Ben Smith notes that "it's a cliche of politics that you want low expectations going into a debate." We saw that quite clearly before Friday's first presidential debate.

However, what if expectations hit rock bottom for your candidate?

After two weeks of dramatic missteps by Gov. Sarah Palin, virtually no one expects her to be a credible rival to Sen. Joe Biden. As a result, Jonathan Martin notes that Republicans are actually trying to lower expectations for Biden in Thursday's vice presidential debate, rather than raise them.

Earlier this week, Sen. John McCain tried to lower expectations for his own debate performance tonight by stressing how good Sen. Barack Obama is at debating.

"Have no doubt about the capabilities of Sen. Obama to a debate. He's very, very good. He was able to defeat Sen. Hillary Clinton, who, as we all know, is very accomplished. He was able to, with his eloquence, inspire a great number of Americans. These will be tough debates."

Today, the Obama campaign takes the art form of the expectations game to a new level with a memo saying that McCain's "debating skills are unparalleled" and that the topic of foreign policy gives him "home field advantage."

Read the entire memo below.

Last night around 8:30 p.m., Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain released a "joint statement" pertaining the the crisis in the financial markets:

 "The American people are facing a moment of economic crisis. No matter how this began, we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our economy. The jobs, savings, and prosperity of the American people are at stake.
 
"Now is a time to come together - Democrats and Republicans - in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of the American people. The plan that has been submitted to Congress by the Bush Administration is flawed, but the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.
 
"This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country."
 

However, the Obama campaign also released a "set of principles" that Obama wanted McCain to support. However, Marc Ambinder reports McCain would not agree to this so they were left on "the cutting room floor."

Here are the five principles outlines by Obama:
 

First, there must be oversight. We should not hand over a blank check to the discretion of one man. We support an independent, bipartisan board to ensure accountability and complete transparency.
 
Second, we need to protect taxpayers. There should be a path for taxpayers to recover their money, and to turn a profit if Wall Street prospers.
 
Third, no Wall Street executive should profit from taxpayer dollars. This plan cannot be a welfare program for CEOs whose greed and irresponsibility has contributed to this crisis.
 
Fourth, we must help families who are struggling to stay in their homes. We cannot bail out Wall Street without helping millions of families facing foreclosure on Main Street.
 
Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.

Interestingly, when President Bush addressed the nation just minutes later, he essentially agreed to the exact same set of principles in his own speech. So the question is: Why wouldn't McCain agree to a fairly innocuous, Mom and apple pie set of conditions for a bill?

Democrats fear this morning that McCain is setting up a scenario in which he will vote against the bill, rally conservatives to his side and, most importantly, distance himself from both President Bush and Congress before the election.

Sen. John McCain yesterday floated the idea that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo might make a good Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the New York Times.

However, he might want to read a Village Voice piece from last month that suggests that Cuomo, as the nation's youngest Housing Secretary, actually "gave birth" to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Need a break from the seriousness of the presidential campaign?

Take a look at the newest CQ blog, Politics (Un)seriously, for a great collection of the funniest videos to hit the web during the heated campaign.

Even Al Franken took a break from his U.S. Senate campaign in Minnesota to help write a skit for his old pals at Saturday Night Live mocking Sen. John McCain's ad strategy. Very amusing.

The National Journal polled five states that voted for President Bush four years ago -- Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia -- and found that less than 40% of voters in those states (except for New Mexico) believe that Sen. Barack Obama is more prepared to be president than Sen. John McCain.

In a political environment not generally friendly to Republicans, McCain's biggest advantage over Obama has been his perceived readiness to be president. He hammered away at this message all summer and kept the race reasonably close.

However, when McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate -- a person just two years removed from being mayor of a town with fewer people than the Fenway Park bleachers -- he essentially gave up experience as a campaign issue. It's hard to argue that Obama is inexperienced when McCain's choice to be just a heartbeat away from the presidency has even less experience.

As the pollsters note, it's hard to see how Obama can get to 270 electoral votes without picking up at least one of these five states. However, it's equally hard to see how McCain can win all of these states without using the experience issue. By choosing Palin -- and giving up that issue -- McCain dramatically hurt his chances of winning the election.

Related: Palin's favorability ratings tumble.

If you want to know why Gov. Sarah Palin drives liberal Democrats crazy -- and is helping Sen. Barack Obama raise money at a record pace -- here's an excerpt from an viral email making its way around the country:

• If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
• Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential American story.

• If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
• Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

• Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
• Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

• If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
• If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

• If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
• If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

• If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
• If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

• If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
• If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

I found it amazing that both Democrats and Republicans could hold their national conventions without speaking about a word about the meltdown in the nation's financial markets, but as Ben Smith notes, the likely collapse of Lehman Brothers is "going to make it hard for the candidates to talk about anything else this week."

With no bidders emerging for Lehman over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal notes "that would leave an orderly liquidation as the most likely scenario, a dramatic outcome for a once-powerful firm." This follows the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week, and of Bear Stearns earlier this year.

The financial markets are in more serious trouble than we've seen since the Great Depression, yet we've heard very little from Obama or McCain.
 

Today we learned that the Obama campaign has quietly embraced 527 groups -- organizations set up via a loophole in the campaign finance laws that can raise and spend nearly unlimited funds. Of course, Obama cannot ask anyone to form these groups; the campaign can only communicate its intentions through the media, hints and winks.

However, this reversal on Obama's part is not necessarily because he finds his campaign in a fundraising slowdown. Instead, as Rick Hasen write, "he needs groups that can go more negative on Palin and McCain. Obama is trying to run as a different kind of politician, and it would interfere with his branding to go overly negative. But outside can attack in ways that Obama cannot (think of the recent union ads attacking the cost of McCain's shoes), and with the race tightening, especially in the battleground states, negative advertising probably is what the campaign wants and needs right now."

Looking back at the 2004 presidential race polls, it's interesting to note that Sen. John Kerry maintained the lead in national polls through most of the summer. However, the dynamics of the race turned dramatically after the conventions with President Bush jumping into a double-digit lead. Kerry gained on Bush as the debates took place, but Bush essentially remained ahead in nearly all polls until the November election.

It's fair to say that President Bush won re-election four years ago in large part because of the lift he received at the Republican convention.

Reviewing the 2008 national polls shows that while Sen. Barack Obama led Sen. John McCain for most of the summer, his edge over McCain was just a few points before the conventions. The early polls this week are mixed: Some show McCain ahead, some show Obama ahead but most show the race deadlocked or in a "statistical tie."

Sometime next week, the impact of the conventions will be fully accounted in the national polling. It will be interesting to see if the dynamics of this year's race changed as radically as it did four years ago. The early indications are that the bounces each campaign received essentially canceled out each other.

When the presidential debate schedules were announced, the staging and format of the sole vice presidential debate was "to be resolved after both parties' Vice Presidential nominees are selected."

We know it will be Sen. Joe Biden vs. Gov. Sarah Palin.

We know the debate will be on October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

We know Gwen Ifill will be moderator.

We know Rep. Rahm Emanuel is negotiating for the Obama campaign and Sen. Lindsey Graham is representing the McCain campaign.

What we don't know are the details. It would be very interesting to learn how those discussions are going.

Josh Marshall: "Isn't Palin supposed to move to Cheney's undisclosed location after she gets elected, not before?"

We all spend too much time watching political coverage on television. We listen to former politicians and analysts dissect speeches, evaluate campaign strategy and predict what's going to happen in November. But they probably don't know what they're talking about.

Jon Stewart makes the point better than anyone.

After watching Gov. Sarah Palin accept the Republican party's vice presidential nomination last night, the common reaction is that the party's base loved what they heard in her speech. She generated real excitement among the delegates. Conservative talk radio sees Palin as the Republican version of Sen. Barack Obama.

This is important to the McCain campaign, because compared with Obama they have almost no field organization to speak of. Firing up their base will be critical to giving McCain a chance on Election Day.

However, the challenge for McCain still remains getting independents and moderate Democrats to vote for him. In this respect, Palin's speech fell far short. In fact, focus groups of independent voters found her overly harsh in her sarcasm and not very appealing to this cohort of voters.

Nate Silver makes another very important point: "To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone's opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority -- she's much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir."

The job of making independents and moderate Democrats vote for John McCain is McCain himself. That's what his speech is about tonight. He's a trusted figure. And he's given good convention speeches before. If he cannot connect with independents on the key issues -- in particular, the economy and health care -- it doesn't matter how good Sarah Palin was last night.

It's now become evident that Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign did not do a thorough vetting of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin before officially announcing her as his running mate.

The McCain campaign chose today -- a day when many families are at Labor Day picnics or at the beach -- to push out some of the more damaging news about his new political partner.

Here's what we learned today:

• Just three weeks ago, Palin hired a lawyer to defend her against a state probe into whether she abused her power in firing a state employee.
• Palin announced that her 17 year old unmarried daughter is pregnant.
• Todd Palin, the governor's husband, was arrested for drunk driving in 1986.

We also learned -- though not directly from the McCain campaign -- that Palin was once a member of a fringe party that wants a vote on whether Alaska can secede from the United States.
 
An added advantage for McCain of having the information come out today is that with a hurricane threatening the Gulf Coast, both parties are holding their fire in an attempt not to look overly political when Americans are being evacuated from their homes.

The big question: How much more is there to learn about Sarah Palin?