Ballot Box

By XANA O'NEILL

Updated 12:55 PM EDT, Mon, Jul 13, 2009

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McCain says he loves being the underdog. Palin made her SNL debut. Obama picked up Colin Powell's endorsement. Yep, it's been quite the weekend for the presidential noms. That said, McCain is still trailing and as Nov. 4 nears it appears no amount of Joe the Plumber shout outs or late-night TV appearances can stop the bleeding. Today's buzz:

Fun fact: The Democratic ticket leads Republicans in newspaper endorsements 105 to 33 -- compared to the thin lead Kerry had over Bush in 2004 with 213 and 205, respectively.
Paul Krugman wrote in the NYT that Joe the Plumber would fare better under Obama's tax plan than McCain's. Take-away: "President Bush's policies have already led to disaster -- and whatever he may say, Mr. McCain proposes continuing Mr. Bush's policies in all essential respects, and he shares Mr. Bush's anti-government, anti-regulation philosophy."
Also in the NYT, Bill Kristol defended Palin (again), challenged the allegation that her nomination represented the vulgarization of U.S. politics and wrote that it's not too late for polls to shift in favor of McCain. Take-away: "Some number of the public may change their minds in the final two weeks of the campaign, and may decide McCain-Palin offers a better kind of change -- perhaps enough to give McCain-Palin a victory."
The LAT editorializes that McCain's rabid persistence and hyperbolic claims about ACORN voter fraud undermine actual efforts to clean up the system. Take-away: "Wild claims McCain's undermine reform efforts and make it harder to hold ACORN accountable for its real faults."
McCain can still win -- by a long shot, wrote Michael Goodwin in Sunday's NY Daily News. The Republican candidate can still win over swing states and if he pushes his tax plan (read: mention Joe the Plumber about a dozen more times) he may be able to get the edge he needs. Take-away: "McCain's No. 3 ray of hope is out of his control. It runs the gamut from luck - every winner needs some - to whether Obama can motivate his first-time voters to show up on Election Day."
The WSJ editorializes that Obama isn't necessarily the answer to the climate control problem that Dems believe he is. Take-away: "Climate-change politics don't break cleanly along partisan lines."