Luffing Polls

It's a confusing moment in the trend of the presidential race. On the one hand, the crisis economy makes it enormously difficult for any new storyline to be introduced, leaving voters wanting to extinguish all Republicans. On the other hand, the McCain campaign has started educating on the topic of Barack's scumbag friends. Which should make for an exciting debate tonight!

McCain's campaign "wants to say the issue here is character and judgment," said Anita Dunn, a senior Obama adviser. "And that is frankly an argument that we are happy to have with John McCain."

While it will take a while for the impact of the introduction of Bill Ayers to be measured by polls, there is already some tightening evident in the race going into tonight's debate.

While the Rasmussen and Gallup polls have shown a small increase in Barack's lead over the past couple of days, both with Barack up 8% as of yesterday, there are some contrary indications - the most dramatic from Zogby.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama has a 2-point lead in the U.S. presidential race on Republican John McCain, whose choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate helped shore up support for both candidates, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

Obama leads McCain among likely voters by 47 percent to 45 percent, within the poll's 3.1 percent margin of error. He gained ground in the last month among independent and women voters and on the question of who could best manage the faltering U.S. economy.

Obama wiped out McCain's 5-point edge in a Reuters/Zogby poll taken in August before the nominating conventions.

A new CBS poll shows Obama's lead in a similar range.

In the new poll, the Democratic ticket leads by 3 percentage points, 48 percent to 45 percent, among likely voters.

The Obama-Biden ticket led by a wider margin, nine percentage points, in a CBS News poll released last Wednesday, before Joe Biden and Sarah Palin faced off in the vice presidential debate. Obama-Biden led by five percentage points on Sept. 25.

One positive trend for McCain is a declining sense of linkage between he and President Bush.

38% in this poll think that if elected president McCain would generally continue President Bush’s policies, down from 46% last month, before the first presidential debate. This is the lowest percentage to link McCain to the President’s policies since last the question was first asked last May.

Look for Barack to be talking lots of Bush/McCain tonight.