It’s a fair question, and a delicate foreign policy area.  Barack Obama said he would in a debate many months ago, and McCain called him out on it during Friday night’s debate.  So a kid asks Palin about it in a cheesesteak hut, and she says Obama’s right.

Today, McCain gets angry, cancels his town hall meeting, and yells at George Stephanopoulos about it.  Pretty funny.

Click here for video.

Fair enough. But I’d specifically single out the fact that no one seemed impressed with McCain’s ignoble “I’m suspending my campaign” stunt (after which he failed to suspend his campaign). Just check out the national Gallup Daily Tracking poll as we approach Friday’s debate:

Count me among those who are supremely interested to see what this poll looks like after they start polling Americans post-debate (read: Monday’s numbers).

But my reaction? YAAAWWN!

I never would’ve thought I’d be longing for the days of Bush vs. Kerry, but here I am today, almost putting myself to sleep trying to write about last night’s debate. Don’t get me wrong — I like substance, and substance is kind of what we got. But whether it was McCain somehow still tripping over endless regurgitations from his stump speech (”I’ll veto spending and be famous!”), or Obama taking way too much of his own time responding to McCain’s consistent attacks, I can only think of one word to sum up the debate: repetitive.

• Obama’s strengths: Civility, bipartisanship, calm.
• Obama’s weaknesses: Being baited into responding to McCain’s attacks, not spending enough time on his own plans
• McCain’s strengths: Staying on-message, attacking Obama with every single answer
• McCain’s weaknesses: He appeared contemptuous, angry, old and bitter. He was highly partisan.

According to post-debate polls, people are just loving Obama. I don’t totally get it, but I approve of it. I think he did, in fact, have the better debate. His answers were more appealing to everyday folks, and he had more specifics about his plans. McCain only seemed to offer specifics about Obama, and hardly any about himself.

McCain repeatedly interrupted Obama and the moderator, PBS’ Jim Lehrer, often raising his voice and speaking over them until they gave up, which could take up to 30 seconds of crosstalk, just like on Bill O’Reilly’s godforsaken show. This was one of the more annoying traits I’ve seen in a debater.

Other than that, next time bring out the fireworks, boys! Try to convince us that you have at least some passion for the job. (Note: McCain getting angry about Obama’s record does not count. Negativity doesn’t win debates, and the Independents polled proved that.)

I think the idea was, for McCain anyway, to appear in the senate when they were signing the bill and try to claim some kind of credit.  But instead, everyone seemed to get pissed when he and Obama showed up, because it reminded them of how much they hated their idealogical opponents.

In particular, the extra conservative brand of Republicans are more interested in the markets failing than they are in spending government money.  That’s okay, philosophically (though, as is so often the case with extremism, it’s not okay practically), but they were ready to bite the bullet and vote for the bill before the candidates showed up.  Let’s hope that after McCain is forced to eat his words and show up at the debate tonight, congress can start doing some real work.

And now we’re getting to know all the juicy details of the McCain stunt, not the least significant of which is that he never actually suspended his campaign, and he never will. Andrew Sullivan notes that all the McCain ads are still up all over the country, and David Letterman was miffed last night to learn that McCain cancelled his appearance on the show because he had to “rush back to Washington,” when, really, he was in New York City giving an interview to Katie Couric instead of Letterman.

So while McCain is happy to call press conference after press conference talking about how eager he is to put his country first (even if he can’t seem to deal with more than one issue in that country at a time), his surrogates are still doing smear interviews, his ad team is still buying ads, and he himself is still not in the senate.

The final joke, of course, was that instead of being in the Senate this morning, helping to get the damn deal done, which was allegedly what the whole purpose of this “suspension” was, McCain was speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. Way to crack that whip over Congress, senator.

And check out this bonus video, where McCain says he’s never actually read the bill that he fictionally suspended his campaign over because it’s so important to pass:

If you don’t watch this video, you’re an un-American:

Until today:

Any kind of polls should be taken with a massive grain of salt, and especially daily tracking polls. But this isn’t just the highest Obama has polled yet in 2008 — as I said, he’s broken the 50% barrier, which is perhaps the only statistically significant milestone someone can reach in a head-to-head poll. McCain, for his part, exhibits a more telling story with his ratings, as he hasn’t been able to poll above 45%.

Here are the hard numbers:

Gallup:
Obama - 50%
McCain - 42%

Rasmussen:
Obama - 51%
McCain - 45%

Undecideds are apparently the X-factor, as Obama is gaining support from their category while McCain is holding strong at around 42%. I’m not sure if this is pure convention bounce, or if dissatisfaction with McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his VP is pushing undecideds into the Obama column. It seems to me that the latter is more likely. We’ll see if it lasts or if Obama falls back down.

Convention bounces don’t often last — but unpopular VP choices last forever.

She was elected mayor of a backwoods town in Alaska, and then governor of the state, which is a notoriously arch-conservative electorate, filled with burly woodsmen and a citizenship influenced by traditional frontier “values” more than anything else — or at least wannabes, trying to imitate the above.  I’m not going to say it’s entirely unlikely that such a culture would elect a female as its leader, but it can be difficult to pull off.

Most importantly, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Palin knows how to game the media in her favor.  Just before she was officially announced as the Vice Presidential choice of John McCain, her Wikipedia page was scrubbed of anything that might reflect poorly on her by a user going by the name of “Young Trigg,” which happens to be the name of her son.

For analysis and giggly conjecture, check out the NPR audio of the story.

For a list of the changes made, when, and by whom, the most comprehensive piece I’ve seen is this Daily Kos diary.

So while the cable news talking heads fabricate their “you can’t discuss the pros and cons of a woman” storyline, the woman in question appears to be one step ahead of them.  And hey, so are most people — but I suppose the talk shows have to do something to keep the debate over this strikingly bad choice of a VP from turning into a bloodbath.

But this morning, Joe got into an absurd tiff with David Schuster, who is an MSNBC reporter and was on the show acting as a guest commentator/analyst. For those of you who don’t know, Joe is a lot like Chris Matthews, only right-leaning (Matthews is left-leaning). Each of them are fairly laid back, curious guys with a genuine interest in politics and public policy. This genuine interest makes their respective shows immensely watchable.

Today, though, as often happens, Joe was going a little Right Wing on us, saying that if the president of Iraq wanted us to leave, we should, and he would be assassinated, and Joe said he didn’t care if that happened (in fact, Joe seemed to enjoy the thought). This was out of line, but in my opinion, Schuster was the one who brought up partisanship by calling Joe a Republican as if it were an insult. …okay, so maybe it is a pretty good insult these days:

But it comes on the heels of Keith Olbermann telling Scarborough to “get a shovel” (for his bullshit, you see) on national television last night, while Joe was making a legitimate claim about McCain gaining on Obama in the polls these last few weeks. If referencing polls is what qualifies as “bullshit” on MSNBC these days, I fear for the future:

And all of this seems to be a part of a larger theme, coming just a week after MSNBC hired Rachel Maddow for their third prime time TV slot along with Olbermann and Matthews, thus cementing their role as liberal antidote to Fox News. As a result, the liberals in the network seem to be far more bold and combative than they were even a few weeks ago — and that have Scarborough in their sites.

For the record, Fox news does need a liberal antidote — but not one that behaves exactly as Fox does, by suppressing viewpoints and demonizing well-meaning dissent.

I don’t always agree with Scarborough, but that’s the point. And that’s why I’m in his corner on this one.