Election Round-Up

**Obama has a 15 point lead over McCain in a shock poll from Newsweek. I found that to be highly unlikely- but it could be true. According to the article Obama is in a better position at this point than both Gore and Kerry were- which is good, but beware Dukakis! He too, had a 17 point lead and look what happened to him!

**MoveOn.org is closing its 527 in response to Obama's campaign. My blood pressure just went down a notch, thank God.

**There's some flak about Obama's decision to opt out of taking public money this electoral cycle. He's the first candidate since Watergate to do so- and the cries are going up that he's being a hypocrite and he's flip-flopping and so on and so forth. I don't think he's flip-flopping or being hypocritical about it- in fact, I think he makes an important point: the system is broken, so why play by the rules? Plus, we have to consider that Obama has changed the financial model of Presidential elections as we know it. This isn't a typical election and this isn't a typical candidate. He's not a corporate sponsored candidate, he's getting donations from small donors and individuals. I could see the sense of limits with public money if Obama was running the typical campaign with corporate contributions, but he's not, so the argument against it works in my book. Any-hoo, some thoughts on a David Brooks column and commentary from Althouse here.