THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN A “DEBACLE”? That seems highly exaggerated to me. I do think a lot of the air that the media pumped into the Obama balloon is leaking out, but that just means that Obama has to step up, and get more specific beyond “hope, change, and opposing the Iraq War in 2002.”

I expect that the Hillary diehards will make one last push for her, though. Meanwhile, some thoughts on that Zogby poll.

UPDATE: Lindsay Beyerstein: “John McCain is gaining in the polls nationally, according to several independent measures. . . . As one of my colleagues pointed out, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll through the last week gives Obama a stable 1 to 2 point lead over the past two weeks. Still not good news, but also more reason to question the validity of the Zogby results.”

THE OBAMA / BILL AYERS / ANNENBERG STORY has broken out into the Legacy Media now. Tom Maguire comments: “Hard to believe that with our aggressive national media covering a Presidential campaign that Obama and Daley could mange this cover-up in plain sight. Yeah, real hard.”

I caution those who are excited about getting into the archives, though: It probably won’t happen, and by now I’m sure that the files have been vacuumed of any seriously embarrassing matter anyway. This is Chicago.

UPDATE: What leaked out.

OBAMA: OF COURSE THE SURGE SUCCEEDED:

Sen. Barack Obama, edging away from a long-held position, tacitly acknowledged the success of the Iraq troop-surge strategy during an appearance Tuesday before the country’s largest organization of combat veterans.

“Let’s be clear, our troops have completed every mission they’ve been given,” Mr. Obama said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Orlando, Fla., where the likely Democratic presidential nominee courted military voters who are expected to play a pivotal role in several swing states. “They have created the space for political reconciliation.”

Well, he’s only a few months late in recognizing that.

HEH: “Oh, come on! If you want to people to be upset about waterboarding, don’t demonstrate it on lawyers.”

HMM: “Annenberg-Gate” - It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up. (Via Tom Maguire). I suspect that anything damaging has vanished by now anyway. It’s Chicago, after all.

Wheres Sandy Berger?

INDEED: After Barack Obama hype, a backlash.

No human being can meet the wildly inflated expectations that accompany the rookie senator’s every move. It can’t help that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Obama “a leader that God has blessed us with at this time.”

That’s the kind of remark that can turn voters into problems. Most Americans famously resent being told an election is over months before the polls open or that God is taking sides. . . . While McCain has complained about media favoritism toward Obama, most recently about NBC News’ tilted coverage, maybe he ought to encourage it. Resentment over the media love affair with Obama might be McCain’s most powerful weapon. The fawning coverage exaggerates even routine Obama events, and when he fails to meet giddy expectations, the excuse machine warps into overtime. That, in turn, creates another unappealing layer of media-imposed conventional wisdom.

…

CORRECTING OBAMA ON THE TOPIC OF AMERICAN SELFISHNESS: “Whatever the case is with his own selfishness, the evidence of an internationally superior American generosity is impressive, beginning with the numbers on our charitable giving. We give twice as much as the British per capita, and according to The American magazine, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians. Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the amount given each year just keeps getting larger, and meanwhile, we do far more volunteer work than in other industrialized countries.”

Obama’s comments seem to echo the claims of U.N. official Jan Egeland that the U.S. response to the Indian Ocean tsunami was “stingy.” That charge was bogus — there was over a billion dollars in private tsunami relief from Americans — and it turned out that the U.N. wasted a lot of its

…

BACK TO SCHOOL TIPS for families with dogs.

WELL,THIS MUST BE EMBARRASSING FOR SOME PEOPLE:

There’s been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so — beginning with this Daily Kos diary — suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Soviet gulags.

But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing.

The rowbacks are commencing. The desperation, however, remains palpable.

CHANGES IN THE EARTH’S magnetic field. I blame Bush.