Here’s a summary of the smartest new political analysis on the Web:
by Gerald F. Seib and Gerald F. Seib

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Barack Obama speaks at a campaign event at the McConnell Center in Dover, N.H., Friday. (AP Photo)


Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has a question for the worried campaign of Sen. Barack Obama: Why aren’t you willing to stretch the truth more? “Since July, John McCain and his campaign have made 11 political claims that are barely true, eight that are categorically false, and three that you’d have to call pants-on-fire lies—a total of 22 clearly deceptive statements (many of them made repeatedly in ads and stump speeches),” Manjoo writes.

“Barack Obama and Joe Biden, meanwhile, have put out eight bare truths, four untruths, and zero pants-on-fire lies—12 false claims. These stats and categories come from PolitiFact, but the story looks pretty much the same if you count up fabrications documented by FactCheck.org or the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the other truth-squad operations working the race…” Confronted with misrepresentations in its ads, Manjoo writes, Obama’s campaign has sometimes altered its approach. What’s “so puzzling about Obama’s strategy,” Manjoo asks, is this: “Why is he paying any attention to the fact-checkers? So far, McCain has seen little blowback from lying. Polls show that he’s perceived as more “honest and trustworthy” than Obama and that the public believes his claim that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class.”

Meantime Obama has lost the control he once had over the campaign and deployed a new – more aggressive – strategy on Friday to combat it. Washingtonpost.com’s Chris Cillizza wonders if it will actually work. “One other potential complication that presents itself when considering the efficacy of Obama’s new aggressive approach is that it is focused entirely on painting McCain as out of touch on the economy at a time when many Democrats are clearly itching for the Illinois senator to go at Palin in a meaningful way. The liberal base of the Democratic party detests Palin in a visceral way and wants to destroy her, regardless of whether it is a sound political strategy or not,” Cillizza writes. “While it’s clear that the economic message is the right one for Obama…The question is whether anything other than a full frontal assault on Palin will energize the base in the way that can help Obama carry the fight to McCain.”

Newsweek’s Andrew Romano puts forth his own interesting thesis: Image is driving what voters think about a candidate’s economic positions, not the other way around. “In the wake of last week’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul,” he writes, “most analysts have focused their energies on examining the stunning shifts in McCain’s direction among independents and white women…But the more interesting change may be in the ‘who do you trust to handle the economy?’ category. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in mid-July, 54 percent of voters answered Obama and 35 percent answered McCain. That’s a 19-point gap. But now Obama’s lead has collapsed to a mere five points–47 percent to 42.”

This happened despite no discernible change in policy. “At the Republican convention, McCain didn’t say much about his economic proposals, so it’s hard to see how the swift McCainward shift on the economy had anything to do with specific policy prescriptions. It’s not like vast swaths of the American populace spent the post-St. Paul weekend carefully combing through Obama’s plan and McCain’s plan and deciding they preferred the latter. A more plausible explanation is that the convention changed how voters view McCain as a candidate–and that in turn affected their preferences on specific issues.”

National Journal’s Charlie Cook takes a look at how big of an asset Sarah Palin truly is in down ballot races. “In part the answer depends on whether you believed that Republicans had a turnout problem before Palin was chosen. There are two schools of thought. The first is that although many Republicans were not excited about McCain, a longtime maverick and, yes, irritant to the GOP establishment, the party’s voters would have supported him anyway…This theory posits that these voters simply feel better now about a vote they would have cast anyway,” Cook writes.

“The second theory is that if McCain had not added Palin or someone else capable of revving up the GOP base, quite a few Republicans wouldn’t have voted.” The truth is that there is still a group of “unreliable Republicans” who need to be reminded over and over – at a minimum. “McCain has neither the money nor the organizational ability to match the get-out-the-vote efforts of President Bush’s 2004 campaign or Obama’s current effort. So perhaps Palin is an asset but not quite a savior.”