Maybe the media outlets that have been pushing the Obama’s-not-getting-a-bounce theme jumped the gun. The latest Gallup daily tracking poll – the result of interviews conducted between Monday and Wednesday nights this week – finds Obama pulling ahead by six points, 48 percent to John McCain's 42 percent. That’s a clear jump for Obama from earlier this week, when Gallup showed John McCain actually edging into the lead by a point.

This is hardly surprising. Convention bounces don’t usually appear until a few days into the convention, or even just after the nominee’s acceptance speech – the idea that polls released earlier this week said anything about whether this convention had been helpful to Obama was rather silly to begin with.  read more »

The prospect of Joe Biden joining Barack Obama’s ticket, which seems to have grown more real in recent days, raises an interesting possibility: another Biden presidential campaign.

Given how his campaign turned out this year, the idea of Biden ever seeking the White House again seems (and probably is) unlikely. But, at least in theory, a tour de force performance as the VP nominee – think Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 – could spark popular interest in a future Biden presidential campaign that was missing in this past one. If Obama were to lose, Biden (again, theoretically) might then have a shot at the 2012 nomination (much the way the ’92 nomination was essentially Bentsen’s for the taking after his ’88 performance).  read more »

Tim Kaine’s stock as a potential running-mate for Barack Obama has dropped markedly in the last day, with the news that Mark Warner, Kaine’s predecessor as Virginia’s governor, will be the keynote speaker at the convention in Denver.

The thinking, widely repeated in the media yesterday and this morning, is that Warner’s selection effectively excludes Kaine from the V.P. hunt since the Obama campaign wouldn’t want two Virginians occupying the featured speaking roles on two consecutive convention nights. As Keith Olbermann put it on his MSNBC show last night:

Warner's rising star might actually dim the VP chances for Virginia's current governor, Tim Kaine on this simple theory.

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Every four years, involving one party or the other, it seems that we get a batch of stories just like today’s Washington Post write-up on a possible platform fight between John McCain and the G.O.P.’s right wing.

It’s almost always much ado about nothing. Tension between the nominee of either party – who is interested in projecting a moderate, inclusive image to the general-election audience – and that nominee’s red-meat-hungry party base are inevitable. But party platforms themselves do not influence mass opinion – the pictures and sounds that come out of the convention do.  read more »

Obviously, Democrats want voters to be thinking about John McCain’s age and fretting over whether it might be eating away at his mental faculties. There’s no other reason why party’s anti-McCain talking points would call for surrogates to so prominently slip forms of the word “confused” into attacks on the soon-to-be 72-year-old Republican candidate.

In a Wednesday conference call that received much attention, Susan Rice, one of Obama’s national security advisors, talked about McCain’s “disturbing, even disconcerting, pattern of confusing the basic facts and reality that pertain to Iraq,” while John Kerry called his Senate colleague “confused” – a word he repeated several times in an MSNBC interview later in the day. It’s not the first time Democrats have played this card this year, and it surely won’t be the last.  read more »

Think Barack Obama can get away with an ad like this in the fall? 

This year, Republicans have chosen to nominate for president a war hero and longtime senator with one losing White House bid under his belt. In 1996, the party put up a 73-year-old war hero and longtime senator who already had two failed White House campaigns to this name.

On this basis, it has become fashionable to compare John McCain to Bob Dole, the septuagenarian whose listless ’96 effort established the low-water mark for Republicans in the post-Goldwater era—159 electoral votes and 41 percent of the national popular vote.

Reflecting on Mr. McCain’s recent biography-themed campaign swing and a new ad, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat wrote that the G.O.P. standard-bearer “pushes all my Dole-redux buttons.”  read more »

Yesterday Bob Dole came to the defense of John McCain in a letter to Rush Limbaugh that hailed McCain as a "mainstream conservative."

In a television appearance this morning on Fox & Friends, Mitt Romney told the host, Dole is "the last person I would want to write a letter for me."

Now, McCain is returning the favor. His campaign just issued the following statement:

"Governor Romney's attack on Bob Dole is disgraceful, and Governor Romney should apologize. Bob Dole is a war hero who has spent his life in service to this nation and nobody has worked harder to build the Republican Party. Bob Dole deserves the respect of every American and certainly every Republican.

Full statement after the jump.  read more »

The ad guy, Jimmy Siegel, also writes thrillers, but doesn't seem to have any political experience. He's best known for selling a product that every consumer advocating lawman can stand behind: credit cards. He made Visa ads for BBDO, including that Bob Dole spot, but left the agency after it lost the Visa contract last fall.