John McCain's campaign is in crisis. The Republican presidential candidate must quickly reverse recent sharp declines and recapture the momentum in this election race if he is to avoid falling fatally far behind Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent.
Provided the 12-figure rescue package agreed to over the weekend makes it through the House of Representatives and the Senate, and quickly, the financial emergency may recede a bit as the overriding issue of this election campaign, although it will never be far from voters' minds.
Wall Street's distress poses an existential (this election's favourite buzzword) threat to Mr. McCain's campaign. Six of seven opinion polls, all conducted last week, put Mr. Obama at least five percentage points ahead of Mr. McCain (though one poll, GW/Battleground Tracking, had Mr. McCain ahead by two points).
The most recent survey, by Gallup Tracking, has Mr. Obama eight points up. And while many pundits, including this one, thought Mr. McCain outperformed Mr. Obama during the foreign-policy part of Friday night's televised debate, viewers disagreed.
Three separate snap polls – by CBS, CNN/Opinion Research and USA Today/Gallup – confirmed that it was actually Mr. Obama's night.
In the USA Today/Gallup survey, for example, 46 per cent of those polled thought Mr. Obama had outperformed Mr. McCain, while 34 per cent thought the opposite.
Fifty-two per cent picked Mr. Obama, when they were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country's problems. Thirty-five per cent picked Mr. McCain.
Two things seem to be at work. First, the economy – which was always the No. 1 issue in this campaign – has become elephantine in proportion.
And secondly, Mr. McCain, who has always been vulnerable on this issue, did himself no good last week by suspending his campaign and flying to Washington, only to un-suspend it so that he could fly to Mississippi for Friday's debate.
In many respects, national opinion polls are meaningless, because the election will be decided in a dozen or so key battleground states. Mr. Obama was in one of them, Michigan, Sunday, while Mr. McCain travelled to another, Ohio.
But the polls tell a tale there, too.
In battleground states that went Republican in the 2004 vote, either Mr. McCain is ahead by the narrowest of margins (1.2 percentage points in Ohio, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregate; 1.6 in Florida; 1.7 in Nevada) or he is behind. Mr. Obama has an aggregate lead of nine percentage points in Iowa, six in New Mexico; 5.4 in Colorado and 1.8 in Virginia.
Mr. McCain isn't leading Mr. Obama in any battleground state that went Democratic in 2004. His campaign, in other words, has become entirely defensive.
Then there is the Palin Effect. It's a whole new effect.
Mr. McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate galvanized the social conservative base of the Republican Party, and intrigued many women still disappointed that Hillary Clinton was not on the Democratic ticket.
Surveys after the Republican convention had Mr. McCain either tied with Mr. Obama or in the lead, with less-educated white female voters, who tend to trend Democratic, moving heavily in favour of Mr. McCain.
More recent polls show that gap narrowing, and women overall preferring Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain.
And Ms. Palin dulled some of her lustre last week when her answers in an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric were, at times, so incoherent that comedian Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live simply cribbed them in her mocking sketch.
This Thursday, Ms. Palin will join Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a televised debate. Mr. Biden is gaffe-prone himself. Last week, for example, he told Ms. Couric: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here's what happened.'” Except that when the stock market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover was president and people didn't have televisions.
Still, Mr. Biden has decades of experience in the Senate and Ms. Palin is consistently demonstrating an inability to answer journalists' questions. It will be an interesting night.
For the Republicans, all may not be lost. The arch-conservative Washington Times reported Sunday that “inside John McCain's campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby.”
The Times quoted one “McCain insider” as saying: “It would be fantastic … You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”
No, it wouldn't.
Five weeks is five weeks in politics. Conspiracy theorists believe the Republicans are sitting on an “October surprise” – some incredibly damning bit of information from Mr. Obama's past that GOP strategists are keeping under wraps until the final weeks of the campaign.
Even if no such surprise exists, the Republicans might try to manufacture one, perhaps by dredging up some new detail about Mr. Obama's connections to William Ayers, the former extremist leader of the Weather Underground who is now a university professor.
And in an election that has been dominated by extremes of meteorological, financial and political turbulence, anything is possible in the month-and-a-bit to come.
But this past week, for the first time, it became clear that one candidate is clearly ahead in this race and another dangerously far behind. Mr. McCain has 36 days to catch up.
