Via Blake Dvorak at RCP, we learn Cindy McCain is the latest member of the McCain team to take a hard negative turn:

"Let me tell you just a little something that I was not so happy about. My son, like so many others, and today like the Palin's son, have served on the front lines, helping keep peace and helping freedom for other people. I'm a blue star mom, just like Gov. Palin is. I'm proud of my sons, but let me tell you, the day that Sen. Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body," Cindy McCain said.

"I would suggest that Sen. Obama change shoes with me for just one day, and see what it means, and see what it means to have a loved one serving in the armed forces, and more importantly, serving in harms way. I suggest he take a day and go watch our fine young men and women deploy, get on those busses and leave with a smile and a charge."

UPDATE: Democrats respond (and are far less personal about it than many of our commenters):

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Nielsen reports 63.2 milion people watched last night's debate, a big increase from the 52.4 million who watched the first matchup between John McCain and Barack Obama on September 26 (a Friday night, not exactly ideal). But that is still far less than the 69.9 million who tuned in to see Sarah Palin and Joe Biden last week.

A devastatingly clever little bird chirps that it's a good thing that we're almost done with this rodeo; McCain is running out of songs to play. A list of the songs whose authors have asked the candidate to stop using them.

Foo Fighters's "My Hero": "The saddest thing about this is that ‘My Hero’ was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential. To have it appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyric just tarnishes the song."

John Mellencamp's “Our Country” and “Pink Houses”: "His reps are quietly reaching out to McCain and asking him to stop playing his tunes."

Heart's "Barracuda": "The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The ‘barracuda’ represented the business.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it there."

Van Halen's "Right Now": "Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given."

Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty": "[T]he fact that Sen. McCain has used this song in a hit-piece on Barack Obama is anathema to Jackson."

Gretchen Peter's (writer) "Independence Day" (Martina McBride performs the song; Peters objects to use of song about abused women being used at a campaign rally): "The fact that the McCain-Palin campaign is using a song about an abused woman as a rallying cry for their vice presidential candidate, a woman who would ban abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, is beyond irony."

Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You": "The Warner Music Group asserted its copyright claim against YouTube, which is the reason for the take-down. McCain's campaign has re-posted the video, sans Warner's intellectual property. It's ironic that a United States senator, who has been part of a body that has so repudiated the idea of fair-use, is feeling the repeated stings resulting from its own legislative history. (To be fair though, McCain's been on the side of individuals in many a legislative fight.)"

But, remember, he always has Daddy Yankee.

David Brooks' devastating assessment of Sarah Palin, delivered at an event for The Atlantic in New York on Monday, echoes an email I received from a prominent Republican party professional in response to Gov. Palin's debate performance last week. His words Here's the email*:

Fascinating.

She really is what Bush pretends to be -- she 's a true anti-intellectual. She's has this very Pentecostal view of the world. We don't need to study the Bible, we don't need ministers, we can just feel the spirit and let the spirit speak through us. It's this classically Alaskan value system that places experience over all other values. I know what mothers need because I am a mother.

We don't need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel.

Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he's Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous....

She's terrifying and represents a streak of the Republican party that is a permanent minority. She will not play well with suburban women in Montgomery County [OH]. They want their kids to go to good schools and college. Palin basically says that isn't necessary. You can just speak plainly from the heart and that's good enough. But that's how you end up a fish picker from Alaska.

It's not that she is an idiot that bothers me. It's that she celebrates non-learning and anti-knowledge. She celebrates ignorance.

Terrifying.

* NOTE: Just to clarify, the block quote above is from a prominent Republican professional, not David Brooks. What Brooks said in New York can be found via the hyperlink.

At a McCain-Palin rally earlier today in Bethlehem, PA, a local GOP leader, William Platt, used Barack Obama's middle name in his opening remarks. Twice. McCain didn't acknowledge the winking slur, but the campaign did send a statement: “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November.”

On a perhaps unrelated note: Sean Hannity traveled with McCain today and had a one-on-two sit-down with the candidate and his running mate even as Platt was making his remarks. If anyone can think of a good reason for McCain and Palin to grant Sean Hannity a second (first and half) interview besides to raise the specter of Obama's "associations" (word and otherwise) I'd love to hear it.

The various daily tracking polls put Obama's lead at anywhere from slim to massive. Gallup, the gold standard, tops the list. These polls do not yet account for reaction to last night's debate. But unless vast numbers of swing voters saw something I missed, the debate won't change much.

David Samuels, one of America's finest working nonfiction writers, has a compelling and challenging piece about Barack Obama in the latest New Republic. It is at once a book review, a comparative literature exercise, a rumination on race, a candidate profile, and a magazine feature. Its central idea is that Barack Obama has internalized the thesis of Ralph Ellison's classic novel, Invisible Man, which Samuels summarizes as the notion that "the symbolic and actual baggage of race makes it difficult if not impossible for a black man to ever realize his full humanity in the eyes of anyone."

To that end, Obama has offered himself to the nation as a blank slate, which is both not who he really is, and exactly who everyone wants him to be. All presidential candidates do this, of course. As the saying goes, they try to be all things to all people. But the Obama phenomenon in this regard has nonetheless been remarkable, and I have never seen it as clearly picked apart as in this piece. Samuels quotes Obama from his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." He continues:

Here, Obama seems to agree with Ellison about the effect of the racial baggage that people bring to his public performance as a politician. The black candidate is rendered invisible to his white audience, a fact that would appear to leave him with little choice but to use that blindness in a strategic way if he wishes to lead. It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama's story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison's invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election.

One of the challenges of writing about the Obama campaign is that it has always been difficult to separate out the role of race in his campaign's success. The idea of the first black president is certainly central to his "change" mantra, for instance, but so is the fact that he will bring a new set of policies and priorities to White House. Where does one "change" end, and the other "change" begin? How does the fact that he is named Barack Obama shift the significance of his unmistakable abilities, as a thinker, writer, campaigner and leader? I have never had a way of figuring these questions out, beyond anecdotal conversations with voters.

More after the jump. . .

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While I recognize the serious criticism buried in this statement (from a Tampa rally today), I have to wonder if someone told Biden to dial back his attacks on Palin: "You know the idea here that somehow these guys are once again injecting fear and loathing into this campaign is ... I think it's mildly dangerous."

Oooooh, "mildly dangerous"! Maybe it'll escalate into "kind of worrisome"! Or "possibly problematic"! "Meddlesome, under certain, rare yet identifiable conditions!"

It's not like she sang about bombing a country or anything.

Karen posts Robert Gibbs' attempt to cut through Sean Hannity's bluster below without comment. I have a comment...

It isn't just that Hannity is a major-league sumphole, it's that Alan Colmes is perhaps the lamest human being on any major TV network. Watch him at the end of the clip. I mean, this guy approaches Mr. Bill in his flaccidity. He is a window in Roger Ailes' carnival barker soul: this is what the wingnuts who watch this putrid swill want a liberal to look and act like. I've had my differences with Eric Alterman and Glenn Greenwald--still do, in fact--but I'd pay good money to see one of them go up against Hannity for a week while Colmes is off getting a backbone operation.

This morning John McCain put out a list of 100 former ambassadors who are supporting his campaign. Number two is Leonore Annenberg, the wife of Ambassador William Annenberg, the founder of the Annenberg Institute of Reform, which funded the Annenberg Challenge, which once had two famous board members: former "domestic terrorist" William Ayers and Sen. Barack Obama.

So either we should all be outraged that John McCain is supported by a family who funded a foundation that hired a domestic terrorist, or this whole William Ayers thing is just plain silly. I choose the latter.