Good news and bad news for Obama, farewell to Paul Newman, and this week's winners and sinners

Today brought the most encouraging poll numbers since John McCain picked his splendid running mate in August. According to three new Quinnipiac polls, Barack Obama is now surging into the lead in three crucial swing states: 51 percent to 43 percent in Florida, 50 percent to 42 percent in Ohio, and a whopping 54 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania.

Maybe—just maybe—the worst economic crisis since the depression, McCain's idiotic suspension of his campaign in the name of "nonpartisanship," the rejection of the bailout by a large majority of Republican Congressmen, Sarah Palin's serially brilliant performances with Katie Couric, and David Letterman's thirty-five minute long attack on McCain last week are finally having the appropriate cumulative effect.

But before we start counting our chickens, in expectation of another disastrous Palin performance in tomorrow night's debate with Joe Biden, there are a couple of things that should temper our optimism.

Joel Millman reports in this morning's Wall Street Journal that there are two things Alaskans remember about Palin's performance when she was running for governor: "One is the stack of color-coded cue cards she took to the podium for help whenever she was asked a policy question. The other is how quickly she was able to shuck those props, master the thrust-and-parry of jousting with her opponents and inquisitors, and project confidence to an audience of television viewers watching from home."

"Her métier was projecting winsomeness—making a virtue of not knowing as much about the minutiae of state government because, for most of her adulthood, she was immersed in small-town life and raising a family." So it's still possible that she will turn her pristine ignorance of almost everything (The Bush Doctrine, the names of the newspapers she reads, the names of any Supreme Court decisions except for Roe v. Wade—as we will reportedly see tonight in the latest Couric installment) into a virtue—at least for her know-nothing base.

In The New Republic, Eve Fairbanks argues that as a beloved torch bearer for her side of the cultural divide, the person Palin may most resemble is Bill Clinton: "Before Palin, what other youthful and relatively inexperienced governor from a backwater state burst onto the Washington scene, chased by an eye-popping train of hometown enemies? What other charismatic politician became a culture-war lightning rod? Who else drove his critics to such depths of rage and despair that they reached for wild conspiracy theories?...The more one burrows... the more weird parallels between the two emerge (could Todd Palin be Hillary with a goatee?) —and the more liberals might want to look to the Clinton years for direction on how—and how not—to hit back."

Finally, another Journal story with good news for Obama—"This year's flood of newly registered voters heavily favor Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential contest"—also contains a cautionary tale: "they won't necessarily show up to support him on Election Day."

While new voters favor Obama by a stunning 61% to 30% in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, "just 49% said they were "very interested" [in the election], compared to 70% of voters in all age groups who said they were "very interested." And just 54 percent of the new voters said they would definitely vote on November 4.

As FCP has repeatedly pointed out, in previous presidential elections voters under 30 have never turned out in the same proportion as their elders. If Obama is going to win, this time, they have to.