share of Americans who harbor such ideas decreases with each day, and as each new generation replaces its parents and grandparents. One in every 15 new marriages in America is mixed race, and the offspring of those marriages are thus mixed-race kids; we can take heart that things can only improve as we move forward.

If there is an upside, however, it is that the Bradley effect is disappearing, as scholars have demonstrated. The reason this is an upside is that there should, in theory, be fewer surprises on Election Day -- fewer disconnects between the final polling numbers and the voting results. (This presumes that the polling methods and sampling are accurate in other ways, of course, which is not always true.) And Democrats, in particular, should take heart in the disappearing Bradley effect this cycle because, well, because the party's presidential candidate is an African-American.

Now, having said all of that, I think we are still in terra nova here. This is the first major-party black presidential nominee, and if there's a residual Bradley effect at work it makes logical sense that it would adversely affect a black Democrat. So I'm not convinced that there will not be a small difference between the final national polls and Obama's total. (Of course, his superior field campaign could neutralize and, thus, mask these effects; indeed, my suspicion is that, relative to final polling numbers, Obama's field campaign may be worth a 2-point bump, and the Bradley effect may account for a 2-point loss.)

The point is this: People who say Obama had better be up by 8 or 10 points in the polls fret too much because the Bradley effect ain't what it used to be.

David Frum previously expressed his concerns about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. In today's New York Times, he says what other conservatives dare only think privately:

"I think she has pretty thoroughly -- and probably irretrievably -- proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States," David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who is now a conservative columnist, said in an interview. "If she doesn't perform well [in Thursday's vice presidential debate], then people see it.

"And this is a moment of real high anxiety, a little bit like 9/11, when people look to Washington for comfort and leadership and want to know that people in charge know what they are doing."

Well, yeah.

Over the weekend, the Politico reported that some Republicans are talking about dumping Palin. As Harper's Ken Silverstein correctly argues, that's never going to happen. McCain, who prides himself on his stubborn judgment, would be sunk if he dropped her. The base would go beserk. He's stuck with her, so we're stuck with her.

Clear your calendars for Thursday night's Biden-Palin debate. It could be quite the spectacle.

Let me preface what I am about to say with the usual caveats about how, in politics, five weeks is a lifetime and anything can happen and polls are sometimes unreliable, and blah, blah, blah. And yes, included in the remaining 35 days are two more presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate. But if Barack Obama holds his current lead and wins this election, we are going to look back on last week and this one as the pivotal fortnight during which John McCain and, more broadly, the Republican-conservative political project finally came undone.

Some of this unraveling has to do with the economic situation and the bailout issue. Some of it has to do with a Republican candidate who, with a straight face, can defend hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts (after initially opposing them), yet complain about $3 million in pork-barrel spending to study the DNA of bears. Some if it has to do with what our own Rebecca Traister powerfully describes as the national insult -- not only to women but especially to them -- of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, a decision that simultaneously reveals the thinness of the Republican national bench and the GOP’s complete and mendacious misunderstanding of gender politics.

But mostly it has to do with the fact that a 72-year-old candidate literally embodies a party and an ideology that have grown old in a hurry, and how the personal resentments that candidate exhibits toward his opponent merely confirm that party’s fear of new ideas and the future. Strip away the superficial narratives and horse-race distractions and we see that McCain is a late adopter, the inheritor of a dying movement that mythologizes a past that never really existed and, even if it did, isn't returning anyway. This is why the senator from Arizona flails around, gasping for air and behaving as if he were unaware that he and his followers have reached the point where nothing -- not even a young, cheeky, tabula rasa governor from a separatist state -- can save them.