Pundits Zero In on McCain's Slide

With the election campaign in its last month, the Sunday talk shows turned to John McCain’s substantial slide in the polls, Politico reports. The highlights:

• Vice-presidential debate moderator and soon-to-be author Gwen Ifill suggested on Meet the Press that hype over her alleged pro-Obama bias came from a twitchy Sarah Palin camp: “It was also interesting to realize that if changing the subject from the stakes of the vice-presidential debate, then talking about the moderator, instead of talking about the candidate, they would do that.”
• Sarah Palin’s attempt to tie Barack Obama to a radical leftist is a “strategic mistake,” ex-Clintonite Paul Begala told Meet the Press, arguing that McCain himself once sat on the board of a far-right group Begala termed “a point of contact for extremists, racists, and anti-Semites.”

• House Minority Whip Roy Blunt sought to defuse Obama's charge that McCain was erratic during bailout negotiations: “John McCain in a very selfless and cool way began to talk to Republicans about why this had to be done this week.”
• Noting a blue electoral map, Karl Rove told Fox News Sunday that the “McCain-Palin ticket needs to give voters a positive agenda so that people who are concerned about Obama’s qualifications have something to hang their hat on."
  

• Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm cracked on Palin’s folksy style on Face the Nation: “I really believe, honestly, in Michigan we are hurtin’ so bad we don’t want to hear just you know by golly, aw shucks, doggone it."

(More Election 2008 stories.)