CBS Poll: Obama 49-McCain 40; Palin Tanking

The N.Y. Times reports this nice bit of news, that Obama has opened up a sizable lead over McCain in the latest CBS poll. Obama’s favorables are up to the highest they’ve ever been, McCain’s are down to the lowest they’ve ever been.

I’m not foolish enough to believe that this is the end of the campaign or even the beginning of the end. There is a long way to go till November 4th and five weeks is a lifetime in presidential politics. After all, the bailout fiasco which apparently did so much damage to McCain’s image, was a very unusual development. One doesn’t know how the fallout will play out from this. Does the bailout have “legs” as a political issue (as I suspect it does)? Or will it recede into the political woodwork as Katrina did for Bush, in a few days or weeks? As long as it continues to occupy the public’s attention, McCain remains wounded.

And this is not a helpless candidate by any means. He can still land serious blows on Obama and potentially derail his campaign in any number of ways.

Bush’s favorability rating is down to 22%! The lowest since Harry Truman in the Korean War. Who’d a thunk it only five years ago when he rode high in the saddle into the Iraq War?

One of the most delicious pieces of news from this story concerns Sarah Palin’s receding prospects:

The Pew poll found that 51 percent of respondents said she was not qualified to be president, compared with 37 percent who said she was. That is a reversal from early last month, when 52 percent of respondents said Ms. Palin was qualified to be president.

She’s lost 15 percentage points in less than a month. That’s a candidate in free fall, perhaps without a parachute given her recent performance in Katie Couric’s CBS interview. When I first started writing about her after McCain chose her I wondered why the American public wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. My hope and conviction was that this would be a process that wouldn’t happen instantaneously. But that a campaign of a thousand paper cuts, perhaps inflicted by liberal bloggers and her own hubris, would eventually bring her to her knees, which is more or less what has happened. Now, let’s see if this impression is reinforced in tomorrow’s V.P. debate.