Above: on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, today.

“I’ve been sleeping like a baby,” the GOP candidate said on The Tonight Show Tuesday. “I sleep two hours, wake up and cry. Sleep two hours, wake up and cry.”

Above: in Danville, Virginia yesterday.





McCain returned to the David Letterman show last night. This after he cancelled an appearance last month. McCain encountered air traffic gridlock in Philly yesterday & rented a helicopter to make sure he reached the Letterman show on time.
Like Obama, McCain cracked wise at the Al Smith Memorial Dinner last night:
The same poll has Saxby Chambliss leading by 2.

On NewsChannel9.com’s main page: a new web poll that asks “who would make a better president?”
Go vote!
“McCain had at least one good line last night: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush you should’ve run four years ago.” But one good line isn’t a lifeline.
BUT
The Arizona senator finally mentioned Bill Ayers and ACORN to his opponent’s face. But he can’t link Obama to Ayers and domestic terrorism, or to the controversial community group called Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, as tightly as Obama can link McCain to Bush. And that remains one of Obama’s biggest advantages in this race.”
“The general feeling on the right side of the blogosphere is that this was McCain’s best debate and he did himself a lot of good. I think people on the Right were so relieved that the debate finally turned to matters of ideological and partisan moment — abortion, ACORN, Ayers, trade, spending — that, perhaps for the first time in his political career, they graded him on a curve. The problem, in my view, is that the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain’s shorthand with longhand — with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them.
We’re not the audience for these debates. Undecided voters are, and undecided voters are, or so studies tell us, often astonishingly ill-informed. You can only bring up new issues if you’re able pithily to explain the context and meaning of them. It is not a rap on McCain to say he’s not good at it; he doesn’t want to bother with the introduction. But in a setting like that, the introduction is what matters, far more than the attack.”
As a person whose “day job” consists of constantly attempting to make complex stories “clear & easy to understand,” I completely agree with this assessment.
Daniel Larison at the American Conservative (essential read):
“There is a basic rule in any competition, and elections are no different. If you assume that all you really need do is show up and wait for the other side to fail, you will lose and probably quite embarrassingly at that. McCain never made the case for himself, because he assumed that he would be the default winner once the public decided Obama was unprepared. Whether or not Obama is unprepared by some standards is not the point. Relative to McCain, he has shown himself to be fairly masterful while his opponent blunders and lurches. Despite having every advantage in the political conditions this year, Obama has not taken those advantages for granted nearly as much as he could have done. The post-nomination pandering and position-switching, all of which now seems to have been quite unnecessary, were part of a steady, cautious effort to appear cautious and steady, which gave calls for undefined change a reassuring rather than an unsettling quality and negated McCain’s efforts to portray him as reckless and unready.”
&
“Perhaps most remarkable about the attempt to potray Obama as a lightweight celebrity is how true of McCain that description now seems to be.”
Above: McCain speaks on Fox News today.
But: isn’t this also an argument against Sarah Palin?

The Tennessee Senator & [former Chattanooga mayor] was at the NewsChannel9 studios Tuesday morning for a satellite interview with the Fox Business Channel; we interviewed him briefly after that, & though I was not the “main interviewer,” I did manage to get some questions in.
In your conversation with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne back in May, you warned your party against making personal attacks against the Democratic presidential nominee, saying it actually hurt your 2006 Senate campaign. Do you still stand by that warning?
SENATOR CORKER: What I was warning against is these third-party groups that get involved, & they think they’re assisting you, OK? In our case it was the Republican National Committee that ran ads at the end of our race, uh, quote “trying to help us.” & instead over a 6-day period, they knocked us down by 10 points. & what I was saying is, that, you know, that in these campaigns you need to ask your friends not to run any kind of negative ads about your opponent, because they have unintended consequences. If the campaign itself wants to draw distinctions, I think that’s something the campaign should do, but again, these 3rd-party groups can do things that just totally adversely affect your campaign. It’s one of the results of McCain-Feingold. & I think it’s just totally out of control. I think certainly Tennessee’s not a battleground state, OK? & we’re not seeing a lot of ads here - it’d be a total waste of money in the state. But I’m sure that in the other states like Ohio & places that are battleground states, they’re having all kinds of 3rd-party ads run in those states, that have by the way all kinds of unintended consequences. & so, what I talked about to E.J. Dionne, & what I’ve talked about to others is the fact that these 3rd-party ads can be very detrimental.
Is free-market fundamentalism dead?
SENATOR CORKER: No, not at all. Look, you know, if you think about what happens every day in our banking system, the Federal Reserve opens the window if you will, & banks in essence put up collateral, & receive monies from the Fed, & so, every day there’s intervention, if you will, there’s a coordinated effort from central banks to keep our financial systems operating. This is a very exacerbated situation where excesses occurred, I don’t think people understood that there was potentially $55 trillion dollars of these derivatives that were getting ready to bring the system down. What we need to do is implement what happened properly & then come back in January & put in place reforms. I think most people understand there needs to be appropriate regulation. There was not appropriate regulation as it relates to these derivatives. I think we’ll get that straightened out over the course of this next year. I do not think that ‘free-market fundamentalism’ if you will is gone at all, I think we’ve always had it, whether it’s the airline industry, the fact that we have the F-A-A that coordinates people landing, there’s always a certain amount of government involvement. Hopefully it stays limited & as an advocate of limited government I certainly want to see that be the case. But today we had a very exacerbated problem that to me needed to be solved, our whole way of doing business was gonna come down. As you know I’ve supported that & have been very involved in negotiating taxpayer protections & oversight if you will that have come into play in this case & then I hope we can move very quickly away from this active involvement towards a regulatory regime that keeps this from happening again. But great question. Thank you.


Quote of the day. I hope it’s not too late to heed this advice [Update: Never mind]:
“John Weaver, McCain’s former top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this behavior.
“…we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn’t done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today–and more, it is a national disgrace.”
FURTHER READING: “the Unthinkable,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates