The war of nastiness and hyperbole is escalating further as the presidential campaign moves to within 17 days of the general election, and today John McCain chose to accuse the Obama-Biden ticket of nothing short of quasi-socialism. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden fired back, suggesting that the McCain-Palin rhetoric was getting not only overheated, but also downright shrill and distorted, and accused McCain of playing fast-and-loose with the truth about McCain's own tax and health care proposals.

Obama appears to benefiting from a gradual but inexorable flow of energy in his direction. At a rally in a park near the arch in St. Louis, Obama spoke to a crowd which police estimated at between 185,000 and 200,000--possibly the largest single candidate political event in history. McCain is drawing large crowds as well, but nothing on the scale of what Obama has seen lately.

At McCain events, the Senator from Arizona is offering what he sees as an unvarnished but seldom spoken truth about Obama: that Obama is a re-distributor of wealth, a big government, big spender, and a borderline socialist who thinks all the answers can be found through federal intervention and support. Obama, on the other hand, now routinely suggests that McCain's tax rebate/tax cut plans designed to offer Americans a source of money for health and medical care is nothing more than a clever scam since McCain's plan would also turn around and tax those very benefits. Further, Obama says that McCain will offer still more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, hardly something that will benefit middle class and working class citizens.

In this dismal debate, however, Obama wins. At no point in the last 80 years have Americans felt as uneasy and discouraged about their future. And in election years, economic chaos and volatility trump even war as the central catalyst for the majority of voters--most especially when their own pocketbooks and wallets are being hurt. Even as McCain scrupulously tries to distance himself from eight years of the George W. Bush legacy, those noisy cans remained tied to his tail.

Indeed, McCain faces the most difficult challenge of his more than thirty years in public office. Most news organizations and independent polling groups have shown a steady flow of support toward Obama during the past ten days, most dramatically just within the last week. States once considered keystones for the GOP map-Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Nevada-are now up for grabs, making the Electoral College math for McCain very difficult indeed. If you also remove Colorado from the list of states teetering between the two major candidates (Colorado is likely to swing to Obama in the final days) you end up with two columns that look something like this:

Obama states		McCain states
New York	31	Texas	34
California	55	Arizona	10
New Jersey	15	Alabama	9
Illinois	21	Oklahoma	7
Hawaii	4	Wyoming	3
Oregon	7	Tennessee	11
Washington	11	North Carolina	15
Wisconsin	10	Kansas	6
Minnesota	10	Nebraska	5
D.C.	3	South Dakota	3
Maryland	10	West Virginia	5
Massachusetts	12	Louisiana	9
Michigan	17	Utah	5
Pennsylvania	21	Idaho	4
Missouri	11	Mississippi	6
Iowa	7	Arkansas	6
New Mexico	5	Georgia	15
Virginia	13	South Carolina	8
Maine	4	North Dakota	3
Delaware	3	Alaska	3
Vermont	3	Kentucky	8
Rhode Island	4	Montana	3
Connecticut	7	Indiana	11

Florida, Ohio and Missouri will remain heavily contested battlegrounds for both candidates.  Each candidate plans numerous appearances in all three states between now and Election Day. Neither candidate can afford to take anything for granted, but for McCain—the pressure is far greater.  

McCain is seeking—perhaps too late in the game—a way to separate himself from the eight years of George W. Bush—no easy task.  Voters are seeking change, and not the lip service, bumper sticker brand of change advertised frequently over the last couple of decades. Obama is seeking to recapture the kind of change that Ronald Reagan once achieved at the ballot box in November of 1980, when voters were fed-up with decades of Democratic management of Washington and lockstep thinking among the federal apparatchiks.  McCain—justly or unjustly—is tied to the party responsible for George W. Bush, and the GOP—justly or unjustly—is now tied to a meltdown of the economy and the vanishing nest eggs of millions of Americans.

John McCain will now pour maximum effort and resources into every public appearance, every interview and much of his advertising to try to distance himself from the Bush years while not appearing caddy or disloyal.  And not since Gerald Ford attempted to remove himself from the legacy of Richard Nixon has a Republican faced such a monumental challenge.  Many historians believe that Ford succeeded somewhat during the final weeks of the campaign in 1976, dramatically closing the gap between himself and challenger Jimmy Carter, but it was not enough—many voters still linked Ford directly or indirectly to Watergate.  Carter, like Obama today, had the opportunity to seize the historical moment and channel voter frustrations, positioning himself prominently as the true agent of change for a broken Washington.

But in politics, much can happen in two weeks.  Obama’s chief strategists and managers worry about complacency and overconfidence—a potential game stealer in close elections.  Low voter turnout or mishandled polling data have proved fatal to Democratic candidates in the past, and Obama wants every supporter to actually show up on Election Day.  Official emails from the Obama campaign stress the importance of early voting where it is an option, and online fundraising efforts continue around the clock. The campaign is also stepping up its carpet-bomb advertising in as many TV markets as time and money will allow—and in Obama’s case, the cash flow seems almost limitless.  The Obama campaign reported another fundraising record, nearly $120 million in September, the highest 30 day take in U.S. history and triple what McCain raised during the same month.

And the Obama campaign also fears the hidden damage of what is known in politics as the Bradley Effect.  The theory is this: when Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor of California in 1982, polling data from a variety of sources—GOP, Democratic, news agency—showed millions of white voters receptive to the idea of voting for an African-American for governor.  Indeed, almost all polls showed Democrat Bradley with a seven to nine point lead right up to Election Day.  But at the end of the day Bradley lost the election to Republican George Deukmejian by less than 100,000 votes.  Somewhere hundreds of thousands of potential Bradley votes dissolved.  Studies later revealed that many whites had answered polling questions with politically correct responses—unable or unwilling to say that they might have a problem casting a vote for a black candidate. Other white voters simply changed their minds, possibly at the last minute and in the privacy of the voting booth.

Later, in 1989, when Douglas Wilder ran for governor of Virginia, polling by both parties and by independent groups showed Wilder with a huge lead—as much as 10 percent—right up to Election Day.  But when the votes were counted, Wilder had won by only about 9/10ths of a percentage point—a breathtaking squeaker compared to what the polling data indicated should have been a blowout.  Wilder was the victor, and he became the first African-American governor since reconstruction, but the Bradley Effect had nearly stripped him of the prize.

Obama and his top strategists want to avoid any such misreading of the current poll numbers, and they have a not-so-secret-weapon: voter turnout. Many Democratic strategists believe that Obama has the ability to overcome the Bradley Effect because of the massive voter turnout that his candidacy has driven so far this year in the caucuses and primaries, a turnout they hope to repeat in November.  The Obama campaign is targeting many of the densely African-American precincts, wards, and Congressional districts, but the campaign is also concentrating on college towns across the nation.  This means especially vigorous campaign activity in the swing states of Ohio, North Carolina and Florida.  A big turnout in North Carolina cities with large black populations—Charlotte, Greensboro, Wilmington or Jacksonville, to name some examples—would be coupled with heavy targeting of voter turnout in college towns, such as Durham, Chapel Hill, Greenville and Winston-Salem.  In Florida the same dynamic would apply.  Obama’s forces will push for heavy turnout along the Interstate 4 corridor—Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, Winter Park—while also driving up turnout in the college towns of Tallahassee, Boca Raton, Deland and Gainesville.  High voter turnout in these pockets could make a difference in the case of a close race in a single state (like Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004).

Obama also hopes to benefit from the unprecedented swell in voter participation and heavy Democratic registration that became one of the interesting side stories during the long primary and caucus season.  Democratic voter registration has outstripped GOP voter drives by large margins all year, but in the final months of Obama’s epic battle with Senator Hillary Clinton, millions of Americans participated in the political process for the first time.  Obama hopes to keep this momentum alive right through the general election.  

Obama may also be struggling to overcome the powerful tug of center and center-right Democrats toward GOP presidential candidates—a gravitational force that has robbed non-southern Democrats from Hubert Humphrey to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis.  Call it the Hillary Effect.  These primarily working class voters are predisposed at heart to be old school Democrats, but the party more-or-less abandoned them as a major constituency in the early 1980s.  Many of these voters remain registered as Democrats, but they have—more times than not—voted for Republicans for President, punishing people like George McGovern and John Kerry and rewarding a long string of GOP candidates from Nixon to Reagan to Bush.  And it is not coincidental that the only two Democrats to break this pattern since 1968 were from the south.

Hillary Clinton learned the language of these voters and managed, unlike almost any other Democrat of the last few decades, to rally them around her campaign and its message of center-left populism.  But in the brutal and nearly endless primary fight her message resonated so well that it may have left deep scars among Democrats, and Obama strategists still worry that many of these voters—inclined though they may be toward Obama’s larger theme of change—may revert to their pattern of voting Republican on Election Day.

So Obama and his team want to build a pad of ten percent or greater as a counter measure to any of these wild cards.  Not content to sit on their apparent lead in the current Electoral College math, Obama’s strategists are seeking to change large chunks of the map blue for this election, and that includes some of the most reliable Republican turf, such as Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.With barely two weeks to go, the challenge seems insurmountable for John McCain.  But the challenge is also stringent for Barack Obama. Neither candidate can take anything for granted.