Not as bored as we are of Obama assuming the only reason he isn't winning is cuz he "looks different."

Oh? Seems to me that they got that line from Obama talking about pictures on dollar bills.

This site is consistent with their lack of support for Obama from the outset. They were huge Hillary supporters during the primaries and many of the posters complained repeatedly about the slanted headlines that were nothing more than Hillary talking points.

This site originally began due to them doing opposition research for the Democrats under the DNC when the Clintons were the powerbrokers so they pretty much backed HRC from the outset. However, the Clintons are feeling and whatEVER their dominant point of view is will pretty much be reflected here at TPM and TPM-EC.

Right now, that message is to pound Obama and create doubt so that folks will vote to steal the nomination from Obama in Denver. It is as obvious as McCain's answers as Saddleback being pre-prepared.

Even the site fivethirtyeight, talked about how misleading the headlines were here on McCain outspending Obama. It was deceptive as it is inconsistent with the facts. Obama is investing heavily in a ground game in the battlestates IN ADDITION TO advertising on TV. TPM though used that headline to infer that Obama was making poor decisions by omitting that they were only calculating TV advertising and it is going to take way more than that for Obama to win. The Obama campaign is paying to open large number of field offices and they are paying staff to run those offices.

Obama needs a much larger sum of money to win this campaign due to all the lies, myths, distortions and misleading statements, that even sites like TPM have taken to perpetuating.

We can win this campaign. We just have to work harder and smarter. We can't take anything for granted.

Remember in the primaries, folks polled always said that HRC was more experienced but she lost. She lost because experience does NOT trump change. WJC and Reagan both proved that! So did G.Herbert Bush by beating Carter.

We will win if we stay focused, and remember the polls are designed to give the cable news and pundits something to jabber about.

Also, remember the vast majority of these polls have sample populations that are not dominated by Obama's base, of the young and minorities. Who have not been 'most likely voters' nor are they likely to have landlines to polled and even bigger is that the folks most likely to be polled and most likely to vote are the over 60 set and they are not Obama's base..moreover they are the most likely to actually answer pollsters when they call cause they are home!!

This is our country and we can change it.
We just have to put forth the effort to do so.

and keep saying to ourselves:

Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

so....

Stay focused!!

Obama is outspending McCain, just not in TV advertising!!

Know the facts:
Context on Battleground Spending
Let me start here. Talking Points Memo is, hands down, as good as it gets in political blogging/reporting. They are the gold standard. But last night, Greg Sargent at TPM's Election Central reported that John McCain was outspending Barack Obama in battleground states under this headline:

McCain Outspending Obama By Hundreds of Thousands in Many Core Battleground States

Subsequently, Jonathan Martin at Politico picked up on the reporting, and given how many read TPM each day I'd expect to see more sources discuss the story today and tomorrow, at least to the extent VP talk does not crowd out everything else.

What's wrong with this story's framing?

What's wrong is that when I read those headlines, I get the impression that McCain is massively outspending Obama in the core battleground states. No context is presented. While at least Martin has "On TV" in his headline, there isn't a single mention on either TPM or in the Politico blurb contextualizing that spending in a state is not just advertising.

Readers here know that Barack Obama is dwarfing John McCain's ground operation; we've written about it repeatedly. Those thousands of paid organizers are not working for free. The field offices and the phone lines and the Blackberries and the reimbursed travel miles are not free. Moreover, Barack Obama pays his organizers out of the Campaign for Change, which is funded by Obama's own campaign; McCain's are mostly paid by the coordinated committees which in turn are funded by the RNC, RNSC and RNCC, further impacting the way spending numbers are attributed to each campaign.

While millions may be spent on advertising, so too is one campaign spending millions on ground game while the other is spending virtually nothing. Obama is investing more massively than any campaign in the history of American politics on the ground game. McCain is essentially not investing in ground. His early summer numbers of 20,000 phone calls nationwide for a whole month would be those of a single, low-budget House campaign. That's the equivalent of one person working ten hours a day for a month. For the entire nation. It's basically the equivalent of zero contacts. When Martin writes that McCain's ground campaign is revving up, it's essentially starting from nothing and is now in 1st gear.

Further, the idea that McCain's spending is disproportionately concentrated in television advertising in battleground states needs the context that he's simply not spending it anywhere else. While we don't have enough hard numbers to compose a fancy pie chart, rest assured that McCain's would show a much, much higher percentage of his pie on television ads whereas Obama's would show an unprecedentedly large slice on his thousands of paid organizers and hundreds of field offices.

As the story hits the discussion slipstream, hopefully it will not be framed as "hey, look at this surprising development, the guy with more money is being outspent because he's foolishly and riskily airing TV ads in lesser battlegrounds." Sure, Obama is spending plenty on ads, and he is spending advertising dollars more broadly (and thinly) than is McCain. But people are also failing to appreciate of dollars spent on the dramatic all-in move that Obama has made in organizing and neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion.

fivethirtyeight.com