Barack Obama is starting to narrow down the top priorities he’d send to Congress if he wins on Tuesday. And, as many on Capitol Hill have suspected, he’s saying everything else on his agenda takes a backseat to jump-starting the economy.

In an interview this afternoon with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Obama said his top priority would be an economic stimulus bill, possibly including the middle-class tax cuts he has proposed. “That may be the first bill that I’ll introduce,” Obama said. (Presidents can’t technically introduce bills, but we’ll let that one go.)

After that, Obama said his next priority would be to ask Congress to pass his energy plan, followed by an overhaul of the health care system, a rewrite of the tax code, and restructuring the education system.

It was a unique look at the timing Obama has in mind for his major initiatives, because adapting to the economic crisis — and not giving Congress more than it can handle at any one time — would be critical to his success if he wins the White House.

For example, some veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration believe his 1994 health care overhaul effort failed because he waited until the second year of his presidency, too late to push such a major initiative. At the same time, though, top congressional Democrats believe Obama wouldn’t get very far with his health care plan if he tried to lead off with it, given the budgetary constraints created by the economic crisis.

His rankings could also be an indicator that the tax code and education rewrites are less likely to get done soon. If they slip until after the first year, Congress will already be in re-election mode, which might make lawmakers less likely to want to work on anything too ambitious.

Still, Obama seems to be in agreement with Democratic leaders that “none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system and financial system,” as he told Blitzer. “So that’s priority number one — making sure the plumbing works.”

You realize what that makes him, right? Barack the Plumber. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Barack Obama’s 30-minute network ad tonight did a skillful job of weaving dry policy proposals into a series of compelling personal stories. But he left out a significant piece of his health care plan, an omission that raises question of how hard he’d really push for it.

The way Obama described his health care plan, it sounded remarkably painless. “Every American has a right to affordable health care,” he said, and then noted that many hospitals are cutting costs through technology and computerized records.

“That’s why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions, and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year, and you can keep your same coverage and your same doctor,” Obama said, as little captions hit the high points of his plan.

Sounds great, right? So what’s the catch? It might be the part where large businesses have to cover their workers or pay into a new public health plan. That’s the part that’s often called “pay or play,” and it includes the “fine” that John McCain has talked so much about (actually, a percentage of payroll that would help fund the national plan).

It’s exactly the kind of requirement that could face resistance from the business community, which, of course, helped kill the Clintons’ health care overhaul effort in 1994. That’s especially true in such a tough economic climate. And yet, if Obama can’t get that provision through Congress, his health care plan can’t make as much of a dent in the number of uninsured Americans.

Business groups, it must be said, are more worried about John McCain’s health care plan, which they fear would unravel the employer-based health care system by making the benefits taxable to employees. But the benefits managers at large companies aren’t crazy about Obama’s plan, either.

So it probably wouldn’t have helped Obama’s sales pitch to mention that part of his health care plan. But in doing so, he missed a big opportunity to educate voters about how his plan would actually work — and create a mandate, if he wins on Tuesday, that he can use to help overcome the lobbying Congress is sure to face.

Here’s a scenario to ponder: What if Sarah Palin did become such an activist vice president — if she gets the chance — that she could accurately be called “in charge of the Senate”?

Palin took a lot of heat for that remark to a Colorado television station last week, but some experts on the Senate now argue that she wasn’t necessarily off base. True, modern vice presidents almost never show up to preside over the Senate unless they’re breaking a tie vote. But that doesn’t mean the next vice president couldn’t revive the practice, and in fact, some conservatives think it might be good for a Republican vice president to get more involved if the Democrats expand their majority next week.

Brian Darling, the director of U.S. Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, argues that early vice presidents actually spent a fair amount of time on their duties as Senate president, and that Palin would be within her rights to do so if she and John McCain win the election.

The main reason to preside over the Senate more actively, he said, would be to stop Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada from “filling the amendment tree” so often to prevent Republicans from trying to amend legislation. That’s a procedural manuever in which the majority leader offers enough amendments to fill all the slots that are available to change the bill.

But the tactic only works because the majority leader is traditionally recognized first, and if Palin actually presided over the Senate on a regular basis, she could simply refuse to recognize Reid first — and turn to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky instead if it became clear that Reid was about to “fill the tree,” Darling said.

It seems like a risky move, to say the least. Leaving aside the fact that nobody in the Senate really knows Palin — except for the two Alaska senators, one of whom may not be back next year — the Senate could easily erupt in protests if Palin appeared to yank the steering wheel away from the Democratic majority too often.

But while Palin would have to choose her battles carefully, Darling said she and McCain could make the case that if they win the election, it’s because the voters want Republicans to have a voice in the process and not get shut out.

“She could come in and sit in the Senate and not just break tie votes, but make sure the agenda doesn’t go in a direction the administration didn’t want it to go,” he said.

Could Palin actually do that? Technically, yes, according to Robert B. Dove, who served as the Senate parliamentarian for many years. It’s not very likely, though, Dove said, given that recognizing the majority leader first has been a Senate tradition since the 1930s.

“The Senate is much more governed by tradition than rules,” he said.

In general, though, Palin wasn’t wrong to suggest that the vice president could take an active role in presiding over the Senate, Dove said. Both Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller spent a lot of time in the chamber, largely because Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford shut them out of the workings of the White House. It was only when Walter Mondale expanded the access and influence of the vice presidency, Dove said, that vice presidents stopped spending so much time in the Senate — because they had better things to do.

The subject could be academic unless McCain and Palin turn their poll numbers around, of course. But if they do manage to pull an upset next week, don’t be surprised if Palin means what she says about hanging around the Senate more often.

Here’s what the final week of the campaign is looking like for Barack Obama. He’s going all out, trying to make sure voters see him as a calm, non-radical guy who just wants to restore “competence” to the federal government.

He’s been giving interviews to Colorado TV stations, promising no “lurches to the left” if he wins the White House and the Democrats keep control of Congress, and pledging to “focus on a few things that have to be done well” and make sure taxpayers’ money isn’t wasted. In Canton, Ohio today, he declared that “we don’t need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government — a more competent government — a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.”

And then, someone found an old broadcast from a Chicago public radio program in 2001 in which Obama seemed to regret that the Supreme Court never took up “redistribution of wealth” during the civil rights movement. He also said one of the “tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

See? Scary socialist.

John McCain called him “Barack the Redistributor” in Dayton, Ohio today, arguing that Obama “believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs.” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner warned in a statement that Obama “still wants to ‘redistribute’ our tax dollars and ‘spread the wealth around,’ giving money to people who don’t pay taxes rather than growing our economy for everybody.”

This one has been harder than the usual job for Obama’s rapid-response team. Not because it’s clear-cut that Obama actually meant what McCain and Boehner say he meant — it isn’t — but because his remarks came in the context of such a long, dry panel discussion with legal scholars that it isn’t easy to explain what he actually said.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton simply declared in a statement that Obama “did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all,” and left it at that.

Here’s the full audio of the interview. (It’s one of four Obama appearances from that year — the “court and civil rights” program of Jan. 18, 2001.)

Earlier in the program, Obama talks about equalizing school funding and providing equal opportunity for education, which muddies the waters just enough to suggest that “redistribution of wealth” might not mean taking Joe the Plumber’s hard-earned tax dollars after all.

And Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser who was one of his colleagues at the University of Chicago law school, argued in a blog post for The New Republic that Obama actually was criticizing the civil rights movement for relying on the courts too much in general, and that “redistribution” is a general term that applies to lots of things, including education, health care, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the progressive income tax, and even Social Security.

If anything, the biggest revelation of the Chicago public radio interview isn’t Obama’s economic views, but the way he talked about constitutional law back in the days when he was still teaching students as well as serving in the Illinois Senate. It’s probably the closest most people will come to hearing one of his lectures, and it’s much more consistent with the non-threatening image he’s trying to project now than the “Barack the Redistributor” image McCain would like voters to see.

On the down side, you need a really strong cup of coffee to sit through it.

Is it really a good idea for one party to be in control of both the White House and Congress? That question is starting to surface in John McCain’s campaign and in fundraising pitches for Republican Senate races — though, as you can imagine, it’s an appeal heavier on election-season red meat than on high-minded constitutional appeal to checks and balances.

Lately, McCain has been throwing a line into his stump speech about what would happen if Democrats gain “total control of Washington.” (Answer: higher taxes that would make a bad economy worse.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which faces a potential nightmare scenario on Nov. 4 if Democrats win the 60 seats needed to break filibusters, sent out a fundraising e-mail last night warning that “Barack Obama wants no checks on his power … no debate … no one to question his authority. He wants a blank check.”

And last week, the office of House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio circulated a Wall Street Journal editorial, titled “A Liberal Supermajority,” that tries to scare conservatives about what Democrats could do with the White House and Congress: enact single-payer health care, conduct investigations of the financial crisis “to further their agenda to control more of the private economy,” give more power to unions, do the bidding of trial lawyers and the National Education Association, consolidate their power with national election-day registration, etc.

It’s not exactly a surprise that McCain and congressional leaders would turn to these kinds of arguments to rally their supporters, but there is a serious subject at the heart of it. One-party government certainly helps to break the endless stalemate in Washington, but it can easily lead to a decline in oversight of the executive branch and a general refusal to ask healthy questions about the president’s agenda.

That certainly happened during the first six years of the Bush presidency, and the results — the Iraq war, a series of questionable antiterrorism policies, and politically driven policies that undermined many of the agencies — made much of the country understand the consequences when lawmakers don’t pay enough attention to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama himself may turn out to be a sensible and levelheaded president, if that’s the way the election goes, but he’ll bring in an entire administration full of new people and they won’t all be saints.

It’s an argument that could appeal to independent voters, whose support McCain desperately needs, since he’s losing them in droves right now. In a new ABC News-Washington Post poll, 43 percent of independent voters said they’d rather have divided government, while only 34 percent said they’d be okay with one party controlling the executive and legislative branches.

Still, it doesn’t appear that checks and balances will be the issue that will suddenly turn this election around for McCain and the Republicans, given all of the Bush fatigue that’s driving this election. And in general, the public doesn’t seem too concerned that the executive and legislative branches should be controlled by different parties. A CBS News-New York Times poll released yesterday found only a narrow preference for divided government, with 41 percent saying the branches should be controlled by different parties while 36 percent said the same party should be in charge of both.

It had been a wider split in February 2007, shortly after the Republicans had lost control of Congress. Why is it narrower now? Because Democrats are now happy to have one party in charge of both branches — a reversal of the attitude they had when the Republicans were in charge — while Republicans now want divided government. Of course.

John McCain had one of his most successful moments in the last presidential debate when he told Barack Obama, “I am not President Bush.”

Lately, though, he seems to be beating the message into the ground. In an interview with The Washington Times published this morning, McCain ticked off a long list of issues he thought Bush handled poorly.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” McCain said, adding that “these are just some of them.”

And in a statement this morning on the increase in jobless claims, McCain even tried to tie Obama to Bush. How, you ask? By accusing him of wanting to “double-down on the Bush Administration’s legacy of out-of-control spending.” So really, if you want a change from the Bush years, Obama’s not your guy.

It’s not that McCain is making up disagreements with Bush. His list is actually fairly accurate, based on his Senate record, and is another reminder of how many major issues aren’t captured by his 90 percent record of voting with Bush.

But there is such a thing as trying too hard, and if he doesn’t ration his criticisms more carefully, McCain could easily convince voters that — as Joe Biden put it in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado yesterday — “he doth protest too much.”

Sarah Palin has taken a lot of grief for the CNBC interview she gave, before she became John McCain’s running mate, in which she dismissed all of the vice presidential talk by asking, “What is it exactly that the VP does every day?”

It’s not a bad question, and one she might want to ask again.

Yesterday, Palin gave an interview to a local news station in Denver in which the anchor, reading a question submitted by a third grader, asked her what the vice president does. Her answer, in this video clip, suggests that she thinks the vice president runs the Senate:

“That’s a great question, Brandon. And a vice president has a really great job because not only are they there to support the president’s agenda, they’re like the team member, the teammate to that president, but also they’re in charge of the United State Senate. So if they want to, they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it’s a great job, and I look forward to having that job.”

Talk about expanding the power of the vice presidency. Even Vice President Dick Cheney never claimed to be in charge of the Senate.

It’s hard to tell whether Palin just used a poor choice of words to describe what the vice president actually does in the Senate — presiding and breaking tie votes — or whether she really believes the vice president runs the place. Palin spokesman Taylor Griffin said she was referring to the vice president’s constitutional role as president of the Senate.

But it’s not as if the vice president is actively involved in the Senate, or even seen very often, except for the occasional tie vote or caucus meeting. And needless to say, Palin’s comments were a bit puzzling to Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the man who actually sets the agenda for the Senate.

“Governor Palin needs to re-read — or perhaps read for the first time — the Constitution,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. “While the Vice President presides over the Senate, he or she is not “in charge of” it. Article I says, ‘The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.’ The Senate is part of a co-equal branch of the federal government.”

Worse yet for Palin, the clip was circulating on the same day that she was reminding a Reno audience of Joe Biden’s prediction that Barack Obama would be “tested” by an international crisis if he wins the presidency. Not only did Palin launch into an extended critique of Obama’s qualifications to be commander in chief — an issue on which she hasn’t exactly won the confidence of the public either — but she also took the opportunity to tease Biden: “I guess the looming crisis that most worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden’s next speaking engagement.”

Judging from Palin’s performance in one interview after another, the Obama team can’t be any more worried than the McCain team.

Stung by Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday and polling numbers that don’t seem to be getting any better, John McCain’s campaign has been looking for any possible way to change the subject.

So they turned to the best thing they had going: a Joe Biden speech.

Remember Biden? Obama’s running mate? There was a time when political types were sure the talkative Biden would be a gaffe machine, and he’s had his moments, but nothing compared to Sarah Palin’s rocky interviews and insistence that she was cleared in the “Troopergate” report that actually concluded she abused her power. So Biden has been under the radar for most of the campaign.

Yesterday, however, Biden predicted at a Seattle fundraiser that “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy … Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Somehow, Biden had managed to find one of the least flattering JFK comparisons Obama could receive. So, naturally, the McCain campaign spent much of the day making sure the world knew about it.

“We don’t want a President who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars,” McCain said at a speech in Belton, Mo. And none other than former New York city mayor Rudolph Giuliani called Biden’s comment “an extraordinary statement” in a conference call with reporters, saying it means Biden — who questioned Obama’s foreign policy credibility when the two were rivals for the Democratic nomination — still seems to doubt that Obama is really qualified to be commander in chief.

Not so, insisted the Biden team. “With our nation facing two wars and 21st century threats abroad, Senator Biden referenced the simple fact that history shows Presidents face challenges from day one,” spokesman David Wade said in a statement. “After eight years of a failed foreign policy, we need Barack Obama’s good judgment and steady leadership, not the erratic and ideological Bush-McCain approach that has set back our security and standing in the world.”

Not all historians buy the conventional wisdom of the JFK story, which holds that a disastrous summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 convinced Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak and inexperienced and helped set the stage for the Cuban missile crisis. In his Kennedy biography, “An Unfinished Life,” historian Robert Dallek suggests that Kennedy himself may have contributed to the confrontational tone through his own hard-line rhetoric against the Soviet Union in his inaugural address and in his first months in office.

If that’s true, Obama hasn’t exactly been a hard-liner against foreign leaders in his own speeches, so he might not provoke the same kind of response if he wins.

Still, it’s not clear what Biden gained by raising the prospect of an international crisis greeting Obama’s first months in office. McCain probably would have found ammunition today no matter what he said, but Biden may have made this one a bit too easy.

Barack Obama’s admakers must have been doing handsprings when they found the clip of John McCain — now featured in a new Obama TV ad out today — boasting in his own voice that “I voted with the president over 90 percent of the time, higher than a lot of my even Republican colleagues.”

Granted, the clip is five years old. It’s from a May 2003 interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News, according to this transcript from the watchdog group Media Matters. Naturally, the age of the clip isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Obama ad.

Still, CQ’s own, more recent study of votes covering the entire Bush presidency shows that McCain did, in fact, vote with Bush 90 percent of the time.

But in the interest of presenting a complete picture of McCain, here’s the rest of the story.

It’s true now, just as it was then, that McCain’s score was higher than a lot of his Republican colleagues. But it was also lower than a lot of them, too. In fact, of the 49 Republicans now in the Senate, McCain only ranks 22nd in support for Bush’s policies. In other words, he’s somewhere in the middle.

And even that fact doesn’t reflect the larger truth of McCain’s Senate career during the Bush presidency: that he was, in fact, known for sticking his thumb in Bush’s eye an awful lot of the time. The issues McCain cited in last night’s debate are a pretty accurate list of his rebellions against the administration: supporting climate change legislation, opposing spending bills, pushing for a ban on torture, calling for a patients’ bill of rights, and supporting the creation of the 9/11 commission. (Of course, it’s telling that he didn’t mention his campaign finance overhaul, since the Republican base really doesn’t like that one.)

In fact, the context of the Cavuto interview makes it clear why McCain was so eager to brag about his support for Bush. It came at the height of McCain’s disagreements with Bush and the Republican Party, and Cavuto was asking him whether that meant he might challenge Bush in 2004. McCain was trying to reassure Republicans that he was still on their team, because there was so much reason to doubt it at the time.

The campaigns can certainly argue, as Joe Biden pointed out during the vice presidential debate, about whether McCain ever really fought the Bush administration on the issues that matter most to voters right now — mainly the economy and the Iraq war.

The answer seems to be no, and that may be all that matters to voters right now. But as accurate as the 90 percent score is, it doesn’t capture the full picture of McCain’s relationship with Bush. McCain’s independent streak may not have carried him far enough from Bush to save him now, but it’s not a total myth, either.

If you listened to the way Barack Obama talked about his onetime Republican legislative partner, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, during the debate last night, you might have gotten the sense that Obama was offering Lugar a job in his Cabinet.

“Let me tell you who I associate with. On economic policy, I associate with Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. If I’m interested in figuring out my foreign policy, I associate myself with my running mate, Joe Biden or with Dick Lugar, the Republican ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or General Jim Jones, the former supreme allied commander of NATO,” Obama said. “Those are the people, Democrats and Republicans, who have shaped my ideas and who will be surrounding me in the White House.” (Emphasis added)

It wouldn’t be too big a surprise if Lugar did get the call, if Obama wins the election. As the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (he’s now the ranking member), Lugar invited Obama to work with him on a 2006 law that tries to stop the spread of conventional weapons, such as shoulder-fired missiles, that could be useful to terrorists. That law was, and still is, one of Obama’s only significant bipartisan accomplishments in the Senate.

Lugar has spoken highly of Obama ever since — though he also maintains a good relationship with John McCain — so he’s one of the most obvious Republican candidates for a role in an Obama administration.

For now, though, Lugar says he’s not interested. In response to Obama’s comments last night, spokesman Andy Fisher forwarded this interview Lugar gave to the South Bend Tribune last week (audio included), in which Lugar says he’s too independent to be comfortable with a Cabinet role under either Obama or McCain:

“I responded to a student question earlier in the day. They were asking if I was interested in a Cabinet position or some other situation. And I said no I’m not, because really from the time that I came back from the Navy, and tried to save our family businesses for my brother, a farm and a manufacturing concern, I’ve wanted to be my own boss, an independent spirit. And that I’ve been able to do, as mayor of Indianapolis or a senator, and I appreciate that opportunity.

“I think I can be of greatest value to the country really giving independent judgments, the best judgment I can give.”

Sounds like the end of the story, doesn’t it? Kind of like the time in 2007 when Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, declared that “I will not be vice president under any circumstances.”

The point is, things change. So don’t take your eye off Lugar just yet.

Toward the end of tonight’s debate, the sarcastic John McCain showed up again. When Barack Obama disagreed with his plan to expand the District of Columbia school voucher program, McCain couldn’t resist.

“Because there’s not enough vouchers; therefore, we shouldn’t do it, even though it’s working. I got it,” McCain said, laughing with delight. Obama stared down and scribbled notes, ignoring him.

It wasn’t McCain’s best moment in the debate, and not just because no one laughed with him. (The audience had been instructed to stay quiet, so most jokes would fall flat.) The bigger problem was that, according to the Department of Education’s own evaluation, the District of Columbia school voucher program actually isn’t working.

The June 2007 report found that there were “no statistically significant” gains in reading or math scores in the first year for students who participated in the program.

McCain’s main point was that the lack of resources to run a program nationwide is no reason not to run a smaller program. But here’s a rule of thumb for sarcasm in debates: It doesn’t usually help you, but if you’re going to use it, make sure you’ve done your research first.

Barack Obama had to say something tonight to respond to moderator Bob Schieffer’s question about what programs he’d cut because of the financial crisis. So he called himself “a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.”

He didn’t fight too hard for the pay-as-you-go principle, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stuck a package of tax breaks into the financial bailout bill two weeks ago without paying for most of them.

Reid believed he didn’t have a choice. Senate Republicans had blocked efforts to pay for the tax breaks — including relief from the alternative minimum tax — by raising other taxes. So Reid added the package, with about $150.5 billion in tax breaks and only $43.5 billion in offsets over 10 years.

That was a clear violation of the idea of “pay as you go,” the rules Democrats promised to bring back to Congress in the 2006 elections. And yet, Obama not only voted for the bailout bill, but went to bat for it, bringing his stump speech to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to support it.

Obama did throw in a nod to the importance of restoring fiscal discipline over the long run — at the urging of aides to House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer and House Democratic Conference Chairman Rahm Emanuel, who said it was important to send a signal to the centrist House “Blue Dog” Democrats that Obama would support their goals after the immediate crisis is over.

And Obama returned to that theme tonight. “What is absolutely true is that, once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump, that we’re not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways,” Obama said. The lesson, though, is that a President Obama could face situations in which Democratic leaders can’t stick to the pay-as-you-go principle — and he’s willing to look the other way if he has to.

That said, though, John McCain was once a pay-as-you-go guy, too. In 2004, he and three moderate Senate Republicans held up the annual budget process for months as they pushed for a return to pay-as-you-go rules. And yet, McCain voted for the bailout package with the unfunded tax breaks, too. He may like spending freezes, but paying for tax cuts isn’t so important to him anymore.

As the candidates head into tonight’s debate, Barack Obama holds a solid lead in most polls for several reasons, but one should be especially troubling to John McCain: Independent voters are peeling away from him and leaning toward Obama.

Through most of the summer, Obama and McCain were matched almost evenly among independent voters, and actually tied in some polls. Obama has had a bit of a cushion because so many more voters identify themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans these days. But when McCain gained an overall lead in the polls after the Republican convention, part of the reason was a big shift toward McCain among independents. By mid-September, McCain led Obama 38 percent to 24 percent among independent voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll.

Now, however, that’s starting to change.

The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll had McCain leading Obama among independent voters by 15 percentage points last month, 49 percent to 34 percent. Now, a new poll released Tuesday has Obama edging out McCain among independents by 5 percentage points, 44 percent to 39 percent. Sarah Palin seemed to be a major factor, with nearly half of independent voters now saying she’s not qualified to be president, compared to 37 percent in September.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which had McCain leading Obama among independents by 8 percentage points in late September, showed a 7-point lead for Obama — 45 percent to 37 percent — in a new poll out today.

And the Gallup tracking poll shows independent voters have switched to Obama in just the last week, from a 9 -percentage-point lead for McCain in early October to an 8-percentage point lead for Obama now (33 percent to 25 percent).

McCain still has three weeks to turn that around, but right now he’s losing the very group that would have responded the most to the above-party image he’s tried to present to the country.

As a senator, Barack Obama has taken a dim view of measures Republicans have proposed to fight voter fraud. When Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — now the Senate minority leader — tried to amend an immigration bill in 2006 to require all voters to show photo IDs at the polls, Obama argued that “you are statistically more likely to get killed by lightning than to find a fraudulent vote in a federal election.”

Now that the election is just three weeks away, Obama and John McCain seem headed on a collision course over the voter fraud issue that could lead to some nasty challenges on election day and beyond.

McCain’s campaign is raising questions about the community organizing group ACORN, which is under investigation in some states after registration forms linked to the group have been discovered with duplicate or false names. The campaign is getting a lot of help from the Republican National Committee, which e-mails a “Vote Fraud Alert” every few hours with some new development on the group.

At a press conference today, former Sens. John Danforth and Warren Rudman, the co-chairs of McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” raised the possibility that the ACORN controversy could lead to legal challenges if Republicans suspect the group’s efforts have led to invalid votes being cast on election day. (ACORN officials say they’ve caught a lot of the problems themselves and warned election officials about them, but they’re required to turn in the registration forms anyway.)

“We do believe that this is a potential nightmare,” Danforth said. When the election is over, he said, “we hope that it will come to an end and not go on and on and on with challenges and court fights, not just in one state but in a variety of states, so-called battleground states where people will feel that — that the — the result is — is open to dispute.”

Danforth and Rudman have invited the Obama campaign to work with them to prevent such problems, but the Obama team, judging from its own conference call later in the day, is having none of it.

“This is just the start of what is going to be a very deliberate and cynical attempt to try and, you know, create confusion, to challenge people inappropriately,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said on the conference call.

It’s not hard to see why the Obama team would react that way. Obama has always been suspicious of Republicans’ concerns about voter fraud, and independent experts say real election fraud has been rare to non-existent in recent years (as opposed to registration fraud, which is more common). And at a time when the Democrats are the hands-down winners of the competition to register new voters, any Republican challenges based on voter fraud would strike them as “transparent,” as Plouffe put it.

Bob Bauer, the campaign’s general counsel, noted that the reason McCain’s allies know about the fake registrations at all is that they’re being caught. Rudman, however, said there’s no way to guarantee that nothing is falling between the cracks. “We’re not saying that the system doesn’t work in some places. It does,” said Rudman. “But when you have a large number of people registered who ought not to be registered, the risk of having people vote who are unqualified to vote legally exponentially goes up.”

As for Danforth and Rudman’s invitation for the two campaigns to work together, Bauer — not to put too fine a point on it — blew them off. “We’re really not concerned at the moment that we need their help with anything,” he said. “We need them to stop the suppressive activity.”

It’s always possible, of course, that a lopsided victory would bring the election to a fast and decisive end. But if it’s close at all, especially in the battleground states, the stage is now set for post-election challenges that could get ugly very quickly.

If you compare the new ideas Barack Obama and John McCain put out this week to deal with the financial crisis, you have a pretty good window into their true governing styles, as opposed to the images their campaigns have tried to create.

Obama is the cautious one, even a bit wonky, with specific and targeted ideas of the kind that President Bush used to call “small ball.” And McCain, once again, is the one who goes for the big and bold move that can end up looking more clumsy than helpful.

McCain, you recall, chose Tuesday night’s debate to unveil his new “Homeowner Resurgence Plan,” which would pay off home loans for people whose home values have plummeted and replace those mortgages with more affordable loans. The approach is based on an idea mostly advocated by Democrats, but here’s the catch: unlike the housing legislation enacted earlier this year, McCain’s program wouldn’t require the lenders to accept a loss before paying off the loans with taxpayers’ money.

So McCain’s main accomplishments with that plan have been to hand Obama an opening to accuse him of betraying the taxpayers, provoke a backlash from the National Review, and leave other conservatives scratching their heads.

Today, Obama put out his own new proposal: a “Small Business Emergency Rescue Plan” that has the feel of those classic 10-point plans Obama used to avoid. He wants to channel emergency loans directly to small businesses through an existing Small Business Administration program, expand the agency’s loan guarantee program, and extend a tax break in this year’s stimulus bill that allows businesses to expense more of their equipment purchases.

It’s not clear how much firepower any of these initiatives would bring. Extending a temporary tax break for a year — as Obama would do with the expensing deduction — is a bit like extending a sale at a store. If there’s always a sale, people may stop rushing to take advantage of it.

Still, the proposal is consistent with Obama’s actual career in Springfield and the U.S. Senate, which has been much more cautious and detail-oriented than his campaign rhetoric suggests, so it’s not unreasonable to conclude that this could be the way he’d govern in the White House too.

Now, McCain has gone small-ball as well. Earlier today, in La Crosse, Wis., he proposed waiving the requirement that seniors start taking distributions from their retirement accounts when they turn 70-1/2. On a conference call with reporters, McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said the proposal could provide “some modest help” to some of the approximately 4.5 million households that are taking the distributions during the stock market turmoil.

It’s quite a switch, going from big-and-bold to small ball in the space of three days. Even Obama’s campaign said he had no problem with the idea. Given the way McCain’s big-and-bold moves have worked out in this campaign, though, small ball might be just the approach he needs right now.

Did you think John McCain might be running out of cards to play? Hardly. This morning, he found a new surrogate: a former senator from Illinois, and another one of those Republican mavericks, who just happens to be the guy Barack Obama replaced in the Senate.

Peter G. Fitzgerald held a conference call a little while ago to discuss his experiences with Obama, with whom he served for two years in the Illinois Senate before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998. You can probably guess where this is going: Fitzgerald says Obama wasn’t much of a boat-rocker when they worked together, and that McCain did much more to challenge powerful party leaders and special interests.

“For Senator Obama, reform and nonpartisanship is something to campaign on, but it’s not something he actually does,” said Fitzgerald. Even the ethics overhaul Obama worked on in his second year as a state senator, Fitzgerald said, “passed with little or no opposition.” (In fact, it passed the Illinois Senate 52-4, according to media reports at the time, but the majority Republicans did try — unsuccessfully — to prevent it from reaching the House floor.)

“I do not see him as a reformer,” Fitzgerald said. By contrast, McCain has had a “lengthy” career fighting waste and corruption, Fitzgerald said. He cited their work together in stopping a plan for the Pentagon to lease 100 airborne tankers from the Boeing Co. — rather than simply buying them — and McCain’s investigation of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff as chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

It’s not too surprising that Fitzgerald would speak up for his friend McCain, since Fitzgerald may have been one of the few Senate Republicans who could rival McCain in the number of enemies made within his party.

He clashed with then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, also of Illinois, over funding for an Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield and openly criticized the scandals of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan. He also sided with McCain on key issues, becoming one of the few Senate Republicans to vote for the 2002 campaign finance overhaul.

But there may be another reason Fitzgerald was willing to jump into the campaign now. Although he called Obama “very intelligent and hardworking” and insisted that “I respect him,” the two would have been rivals for the Senate seat in 2004 if Fitzgerald hadn’t decided not to seek re-election.

In fact, before Fitzgerald took himself out of the race in April 2003, Obama considered him vulnerable and was actively running against him. “Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat,” Obama said when he announced his candidacy in January 2003. “And he’s betrayed Illinois ever since. He’s cast votes for Trojan horse tax plans and misguided budgets that jeopardize Social Security and pension benefits.”

Chances are, Fitzgerald heard about that speech.

Given that Barack Obama has written about the importance of bringing more empathy to American politics, it was a bit surprising to see his uneven performance tonight in actually doing it.

To do well in a town hall-style debate, at least on domestic policy questions, a candidate has to be able to practice the politics of empathy — engaging directly with the questioner, maybe even talking with them a bit to draw them out on their personal concerns. Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” style became a bit of a running joke, but it worked wonders for him during the presidential debates in 1992.

And Obama has made a point of arguing that American politics would be better if more people could put themselves in the other person’s shoes. “I find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle — ‘How would that make you feel?’ — as a guidepost for my politics,” he wrote in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

In fact, Obama does have a reputation as a good listener, both in the Senate and in his prior political career. Tonight, though, the Harvard lecturer took over. He seemed to do better tonight at sympathizing with people’s problems in the abstract — not dealing with the actual questioners.

The first questioner, for example, was clearly looking for reassurance in the global financial turmoil. With retired people and workers losing their incomes, he asked, “what’s the fastest, most positive solution to bail these people out of the economic ruin?”

Rather than talking directly to him — perhaps asking to hear a bit more about his own situation — Obama slid right into his standard talking points about the financial crisis being the “final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years.” He threw in a quick list of policy proposals, including middle-class tax cuts, help for homeowners, and overhauls of health care and energy policies. He talked to the questioner, not with him.

It was pretty much the same story later on, as a questioner asked about the bailout package. “Let me tell you what’s in the rescue package for you,” Obama said, but he mostly just explained the threat of layoffs if there had been no action against the credit crunch. Once again, there was no real give-and-take.

He did a little better with a questioner who wanted to know why anyone would trust the presidential candidates with their money in light of the financial crisis. “I understand your frustration and your cynicism,” Obama said — though, naturally, he tried to lay most of it at the feet of President Bush and John McCain’s support of his policies.

The one thing that probably saved Obama was the lack of real competition from McCain.

He was too busy seething at Obama — referring to him as “that one” at one point — and hurling sarcastic asides at him that he never had time to show any real empathy for the audience.

Mostly, McCain sounded like he always does: mystified that he has done so much work in the Senate and Obama is the one leading him in the polls. “I have fought against excessive spending and outrages. I have fought to reduce the earmarks and eliminate them,” McCain insisted to the woman who asked about trust. “Do you know that he voted for every increase in spending that I saw come across the floor of the United States Senate while we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks?”

In other words, McCain wanted someone to feel his pain. But at the height of a global economic crisis, that probably isn’t what most people tuned in for.

Heading into tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, it’s clearly John McCain who has the tougher job. Not just because Barack Obama has opened up a significant lead in most recent polls, but also because McCain now has to decide whether he can fight back without losing sight of the political ground rules he set for himself before he was a candidate.

The election is four weeks from today, and it’s not exactly a secret that McCain’s team is trying to pull out every bit of ammunition it can use to turn things around. That’s why they just remembered this weekend that Obama had some dealings with Bill Ayers, the former member of a militant Vietnam War protest group that was blamed for several bombings. In bringing up the episode on McCain’s behalf, Sarah Palin has even been citing a weekend story in The New York Times, McCain’s least-favorite paper.

Of course, the same story concluded that while Obama has “played down his contacts” with Ayers, “the two men do not appear to have been close.” Although Obama exaggerated McCain’s role in the “Keating Five” scandal — in his campaign’s instant response to the Ayers charges — it was nowhere near the level of exaggeration of suggesting that Obama was “palling around” with terrorists.

And then, when McCain turned back to the economy yesterday at a speech in Albuquerque, it was one of his angriest broadsides yet against Obama. “I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed,” he said of Obama’s claims that he has opposed regulation that could have prevented the financial crisis. It’s undeniable that McCain has supported deregulation on most issues, but he argues that he had tried to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while Obama did nothing. Fair enough, though the record suggests that McCain did a lot less than he says he did.

Right now, McCain is undoubtedly under a lot of pressure from his campaign team and all of his supporters to pound Obama as hard as it takes to win the election. So it’s worth pondering how McCain, with the benefit of a bit more distance, described his own political fortunes before he began his current race for the presidency.

In 2006, I interviewed McCain shortly after he made amends with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whom he had described in his 2000 campaign as an “agent of intolerance.” At the time, McCain looked back on that speech with regret, because he felt he had let his anger over hardball tactics in the South Carolina primary get the better of him. When he wasn’t under the pressure of a campaign, McCain knew that anger was not an attractive quality.

“I was angry. I mean, there’s no doubt about that,” McCain said. “It was a failing of mine to get angry, because an angry candidate isn’t a very good candidate.”

And McCain had learned a clear rule of thumb that seemed to leave him at peace with whatever political decisions he had to make: “When I do what’s right because I know that it’s right — and I’m not always sure on a number of issues — but when I know what the right thing to do is, and I do it, it always turns out fine. It always turns out fine. If I do something for political reasons, it always turns out badly.”

Over the next four weeks, McCain’s biggest challenge will be to listen to his own advice.

No, no, not that Michael Moore.

The other Michael Moore — the distinguished economist who once served on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and is now the director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at The George Washington University.

This Michael Moore was one of 100 economists who signed a letter, helpfully circulated by John McCain’s campaign this morning, that warns Barack Obama’s economic policies could throw the country into “a deep recession.” Some might say we’re headed there anyway, but the point of the letter is that his trade and tax policies could make matters even worse.

It’s also a sign that, as the global economic crisis only seems to get worse, McCain may have decided he can’t change the subject from the economy after all.

And yes, Moore understands the weirdness factor that occurs when anyone named Michael Moore sides with McCain on trade policies. Safe to say, he’s been dealing with the Michael Moore issue for quite a while now. “When I call for a reservation at a restaurant in D.C., I never know if I’m going to get the worst table or the best table,” he said.

But back to substance. Michael Moore the economist is a bit more forgiving toward Obama than the ominous tone of the group letter. He notes that Obama doesn’t talk about opposition to trade agreements as much as he used to, and may even be sympathetic to international trade at some level. His real concern, though, is that Congress — which is almost sure to remain in Democratic hands — “will be pushing him much farther than he wants to go.”

So if China, for example, feels pressure to respond to the economic crisis by increasing exports to the United States, and the Democratic Congress pushes Obama to resist, the result could be “a tit for tat trade war” that makes the crisis worse, said Moore.

He doesn’t think McCain should raise the issue at tonight’s debate, though. Trade is too complicated, and the benefits are too hard to explain, to people who are hurting now and are convinced that trade is a major cause of their problems, he said.

Clearly, though, Michael Moore the economist has raised profound questions about the combined effect Obama and a Democratic majority would have on the financial crisis. If only Michael Moore the filmmaker would make his views known in some way, then we would once again be able to tell them apart.

Maybe it was only a matter of time before Barack Obama played the Keating card.

Today, the Obama campaign launched a Web site designed to remind voters that John McCain, long before he became an ethics crusader, was a member of the “Keating Five” — the group of senators who intervened with federal regulators in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr., whose Lincoln Savings and Loan was under investigation for unsound practices and was seized by federal regulators two years later.

The Obama Web site, Keating Economics, tries to link the scandal to current events by calling it “eerily similar to today’s credit crisis,” arguing that once again, “a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules.”

But the Web site overstates the case by claiming that McCain had a “central role” in the scandal. In fact, most of the coverage at the time — as well as the investigation by the Senate ethics committee — concluded that McCain was a reluctant player all along, and in fact had a big fight with Keating because he didn’t want to get involved in an improper way.

There’s no denying that McCain met with the regulators along with the other senators. But beyond that, it’s not clear how vocal McCain was, and there was a lot of evidence that McCain was openly conflicted about what was taking place. To help capture all the twists and turns of what actually happened, I’m posting the full text of an account written at the time by CQ’s John Cranford, based on his coverage of the ethics hearings. You can find it after the jump.

One highlight of the piece: Some of McCain’s agonizing was captured in lengthy notes taken at the meeting by William Black, the federal regulator who is featured trashing McCain in the “video documentary” on Obama’s Web site. McCain tried to reassure the regulators that “I wouldn’t want any special favors” for Keating’s American Continental Corp., which owned Lincoln Savings, according to Black’s notes. “I don’t want any part of our conversation to be improper.”

McCain did have real problems at the time. He was personally closer to Keating than any of the other senators. He had taken about $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating, his family and associates as a House member, and had to reimburse American Continental for about $13,433 in payments for flights and vacations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, has said McCain’s experience in the Keating Five was “kind of a wake-up call, a time for self-evaluation.” And it set the stage for his work on the 2002 campaign finance overhaul, which was his effort to reduce the influence of money in politics.

But it’s a stretch to say McCain had a central role when the Ethics Committee couldn’t find any evidence of actual wrongdoing on his part, and simply declared that he “exercised poor judgment in intervening with regulators.” The Obama campaign may well be able to draw parallels in the financial crises then and now, but first it will have to get the basic story right.

To hear House leaders tell it, both Barack Obama and John McCain worked the phones to make sure the bailout bill passed the House in today’s re-vote. And roughly equal numbers of members from both parties appear to have switched their votes from “no” to “yes” between Monday and today: 33 Democrats and 25 Republicans.

But for whatever reason — a better P.R. machine, or perhaps just because of the more critical coverage of McCain’s campaign suspension last week — Democrats were louder about publicizing Obama’s lobbying role today than Republicans were about discussing McCain’s role.

At a press conference after the vote, House Democratic Conference chairman Rahm Emanuel said Obama “made numerous calls not only to all of us, but to members of our caucus, and helped us gather the votes on the Democratic side to pass this legislation.”

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Obama “really gave them confidence that this was the right decision for the American people, even though it wasn’t, in our view, a great bill for them to vote on.”

Of course, Emanuel is Obama’s Illinois colleague, and Pelosi has every reason to help Obama by making him sound as effective as possible. So take their comments for what they’re worth. But there was also independent evidence that Obama had, in fact, reached out to at least two crucial factions of Democrats who had opposed the bailout the first time: freshmen and members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Sarah Palin seemed to confirm tonight what her record as Alaska governor suggests: Her views on executive power, and specifically the powers of the vice presidency, might not be too far from the way Dick Cheney has approached the job.

It’s not that vice presidential experts think Palin could come anywhere close to Cheney’s level of influence, given that John McCain would be the experienced one in that partnership — the reverse of the relationship between Cheney and President Bush.

But it’s hard to read her answer to Gwen Ifill’s question tonight — about Cheney’s insistence last year that the vice president doesn’t belong to the executive branch — as anything other than a bid for as few constraints as possible:

“Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position.

“Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.”

Remember that the whole dispute focused on Cheney’s refusal to comply with an executive order setting rules on the handling of classified information. He and his advisers, particularly chief of staff David Addington, had spent most of the past seven years resisting congressional oversight, yet now they were resisting an executive order by insisting that the vice president is actually part of the legislative branch, too.

Joe Biden had the polar opposite view of the Cheney theory. “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” Biden said. As to his own view of the vice presidency:

“The primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

“The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he’s part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.”

At least in this election, both vice presidential candidates have had to answer the question.

Apparently, Sarah Palin’s debate coaches had a strategy tonight that built on the all-Senate nature of the Democratic ticket. The strategy: draw out Joe Biden on any and all Senate votes where he and Barack Obama disagreed.

There aren’t a lot of those to be found, since Obama and Biden’s votes have been largely similar in the three and a half years they have overlapped in the Senate. But Palin seemed to be looking for openings to bring up all the conflicting votes her research team did find.

The 2005 energy overhaul bill was one of them. During a discussion on tax breaks, Palin reminded Biden that “in that energy plan that Obama voted for, that’s what gave those oil companies those big tax breaks.” John McCain, who opposed the bill, has repeatedly criticized Obama for that vote.

Biden, clearly briefed on the explanation Obama gave at the time, noted that Obama “voted for an energy bill because, for the first time, it had real support for alternative energy.” Moreover, Biden added, “When there were separate votes on eliminating the tax breaks for the oil companies, Barack Obama voted to eliminate them. John did not.”

The only part he didn’t mention: Biden voted against the energy bill. He gave no floor statement at the time, but apparently Biden was less thrilled by E85 ethanol pumps than Obama was.

And then there was that vote on funding for the troops, in May 2007. Palin praised Biden, a bit mischievously, for saying Obama’s vote against the supplemental spending bill for Iraq “was political” and “would cost lives.” Sure enough, Biden, who also was running for president at the time, voted for the bill and criticized Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for voting against it.

Biden did the best he could with that one, noting that Obama’s vote was based on the fact that the funding bill didn’t include a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. “Barack Obama and I agree fully and completely on one thing. You’ve got to have a time line to draw down the troops and shift responsibility to the Iraqis,” Biden said.

Biden did manage to turn the argument around on McCain, noting correctly that McCain also voted against a troop funding bill — in April 2007 — because it didn’t have a withdrawal timeline. When three of the four national candidates have Senate records, everyone can play that game.

Let the record reflect that Barack Obama made the approach to John McCain tonight.

As the two shared the Senate floor tonight for the first time since they won their party nominations, Obama stood chatting with Democrats on his side of the aisle, and McCain stood on the Republican side of the aisle.

So Obama crossed over into enemy territory.

He walked over to where McCain was chatting with Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida and Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. And he stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain.

McCain shook it, but with a “go away” look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama.

Finally, with a tight smile, McCain managed a greeting: “Good to see you.”

Obama got the message. He shook hands with Martinez and Lieberman — both of whom greeted him more warmly — and quickly beat a retreat back to the Democratic side.

We’re just hours away from the big moment where the presidential nominees walk onto the floor of the Senate and vote together for a bill to save the financial system. So are their campaigns putting politics aside, too, in honor of the noble bipartisanship we’ll see tonight?

Sure they are.

Here’s the new Obama TV ad that will start airing today, accusing McCain of a “spending spree” because of his tax cuts and support for creating private savings accounts for Social Security.

The punchline: “So as we borrow from China to fund his spending spree, ask yourself: Can we afford John McCain?”

And this afternoon, the McCain campaign is holding a press conference call with former New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and policy adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer to respond to a rally Obama held in La Crosse, Wisconsin this morning. Given the tone of Giuliani’s sarcasm-drenched speech at the Republican convention earlier this month, it’s a good bet they’re not going to praise Obama for his oratorical skills.

It’s a bit hard to square with the bipartisan rhetoric of the speeches they gave today before heading back to Washington. Here’s Obama in Wisconsin: “This is a nation that has faced down war and depression; great challenges and great threats. And at each and every moment, we have risen to meet these challenges - not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans.”

And here’s McCain in Independence, Missouri: “I am confident there are enough people of good will in both parties to help see America through this crisis. And when the last vote is cast, we can be grateful to all of them — Democrats and Republicans alike — for helping to solve the crisis instead of merely exploiting it.”

But as McCain found last week, suspending a presidential campaign in its closing weeks isn’t anything that the public expects, and it’s not anything that works out well. Besides, the political operatives have to have something to do. So today, McCain and Obama may meet up on the Senate floor, but the campaign goes on.