According to the RCP blog, the Strategic Vision PA poll being released tomorrow will show Barack Obama with a two point lead over John McCain, 47%-45%, well within the survey’s +/- 3% MOE. (The RCP story doesn’t mention if the sample is of RV or LV, but with this dynamics of this election, I think it is impossible to tell the difference.) Obama had led McCain by 7 in the last SV poll, taken in late July.

I’m not the resident expert on such surveys, but that seems to me to be an awful lot of positive momentum for McCain/Palin. What would it take to cause this movement to subside before November 4? Axelrod’s going to have to do better than his standard: “Palin’s got cooties!” line. His candidate has lost his enthusiasm-gap and the effectiveness of his Hopechangehope line. There’s nothing new and refreshing left to Obama’s plea, leaving him sitting in on the cardboard boxes in the back with Joe Biden. There’s no “Joementum” for this pair.

All of this means that the United States is a nation of dimwits. No, really! Honest!

That’s what we are told by Linda Heard, writing for the Tehran Times:

If the American voters fall for this smarmy ploy I suspect I’ll not be the only one hurling unflattering adjectives in their direction. A new Gallup poll has Obama trailing McCain by three points. Naturally, it’s been dubbed “the Palin bump”.

True to plan, Americans are succumbing to the smiles and wiles of Sarah. They’re being duped as Bush, Cheney, Rove and those whose interests they represent slap each other on the back. If the Democrats aren’t careful, Oprah will really have something to sob about come November.

Gosh, I feel so stupid. And used.

In the lefty Brit broadsheet The Guardian, a fellow named Jonathan Freedland writes:

If it [Obama's rejection] is deemed to have been about race [by whom?] – that Obama was rejected because of his colour – the world’s verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that “the United States had its day, but in the end couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race”.

Even if it’s not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one – while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars – on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, “historical decline”. Let’s not forget, McCain’s campaign manager boasts that this election is “not about the issues.”

Of course I know that even to mention Obama’s support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the “candidate of Europe” and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today’s America, that the world’s esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us – and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

That message, in its essence, is that we are racist xenophobes is we do not accept the ill-informed verdict of some mythical “global population” and elect a man who sometimes seems almost as poorly informed.

If Obama loses this election, it will certainly not be because of his race.

If Obama loses this election, it will certainly not be because a few lefty writers, a buffoonish British prime minister, and a crowd of screaming Germans think he’s their messiah. Get over yourselves.

If Obama loses this election, it will be because Americans were not bamboozled by the man on the back of the medicine show wagon hawking bottles of Hopechangehope. We’ll have chosen to cast our lot with the strengths of the past, present, and future.

Pennsylvania has been listed as a blue State since there was such a thing. If the Strategic Vision survey is met by other surveys, it will soon be a tossup-turning-red. The Brits and the Iranians have their own leaders, and we most certainly approved on neither.