This morning, I wrote up a post noting an apparent lack of tightening in the polls. Au contraire, objects the McCain campaign pollster Bill McInturff in a new public memo: "The McCain campaign has made impressive strides over the last week of tracking. The campaign is functionally tied across the battleground states … with our numbers IMPROVING sharply over the last four tracks."

McInturff is looking at internal numbers. We in the outside world are left with public numbers. Nate Silver summarizes today's national numbers this way: "Gallup and Research 2000 moved toward McCain, and IBD/TIPP moved toward Obama; the other five trackers were essentially flat. Among the one-off national polls, Pew and ARG moved toward Obama, and Ipsos moved toward McCain."

State polls are similarly showing no big movement, or confusing movement. But something could be starting. (A McCain insider assures me that key (unidentified) swing states are back to within 3 points, and closing.) After the jump, the full McInturff memo. Read it for what it says, and for what it fails to say.

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Markos Moulitsas has a post today about the vindication of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy. He's right. When Dean launched the project, many thought it was foolhardy. As late as October 2006, top Dem strategists and elected officials were bemoaning the way Dean had spread the party's money around instead of concentrating it on targets of immediate opportunity. The Obama campaign adopted the idea and hitched it to a candidate with the message and the appeal to capitalize on it in a national race. It helped that the Republican brand was in the process of imploding. But Dean and Obama put themselves and the Democratic Party in position to exploit their opponents' failures and maximize their own returns. That took both vision and political guts. And it took the netroots activism of people like Markos, who takes a bow for the collective. We'll know in a week just how well it worked.

Politico honchos Harris and Vandehei pen a fair assessment of the evidence - and the criticism - that the press in this election cycle has favored Obama and disfavored McCain.

A lot talk lately about what happens to the GOP post-election -- no matter who wins. I was talking to a GOP strategist yesterday who noted that, for the past eight years, "You walked into the RNC and it made sense--George Bush was the head of the party, and everyone there was working for him. All those 'dear leader' pictures of Bush made sense. Now, who's it going to be? McCain? Seriously? I think we're going to have to go retro. Nixon. Reagan. Hoover... though McCain's also been harshing on him."

At least we've all heard of them. The next leader of the GOP is likely to be rather obscure, if only because no one who's popular right now is, well popular right now.

Ambinder has been following some of the early indicators of who might wind up at the top.

Ana: If Doug Holtz-Eakin doesn't believe that young, healthy people would leave the system, he might want to talk to Mitt Romney, who actually studied the situation in the real world when he was reforming the health care system in Massachusetts. It's not--as Holtz-Eakin suggests--that these healthier citizens would choose between staying with their employer-provided benefits or buying them on the open market. It's that they would decide to go uninsured entirely--leaving older and sicker people in the employer-provided system. That would make it even more expensive for employers to continue to provide coverage for their workers, accelerating a trend that we are already seeing, in which fewer and fewer companies are providing coverage.

That young, healthy people would choose not to have health insurance was a great revelation to Romney:

... they also found something surprising when Romney began looking at who, precisely, the uninsured were in Massachusetts. Everyone expected the typical profile to be that of a single mother just scraping by or maybe someone with chronic illness--not exactly ideal customers for insurers. Instead, nearly the opposite was true. "It turned out they were largely single males, and they were working," Romney recalls. "They were eminently insurable. It's funny how data opens up new insight."

That was the bit of analysis that changed everything. Gruber ran the numbers at MIT: universal coverage would be expensive, but so would any half-measure. Romney could simply expand the existing system and, by doing so, cover about one-third more people. Or he could cover everyone by including an "individual mandate," a controversial measure requiring people to buy insurance and offering subsidies to those who couldn't afford it. The price tag would be about one-third higher. "I began by saying, Well, maybe we could help half the people that don't have insurance, maybe we could help a third of the people, and ultimately it became, You know what? We could actually get everybody insured!" Romney recalls.

Wow:

CNN Money: Election: Your health insurance at stake -- Younger, healthier workers likely wouldn't abandon their company-sponsored plans, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior economic policy adviser. "Why would they leave?" said Holtz-Eakin. "What they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the credit."

In addition to harshing on their own brilliant "you get to choose your own!" health care plan, there is a bigger gaffe hidden in DHE's statement. The problem, of course, isn't that employees would "leave," it's that employers would. Flashback:

Only about 60% of employers provide health care coverage. McCain's program removes the incentive for employers to provide it so I expect a lot of them will stop providing it. More Americans will be on their own, those with preexisting conditions will not get insurance. And it provides no incentive for employers to start covering employees. For small businesses, the situation is worse - only about 45% provide health benefits.

A little belatedly, a quick snapshot on the Pennsylvania House races and McCain's double down in that state. And my take on Virginia after spending more than a week floating around Prince William County, which, together with Loudon County, are the lynchpins to Democratic victories in the state. Ruy Teixiera has a fascinating study out about the changing demographics in Virginia and Florida.

Tightening? That seems to be the question of the day. John McCain admits that he needs (and expects to have) the momentum on his side going into election day. The polls show that Obama's big October spike seems to have plateaued. But the aforementioned tightening is not really in evidence with seven days to go. (Disclaimer: A lot can happen in 7 days; just read your bible.)

Says Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal: "We had what I believe is a new one-day record for new statewide poll releases (37), but if you are looking for evidence of 'tightening' you won't find it here. Fifteen of today's polls represented updates from the same pollster from previous tracks conducted earlier in October: Eight (8) of the 15 showed a nominal shift in Obama's direction, 7 in McCain's direction and 1 showed no change in margin."

Says FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver (last night): "There is a lot of discussion going on about whether the national race is tightening; our model concludes that it is not."

UNC's James Stimson charts a flat line. He notes, "Despite all that daily variation, Barack Obama has held a lead over John McCain of about 7 points over more than a month with virtually no daily variation. In my metric of the two-party vote division, the Obama lead of about 53.5 is just locked between 53 and 54 day after day after day. The organizations that do really large samples are reporting the same fact, remarkable continuity of day to day estimates, as if the race has been frozen since late September. Tracking polls with smaller samples are reporting trends, back and forth, which, while entertaining, appear to be quite false."

Gallup also charts lots of horizontals, with maybe a slight uptick for Obama.

The RCP Electoral Map is basically flat as well, with a comfortable cushion for Obama.

Marc Ambinder finds Sarah Palin's silence on whether Ted Stevens should resign to be "curious," and wonders:

Why is it, exactly, that while Sen. McCain called for Sen. Ted Stevens to resign in the wake of his corruption convictions, Gov. Palin couldn't bring herself to utter the word?  Will the media interpret this as a disagreement between the candidates?  Was yesterday's statement a Palin audible?

Maybe, but unlike John McCain, Palin has role to play in all this that goes beyond public pronouncements. If Stevens resigns, she has to appoint a temporary successor pending a special election. Alaska law has been changed a number of times with respect to this question.

But here's a tantalyzing possibility: If Stevens were somehow to squeak through this election, and then be forced to resign after exhausting his appeals, might Sarah Palin decide to appoint ... Sarah Palin?

I don't know which advance genius thought of an outdoor rally in Chester, Pennsylvania in late October but it's freeezing here, pouring and knee-deep in mud. Obama, who spoke for more than 35 minutes before a dripping crowd of 9,000, with no umbrella, hat or gloves, should take a lesson from William Henry Harrison.