Yawning.......

Make it stop!!!!

Please!

Really pretty silly to watch the media flopping around like a pig in mud to push this horse race mentality ... as they keep silently emphasizing political gamesmanship as being reputable and dignified substantive qualities.

Of course if the Polls came back showing Barack getting blown out by 30 points, then all these pundits would be screaming "SEE HE IS DONE IT IS OVER!!!!!" on the mountain tops.

Give me a got d@mn break already...are these pollsters and pundits really that retarded to think that it takes FIVE WHOLE DAYS for people to find something offensive in Obama's words? That is even more condescending than people have been pretending Obama's remarks were.

Just admit it...the media blew this out out proportion and the voters who actually have real f*&king problems don't give a crap.

Gas has gone from 3.79 (yesterday) to 3.81 this morning to 3.85 this evening...I'm a helluva lot more concerned about that than this manufactured controversy and as the polls have now clearly shown...most people are too.

Wow! Is that really our host, Josh, posting just now.

Keep alert kind sir, the trolls are thick and nasty down here under the bridge.

And it seems safe to say that the polls can't tell us much this time. They are all over the place. We're just going to have to wait for the real polls to close in Pennsylvania to see the ending of this thriller.

Man, it's been two whole days of the business week now. If Pennsylvanians haven't been able to find out about Obama's comments and the firestorm surrounding them by this point, then maybe they are clinging to guns and religion instead of paying attention.

I mean that with no disrespect to the good people of Pennsylvania.

The Republicans must be scared out of their fucking minds. Obama's survived another flareup- one that his own words created!

He's plated in Teflon and he's got a lethal left hook. He's gonna fuck up Johnny Mac.

If not for polls, there would be no comeback gal Hillary.

For that matter, there would be no comeback kid Bill.. and then where would we be? Bush'92? Dole'96?

So let's all be grateful for all the polls.

Wow. There are going to be some very disappointed media minions if these polls don't show a bittergate impact for Obama, and I mean soon.

Come on, TPM. Stop playing this game.

Last week, the much-vaunted G. Terry Madonna offered the following pearl of wisdom:

In the short run, Obama's words are likely to do serious damage to his campaign in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania working class voters constitute about 40 percent of the Democratic vote. Obama's claim to understand and to identify with them has been dealt a serious blow after a largely successful two week surge in the state. The Clinton campaign is already capitalizing on the controversy. It may be enough to propel her to that big victory that seemed so unlikely only a few days ago.

There's a problem when pollsters also become pundits; they face an almost-irresistible temptation to interpret their polling data in a manner that bears out their predictions. Madonna is certainly enjoying his few weeks of fame - he's become an almost inescapable presence in the national media, the geat sage of the Keystone State, the Oracle of Lancaster. And to be sure, he's a very smart guy, who's forgotten more about Pennsylvania politics than I'll ever know.

But in this case, he made a prediction - that Obama's comments demonstrated his "feet of clay," and put him in line with three previous prominent candidates whose verbal miscues caused or contributed to their losses. Now he's faced with an inconvenient fact. We've had six polls come out in the past two days taken entirely or partially after news of the comments broke. Not only do they not show any discernable shift in the past week, but those polls whose sample straddled the comments didn't show any significant difference from the first days of the sample to the last. And national tracking polls aren't picking up a shift, either. But what's really embarassing for Madonna is that his own poll shows the race tightening.

So instead of limiting himself to what his data actually show, Madonna launches himself into the realm of airy speculation:

Franklin & Marshall pollster G. Terry Madonna agreed that the "bitter" fallout may still be shaping the race.
"The question is if [Clinton] has stopped Obama's surge permanently," said Madonna. "With the new commercial and the San Francisco statements, can she push the lead back to double digits?"

He may well be right. But he's not speaking as a pollster, but as a pundit. And here's the real rub. Polls show swings. That's the nature of polling. At some point in the next week, we can be absolutely certain that one or more polls will show a wider margin for Hillary in the latest sample than in the previous one. That's made all the more probable by the apparent fact that Obama is tapping out among undecided voters - I expect the polling to remain fairly steady from here to election day, without the dramatic gains of the past month. In fact, since most of the undecideds seem to be leaning toward Hillary, as more of them make up their minds, the margin will widen again. All Madonna has to do (and he damn well knows this) is stall for time. When a subsequent round of polling shows the inevitable variation and the probable last-minute widening - a shift that I, among others, have been predicting for weeks - he can attribute it to the comments, and we'll have another NAFTA-like narrative. But it wasn't NAFTA that sunk Obama in Ohio - it was that he'd won over the undecideds and uncommitteds, and was unable to chip away at Hillary's bedrock support. And the same thing's playing out now in Pennsylvania.

If this issue was making a difference, we'd be seeing it by now. Not in huge shifts, but pollsters would be reporting that their Sunday, Monday and Tuesday samples showed a subtle shift. They'd report it because it would garner them attention and headlines, and they love that. But the only polling operation to definitively break out those numbers - Quinnipiac - specifically said it had seen no such shift. And the polls taken exclusively over those days also show no shift. So the graceful thing for Madonna to do would be to say: "The voters surprised me - perhaps we'll see a shift in the future, but for now, it looks like the remarks haven't impacted the race." But that would mean admitting he'd be wrong. Don't hold your breath.