This is slightly bizarre, and is probably an intentional distraction to keep the media guessing, but Rep. Chet Edwards (D), TX-17, which includes George Bush’s “ranch” in Crawford, revealed today that he was vetted by Obama’s VP search team:

Final-hour speculation on Democrat Barack Obama’s vice presidential choice is centering on U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards of Waco, a low-key moderate and dark horse ticket prospect.

Edwards, first elected to Congress in 1990, campaigned with Obama in Texas earlier this year. Their chemistry and the experience Edwards might bring to the ticket fueled speculation at the time about a possible vice presidential nomination.

Since then, better-known national brands like Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia have largely dominated the veepstakes talk in the news media.

The Associated Press is reporting today that Edwards is back in the mix.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is said to have advocated for Edwards in the vetting process.

Olbermann: McCain Campaign ‘Apparently Panicked’

As Keith Olbermann put it on MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, “Elections rarely turn now on deep meaning or intercontinental ballistic missile treaties or even or war and peace. They turn on symbolism, and John McCain just fell into a big, giant, steaming pile of symbolism.”

In a recent interview with Mike Allen of right-leaning Politico.com, John McCain was stumped by what should have been a very simple question:

ALLEN: How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?

MCCAIN: I think … I’ll have my staff get to you. I’m not … [garbled] … It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you …

ALLEN: Okay! Thank you!

The Obama campaign has been taking heat lately for not firing back at McCain, whose campaign has seemed to become slimier and nastier by the day. But Obama’s response to McCain’s pose of ignorance about the number of condos he and Cindy owns was, in a word, rapid:

“This puzzled me. I was confused as to what he meant. Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll have to check with my staff.’ True quote! ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’ So they asked his staff and he said, ‘at least four.’ ‘At least four.’

Now think about that. I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you’re like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.

By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes. There’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-laureate economist, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of what ordinary people are going through to understand that we can’t afford eight more years or four more years or one more year of the failed economic policies that George Bush has put in place.”

[…]

Yesterday, John McCain went before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and lied about Barack Obama’s record, saying that Obama voted to “legislate” failure by casting a single vote against troop funding because it did not contain a timetable, despite Obama’s having voted for funding the occupation every other time. McCain continued:
“One of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can’t disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism.”
– Obama

“This was back when supporting America’s efforts in Iraq entailed serious political risk … It was a clarifying moment. It was a moment when political self-interest and the national interest parted ways.”

Today, speaking before the same group, Obama responded:

“Yesterday, Senator McCain came before you,” said Obama. “He is a man who has served this nation honorably, and he correctly stated that one of the chief criteria for the American people in this election is going to be who can exercise the best judgment as Commander in Chief. But instead of just offering policy answers, he turned to a typical laundry list of political attacks. He said that I have changed my position on Iraq when I have not. He said that I am for a path of “retreat and failure.” And he declared, “Behind all of these claims and positions by Senator Obama lies the ambition to be president” — suggesting, as he has so many times, that I put personal ambition before my country. That is John McCain’s prerogative. He can run that kind of campaign, and — frankly — that’s how political campaigns have been run in recent years. But I believe the American people are better than that. I believe that this defining moment demands something more of us.”

And:

[…]

Barack Obama in Albuquerque yesterday:

“We’ve got work to do,” said the senator. “This is not going to be easy. It would be nice, you would think, given how badly Bush and his folks have performed over the last eight years and considering the fact that John McCain has facilitated and worked with the Bush Administration on this disaster, you would like to think that folks would say, we don’t even have to run TV ads, you just open the papers and say ‘we gotta throw the bums out.'”

But, Obama added, “American politics is never that easy.” Telling the crowd in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that he was “confident” that the public would be persuaded by the need for change, the Illinois Democrat shifted focus to his Republican opponent.

“You know, Americans will put up with a lot of stuff,” he said. “We are not, contrary to what John McCain’s advisers will say, we are not a bunch of whiners. We will suck it up and work hard even when things are unfair. But what really gets us mad, what really motivates and activates us is when we start feeling like the rules are so tilted in favor of the special interest, lobbyists and fat cats; that our kids might not have better opportunities we had. And when we start feeling that, that’s when we know the American people rise up. That’s when we know change is going to come about.”

National polls are mostly meaningless for the next few weeks, but this one may be surprisingly noteworthy:

Barack Obama has been declared winner of the 2008 bobble head election, held by sports consulting firm The Goldklang Group in six minor league baseball stadiums this month.

Obama defeated John McCain 55 percent to 45 percent, as minor league fans cast ballots at voting booths inside the six stadiums. Each fan received a bobblehead doll of his/her candidate. Voting stopped and a winner was proclaimed when one candidate’s bobblehead supply ran out.

It sounds silly, as anything involving bobble heads does, but there are a couple of factors here to consider. First, the demographics of fans of minor league baseball are much closer to NASCAR dads and Sam’s Club shoppers than, say, aficionados of chardonnay and arugula, which bodes well for Barack Obama, whom Republicans are trying to brand as uppity, oops, sorry, elitist, because his base includes educated, upper-income wine drinkers who prefer salad made with greens that are more flavorful than iceberg.

In addition, Obama swept McCain at ball games even in generally Republican areas like South Carolina, Florida and South Dakota, as well as in the Democratic strongholds of Massachusetts and New York. In St. Paul, Minn., site of the Republican National Convention next month, Obama trounced McCain by 58 percent to 42 percent.

Another factor to consider is that, in August 2004, the same bobblehead poll accurately predicted the George Bush would narrowly defeat John Kerry.

Of course, there’s one factor that may undermine the accuracy of the poll: It’s unclear how many of the bobblehead voters are under the age of 18 and thus ineligible to vote in the real election in November.

Writing at Open Left, Mike Lux, co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, has been reading my mind:

It’s no accident that the only two Democrats to win the Presidency since 1968 were governors who were from small states, far away from DC, unaffected by the Culture of Caution that tends to grip Democrats on Capitol Hill…

My hope was that Obama would be more like JFK in that although he was a Senator, he was enough of an outsider and confident enough in himself that he was not infected by the Culture of Caution. Much of the time in the campaign he has shown that kind of confidence and strength. But I fear that, at least for the moment, the Capitol Hill Culture of Caution has taken hold of the campaign…

Instead of having the confidence to win the bigger argument on investing in alternative energy production and conservation, they make the shift on drilling. Instead of pushing back firmly and assertively on the race card accusation, they have the campaign’s reply be “No, we’re not playing the race card.” Instead of having the confidence to really negotiate with McCain on debate formats, they fell into the we’ll-just-do-what-candidates-have-always-done formats. Instead of having the confidence to lay out some of his good new ideas on foreign policy that are clearly different from the Bush doctrine in his widely watched Berlin speech, he stuck to cautious generalities. Instead of having the confidence to back up his strong and effective primary rhetoric on FISA and NAFTA, he cautiously moved towards the conventional wisdom.

[…]