Baby Talk

"Good call. The McCain campaign's overbearing handlers are panicked at the notion of a candidate for national office hearing an unscripted question for which she has not been prepped. As a result, they want the benefit of the images, without the risk of embarrassment."

Obama has edged out to a 52-43 lead, says a new WP-ABC poll. Key reason: everyone is fed up with the economy.

I couldn't have gotten away with this sentence, but Maureen Dowd can:

"I don't agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse."

Picking up on the McCain's camp's evisceration of the NYT on Monday, Jack Shafer writes in Slate:

"While I don't believe that the Times is pulling for Barack Obama, and I'd never judge an entire publication by one story, Steve Schmidt is right about the more general point he raises: The press corps does adore Barack Obama. They like his story. They like writing about him. They like the way he gives speeches. They like the way he makes them feel. And they don't mind cutting him slack whenever he acts like a regular politician -- which he is.

"This, of course, is the same press corps that adored John McCain during the 2000 race."

George Will is generating big-time buzz as the conservative commentator, never a fan of McCain, grows increasingly critical of the GOP nominee:

"Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

"Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that 'McCain untethered' -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a 'false and deeply unfair' attack on Cox that was 'unpresidential' and demonstrated that McCain 'doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.' . . .

"In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox 'betrayed the public's trust' -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are 'corrupt' or 'betray the public's trust,' two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people . . .

"It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"