Morning Musings

So I've spent the past couple of days at meetings of various kinds in New York, and there was certainly a sense of impeding doom among many Democrats here. The cute analogy that I've come up with are that Democrats are like Cubs fans -- they assume that something will go wrong until proven otherwise.

With that said, people have become decidely more optimistic in the past 24-48 hours as the economy has returned to the center of the national debate. Obama's never going to be a Clintonesque natural out there on the stump in responding to the economy -- he might have to repeat a message three times where with Clinton it would have sunken in the first one.

But McCain seems to be struggling to come up with anything coherent to say about the issue, and his "fundamentals of our economy are strong" statement was a capital-G gaffe. When I saw McCain and Palin give successive speeches on MSNBC on Monday morning, and McCain repeated his "fundmentals" line and then Palin repeated her "thanks, but no thanks" line on the Bridge to Nowhere, I got the sense that maybe Steve Schmidt isn't quite the messaging genius that he's been made out to be.

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Couple of quick notes:

ARG is supposed to release a big series of 25+ state polls at some point within the next 24 hours.
And for those of you in Chicago, I may try to make it to Scott Kleeb's fundraiser at the Billygoat Tavern tonight, though it depends on when the Cubs game finishes up.