McCAIN FATIGUE?

There's a new Pew poll in which John McCain has "drawn even" with Barack Obama -- translation: he's cut Obama's lead from 47%-42% to 46%-43%. OK, I shouldn't mock -- the tightening of the race is mildly worrisome.

The Pew poll was conducted from July 31 through August 10. Meanwhile, the latest Gallup tracking poll, conducted August 10-12 -- i.e., just after Pew's polling ended -- shows the race going the opposite way (click to enlarge):



The Obama lead in this tracking poll has gone from 3 to 5 to 5 to 6 over the past three days.

Now, what might explain this? What's been going on lately? Well, Obama's been on vacation -- and that means McCain and his surrogates have the floor, tossing out stink bombs and huffing and puffing about how tough he'd be with them red Russkies.

I think the public is sick of McCain already.

When Obama's campaigning, he dominates the news -- but as soon as McCain dominates the news, people start thinking, "Um, that guy? Holy crap, we don't want to elect him."

A week ago, another Pew poll talked about "Obama fatigue" -- an apparent sense on voters' part that they'd heard too much about Obama and not enough about McCain. Well, now they're getting McCain up the wazoo. And I think they've already got McCain fatigue.

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UPDATE: I see that wingnut fanboy Mark Halperin has declared that John McCain won the week, based on his manly bluster against the Russkies.

In response, I'll quote something Aimai just said in comments:

...this thing with mccain on every channel essentially calling for war leads to active dislike.

Americans like war if its free and easy. But we are right in the middle of two ugly, sad, and expensive wars....

Right -- and I'd add that for years we've had a Republican president who constantly beats his chest and talks about how macho he is and how no evildoer better dare cross him ... and all the while the evildoers are doing all kinds of evil and our chest-beating Republican president doesn't actually seem to be able to do anything about it, except perhaps get the number of dead Americans in Iraq down to a few a week, which still compares rather unfavorably to the number of Americans killed by Iraqis before the president started beating his chest, which was, er, zero. Halperin is telling his Time readers that McCain won the week? I think it's just the opposite. I think he looks very, very Bush-like. And that's not helping him.