In one, Mrs. Clinton is quoted questioning Mr. Obama’s résumé, saying: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign. I will bring a lifetime of experience.”

The Obama campaign is not standing by; it put out two of its most negative advertisements on Monday, one citing Mr. McCain’s comment in December that economics was “not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”

The Republicans’ ability to get a message through at the convention has surprised campaign veterans. Recalling his efforts to insert a Democratic message into the 2000 Republican convention, Dan Pfeiffer, now Mr. Obama’s communications director, said, “It was a challenge to break through there.” (Mr. Pfeiffer dismissed the Republican attacks as “a flea on a dog.”)

Others say he needs to describe his experience in government better, to make Americans comfortable with him as chief executive.

Obama is already an elusive Rorschach test candidate, and now he’s being pulled by his party in a thousand directions. The Democrats are in danger of doing to Obama what they did to their last two nominees: burying authentic individuals under a layer of prefab themes.

Not only do the polls show this to be a close race, but the polls, when it comes to Senator Obama, cannot be trusted. It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white. ...

After hearing that some union voters had openly wondered about Senator Obama’s possible “demise,” I asked Dan Hammersmith, president of Unite Here Local 748 in Grand Rapids, if workers were really talking about whether Mr. Obama could survive as president.

Over the weekend The Detroit Free Press ran a chart showing how people responded when asked if they agreed with the statement that “there are people who want to hurt Barack Obama because of his race and sometimes I fear for his safety.”

Fifty-seven percent agreed.

Michelle knew what her job was the big-name opening night speaker: not just to humanize her husband, but to make the skeptics and the doubters more comfortable with him. And, frankly, to make the country comfortable with someone who would be the first African-American first lady. To turn her family into the Huxtables, as MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell put it. She ran the risk of sounding too melodramatic, but her tone -- well, let's just say it was far more successful than Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech four years ago.

The challenge, according to Atlantic's Marc Ambinder:

"Hate to say it, but she has to appear normal, average and exceptional. . . . Many white Americans still have stereotyped impressions about black women and black families, and have very [little] hook to hang their minds on about the millions of middle class black families. Michelle Obama will help them fill in this perceptual gap."

Boston Globe: "... last night's spotlight was trained firmly on Michelle Obama, an accomplished hospital executive, lawyer, and mother of two..."

"Worried that Mr. Obama's far-flung upbringing and his lack of deep roots leave some voters unsure and untrusting, the campaign is essentially substituting Mrs. Obama's family background for his own." - New York Times.

The war scenario (between Obama and the Clintons) got a major boost from this Politico piece by John Harris and Mike Allen, before the convention even started:

"Mistrust and resentments continued to boil among top associates of presumptive nominee Barack Obama and his defeated rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"One flashpoint is the assigned speech topic for former president Bill Clinton, who is scheduled to speak Wednesday night, when the convention theme is 'Securing America's Future.' The night's speakers will argue that Obama would be a more effective commander in chief than his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

"The former president is disappointed, associates said, because he is eager to speak about the economy and more broadly about Democratic ideas -- emphasizing the contrast between the Bush years and his own record in the 1990s.

Former newspaper reporter and Democratic spokesman Phil Trounstein slams some of the media critiques on Biden's selection:

"The most idiotic punditbabble we're heard in the wake of Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden -- advanced by the AP's Ron Fournier, NBC's David Gregory and others as if they were channeling John McCain's talking points -- is the notion that Biden undercuts Obama's message that it's time for a change.

"Exhibit A, in this silly argument, is Biden's 35 years in the United States Senate. The simplistic formulation argues that because Biden is an old hand in Washington, he undermines Obama as a standard-bearer for change."

What's astonishing about this convention is that we are coming into it with the race a dead heat. This is impossible. Every political wind is blowing the Democrats’ way. But the Democrats managed to nominate the weakest of their major candidates, while the Republicans -- by sheer accident, mind you -- nominated their strongest, indeed, the only one with a chance of winning this year.

This election is a referendum on Obama. If he meets the threshold test of making Americans feel comfortable with the idea of him as president -- the way Reagan did in 1980 -- he wins. But he's been sagging in the polls because of the strange combination of two phenomena -- one out of his control, one within.

Out of his control is the sheer thinness and lightness of his biography. He has an interesting history, but in no way dramatic or heroic. Nor has he done anything of any significance in his 47 years other than write two rather favorable histories of himself.

The point of the Democratic National Convention is to pad the biography and to make it look dramatic and heroic. And, on the other hand, to try to control the Obama acceptance speech, which he scheduled as a mass cult-of-personality event in front of 80,000 screaming fans at Invesco Field. Obama’s task is to make it sober and measured. Success is possible. He can pull it off with a good speech -- rooted, serious, light on the cosmic pretensions -- and good camera angles. At least the cheers will be in English rather than German.

Bush has been a polarizing figure, but most senators realize that partisanship should never trump national security. In early 2007, evidence mounted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning terrorist activities in Iraq. An August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate found that "Iran has been intensifying aspects of its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants" and that "Explosively formed penetrator (EFP) attacks have risen dramatically." The next month, the Senate considered a bipartisan amendment to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, an important step to aid nonviolent efforts to deny it funds and financing. Biden was one of only 22 senators to vote against it. "I voted against the amendment to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization because I don't trust this administration," he said. Distrust of the U.S. president is the nature of politics, but skepticism about foreign dictators and their Brown Shirts is the backbone of judgment.

No matter. Biden's political games have made him Tehran's favorite senator. As Gen. David Petraeus struggled to unite Iraqis across the ethnic and sectarian divide, Iran's Press TV seized on Biden's plan for partitioning Iraq and featured his statements with the headline "US plans to disintegrate Iraq." Biden's attack-dog statements about U.S. policy failures emboldened Iranian hard-liners to defy diplomacy. In the Dec. 7, 2007, official sermon, Ayatollah Mohammad Kashani speaking on behalf of Iran's supreme leader, declared, "This Senator [Biden] correctly says Israel could not suppress Hizbullah in Lebanon, so how can the U.S. stand face-to-face with a nation of 70 million? This is the blessing of the Guardianship of the Jurists [the theocracy] . . . which plants such thoughts in the hearts of U.S. senators and forces them to make such confessions." The crowd met his statement with refrains of "Death to America."

Evolution. You can bet a year's worth of gas that you won't hear the dreaded E-word in whatever pompous pledges about education and science are inserted into the Democratic Party platform this week. As for the Republicans, we'll be lucky if their platform doesn't actually promise to promote the teaching of religious "alternatives" to evolution in public schools. That's what the Christian right has been doing on local and state boards of education for years. Yet the backwardness of the U,S in teaching evolution to all students in public school biology classes is surely one reason why American 15-year-olds rank in the bottom half of industrialized countries in their knowledge of science, according to  rigorous international assessments  (the most recent conducted in 2006 by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

The Democrats here are more than a little concerned about their man's slide in the polls; Gallup on Monday said the race is tied at 45-all. Even John McCain's faulty memory about his various houses and condos, so rich for the late-night comics, has not blunted what one senior Democrat calls "McCain's run of 12 unanswered points over the past fortnight."

The news may get worse. There's the story now afloat that an Obama half brother is living in grim poverty in Kenya, scratching out a bare living on a dollar a month while the senator lives in luxury on $5 million a year. Far worse, a summerlong controversy continues about when and where the senator was actually born, and whether the circumstances of his birth could cloud his eligibility to serve.

The Obama campaign has been reluctant to produce a birth certificate. This could be a story with legs, swift long legs to rival those of a Kenyan sprinter. The Clintons are surely trying to help sort this out.

"In the next four decades," noted CIA Director Michael Hayden earlier this year, "we expect . . . the population of Russia to shrink by 32 million people [to about 110 million]. That means Russia will lose about a quarter of its population. To sustain its economy, Russia increasingly will have to look elsewhere for workers. Some of them will be immigrant Russians coming from the former Soviet states, what the Russians call the near abroad. But there aren't enough of them to make up that population loss. Others will be Chinese and non-Russians from the Caucasus, Central Asia and elsewhere, potentially aggravating Russia's already uneasy racial and religious tensions."

Or take oil and gas production, which accounts for one-third of the country's budget, 64% of its export revenue, 30% of foreign direct investment, and a little more than 20% of gross domestic product.

There's bad news here, too. Oil production is set to decline this year for the first time in a decade, a decline that is widely expected to accelerate rapidly in 2010. Of Russia's 14 largest oil fields, seven are more than 50% depleted. Production at its four largest gas fields is also in decline. Russia drilled about 4 million feet of new wells last year. In 1990, it drilled 17 million.

"If you're running Gazprom but you don't really own it, then your interest is in maximizing short-term profits, not long-term development," a Western diplomat told McClatchy's Tom Lasseter.

This announcement tells us that a group called Clintons4McCain is marching to Union Station from someplace eight blocks away on 16th Street, though the starting point of the march is not specified. It's just as well: By the time we leave our hotel, it is past 2:30 p.m., when the march was to begin. We figure we'll just meet them at the station, so off we go.

Getting there is a longer, harder slog than we'd expected. For some reason walking in Denver is much more tiring than walking in New York. (Later someone explains it to us: It's the elevation.

(Mark) Warner has been around since 1994, when he challenged John Warner (no relation) for the Senate and lost, and he has the unenviable task of paving the ground for a nominee who presides over a cult of personality that would make Che green with envy.

These aren't Warner's only problems. He is a centrist who will address a party that took a sharp left turn in 2006. Warner supports gun rights, wants offshore drilling along Virginia's coast, and sponsors NASCAR races. He is also wealthy, with a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions and a perhaps understandable distaste for class-warfare rhetoric. His nonideological politics and businessman's approach to governance plays well with both Virginia's suburban liberals and southern good ol' boys. But it is unlikely to stoke the passions of the union members, academics, antiwar activists, netroots bloggers, grievance groupies, and feminists in the national party.

House majority whip James Clyburn tells Jonathan Alter: "'Obama picks as a running mate someone who has never lived in Washington,' a reference to Biden taking the train home to Wilmington every night. ... Clyburn also notes that Biden, whose wife is a schoolteacher, actually has a negative net worth of $300,000. Not sure if that's true--but it's very on message."

As Alter points out, it's not entirely clear whether or not Biden has a negative net worth. But if he does, is that really an argument in his favor?

Last week, Republican John McCain didn't know how many homes he owns.

Tonight, Democrat Barack Obama didn't know what town he was in.

In a live satellite speech tonight to the Democratic National Convention in Denver from a home in Kansas City, Obama said: "I'm here with the Girardeau family here in St. Louis."

Then came a graphic across the television screen that said Obama was in Kansas City, Mo.

Nothing in Joe Lieberman’s long and placid career—a respected attorney general in Connecticut, a centrist Democrat on the Senate floor, Al Gore’s high-minded running mate—could have presaged his current status: an apostate to his party and perhaps the most hated politician in the United States.

...Mrs. Obama’s speech to the delegates here in Denver was worlds away from her address in Charlotte.

In Denver, Michelle Obama described America as a place of hope, a place where people find success during the course of “improbable journeys.” In Charlotte, her America was a dark and ugly place, where people who work hard are knocked down by sinister forces — a place where even young children burst into tears when they realize the deck is stacked against them.

In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”

In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”  ...

In May, the Pew Research Center found that 22 percent of people polled had an unfavorable opinion of Mrs. Obama. In July, an Associated Press poll showed that she had a 35 percent unfavorable rating — versus a 30 percent favorable figure. A couple of weeks ago, a the Rasmussen polling organization found that 43 percent of voters had an unfavorable impression of Mrs. Obama. (Of them, Rasmussen said, 24 percent said they had a very unfavorable view of her.)  ...

...Mrs. Obama’s unfavorable numbers remain significant — and well above those of the Republican would-be First Lady, Cindy McCain.

So here in Denver Mrs. Obama had a job to do. It wasn’t just to introduce Americans to the Obama family or show another side of her husband’s