Two images for you.

First, Gallup daily tracking (which does not include last night’s debate):

That’s the first double-digit lead of the election.  To be fair, some other trackers see a narrowing, but most folks regard the Gallup and Rassmussen daily trackers as the most reliable, and both show Obama with a significant lead.

Second, a map from Open Left showing a composite of the half-dozen websites out there forecasting the electoral college.  Remember, this is not Open Left’s estimate, but an average of all such sites.

The score is Obama 338, McCain 163, 37 too close to call.

There’s still four weeks left, and anything can happen here, but we’re moving into Reagan-Carter territory here.

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Assume for a moment that John McCain is a transitional figure, and that he will serve only one term if he actually does manage to get elected.  If that is true, where does the Republican Party go after he leaves office?

Sarah Palin represents a dead end for the Republicans.  A Palin candidacy in 2012 will be to the Republicans what George McGovern was to the Democrats:  a transitional, highly partisan individual who appeals to the base without significantly expanding it the way Reagan did.

To make an even more forced analogy, Palin is the Republicans’ Neil Kinnock, the Labor Party leader who preceded Tony Blair.  Kinnock was an old-school traditional Labor ideologue who helped solidify the base but could never translate that into electoral success.  It may be that Republicans have to go through a similar period where they enjoy the false comfort of an ideologue in charge, one who gets trounced regularly, before moving back to a centrist, more inclusive place in American politics.

To further strain the analogy to the breaking point, the fundamental question is who will be the Republicans’ Bill Clinton/Tony Blair/Bruce Cameron — the thoughtful, charismatic, and young centrist who pulls his/her party back into the mainstream of the political discourse.

Another way to look at it is that John McCain is to Ronald Reagan as John Major was to Margaret Thatcher:  the last exhausted gasp of a once-vibrant worldview.

There really are three types of political leaders in the United States:  base mobilizers (McGovern, Mondale, Bush II, Palin), centrists (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain), and game-changers (FDR, Goldwater, Reagan, and perhaps Obama).

The problem for Republicans is that they will see Palin as a game-changer when in fact she is only a base-mobilizer. And with the (disastrous) exception of Dubya, most base-mobilizers don’t win elections.

Discuss.

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As I listened to McCain’s ridiculous gaffe — where he claimed nations don’t invade other nations in the 21st century, apparently forgetting all about our little Iraq adventure a few years ago (oh, and Afghanistan, which despite Security Council approval still was an invasion of sorts) — it brought to mind a largely forgotten moment in the 1976 presidential election.

During his second debate with Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford argued that Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union.  Even when challenged by the questioner to make sure it wasn’t a mistake, Ford repeated his assertion.  Watch it for yourself:

At the time, Ford’s mistake was called “the blunder heard ’round the world,” and many election post-mortems suggested it was a significant factor in his defeat.

I think that McCain’s gaffe is nearly as bad.  The only question is whether the media will hold him to account.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Sorry, I forgot what decade I was in for a moment.

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