Progress Illinois

In a last-minute attempt to shore up support in the Hoosier State, John McCain is going to make a pit-stop at the Indianapolis airport tomorrow:

Republican Sen. John McCain will make his first Indiana campaign stop in more than four months -- a rally at the Indianapolis airport Monday afternoon, the day before voters choose the nation's next president. [...]

Despite the unusual closeness of the race, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters in a conference call Friday morning that "we love the results of the campaign we have going on there."

He cited a poll by Rasmussen, released this week, that showed McCain with a 3 percentage-point lead, a statistical dead heat given the poll's margin of error.

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With polls showing Barack Obama running way ahead of John McCain in the 6th Congressional District, GOP Rep. Peter Roskam is rightfully worried about his reelection chances.  As such, he recently created an "Obama Voters For Roskam" website that features a cherry-picked compliment from the Illinois Senator, as well as testimonials from Obama supporters in the district.  We learned this week that Roskam has also produced numerous mailers playing up his relationship with Obama in the hopes of picking off some local Democrats on Election Day.

It's surreal to see, particularly considering Roskam's full embrace of McCain at the Republican National Convention back in early September.  For instance, at one of the Illinois delegation breakfasts that week, Roskam gushed about McCain and the stakes in this election -- describing the choice between the two presidential candidates as "foundational." Roskam also asserted that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate "was brilliant" and extolled her "centeredness" and "ease with which she communicated."  Progress Illinois was there in Minneapolis to capture Roskam's remarks.  Watch it:

I wonder if Roskam would repeat that "brilliant" claim today, with numerous polls showing that doubts about Palin's preparedness are dragging down the GOP ticket. 

A meeting of the minds:

The Wall Street Journal has the full story.

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Yesterday, John McCain couldn't find "Joe the Plumber" in an audience in Ohio.  This morning, the GOP nominee couldn't seem to get him out of his head. 

Case in point: watch McCain refer to the Democratic vice presidential candidate as "Joe The Biden":

Did I hear a "Sen. O'Biden" in there as well?

The Associated Press is pushing back against John McCain's distortions of comments by Barack Obama during that 2001 discussion on Chicago Public Radio:

"It's always more interesting to hear what people have to say in these unscripted moments," McCain told a rally in Dayton, Ohio, alluding to Obama's now well-known exchange in Ohio with Joe the Plumber. "And, today, we heard another moment like this from Sen. Obama.

"In a radio interview that was revealed today, he said that, quote, One of the tragedies of the civil rights movement is that it didn't bring about a redistribution of wealth in our society."

Obama never said that, according to an audio file circulated by Naked Emperor News, a Web site with many postings critical of Obama.

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When detailing the slime oozing from the McCain campaign last week, we highlighted the story of Ted Zoromski, a Middleton, WI resident who quit his job at a telemarketing firm when they asked him to read a script bashing Barack Obama. As it turns out, Zoromski isn't the only Midwesterner refusing to spew this nonsense. TPM's Greg Sargent has the details:

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

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With time running out and the polls holding steady, a desperate John McCain is throwing the kitchen sink at Barack Obama. In that sink are a boatload of robocalls, a tactic he referred to as "hate calls" when they were used against him eight years ago. As with so many other issues this cycle, McCain has now flipped and is deploying them judiciously as part of an effort to raise concerns about his rival's "character."

One call suggests Obama can't be trusted to keep America safe because he "worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans." According to the folks at Talking Points Memo, who created a great interactive map detailing where McCain's slime is surfacing, the Ayers call has gone out to homes in neighboring Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. The call is so nasty that one Wisconsin resident quit his gig at a telemarketing firm whose job it was to conduct the calls. You can listen to it here.

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The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a supermajority of respondents did not think Barack Obama's ties to Bill Ayers represent a "legitimate issue":

Skepticism about the Ayers issue was one of the factors cited by Colin Powell in his endorsement of Obama yesterday, and in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, likely voters broadly agree: 60 percent say Obama's relationship with Ayers is not a legitimate issue in the presidential campaign; 37 percent say it is.

I can't help but wonder whether this would be the case in the absence of a global financial crisis.  My sense is that voters are simply more focused right now than they were on the cusp of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  The common disconnect between who's in the White House and what's going on around their kitchen table seems to have been largely erased.  Folks know how important this decision is to their lives and the future of the country.  As such, casting their vote simply on the basis of character, personality, or even bigotry, has become a luxury they can't afford. 

Taking a page out of Sarah Palin’s base-oriented playbook, John McCain broached an all-too-familiar topic during last night’s final presidential debate: Barack Obama’s record as an Illinois state senator on so-called “partial birth abortions.” While the Democrat expressed the widely-held view that there should be an exception to the ban if the health of the mother is in danger, McCain slathered on the condescension in response.  Using air quotes around "health of the mother," he seemed to suggest that the term is part of some elaborate scheme by pro-choicers to murder infants at will. Watch it:

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Politico's Ben Smith has the goods, as well as the above photo:

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

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