Obama likes to say he wants to the talk about issues, and dismisses most criticisms against him as distractions. He also says he doesn’t think the election should be a personality contest.

Okay, so if Obama wants to stick to the issues that concern the American people, why is he running an ad that attacks McCain for not using email and not being computer savvy?

John McCain is mocked as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate in a television commercial out Friday from Barack Obama as the Democrat begins his sharpest barrage yet on McCain’s long Washington career.

The new fighting spirit comes as McCain has been gaining in the polls and some Democrats have been expressing concern the Obama campaign has not been aggressive enough. Obama’s campaign says the escalation will involve advertising and pushes made by the candidate, running mate Joe Biden and other surrogates across the country.

“Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. “We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain’s attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people.”

The newest ad showcasing their hard line includes unflattering footage of McCain at a hearing in the early ’80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubix Cube.

[…]

Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said the campaign was not making an issue of the 72-year-old McCain’s age, but the time he’s spent in Washington.

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

Wow. Is that really the best they can do? If that’s all they can come up with to attack McCain, we’re going to win this election in a landslide.

It appears that even Democrats cannot ignore the dismal state of Obama’s campaign…

Democratic jitters about the US presidential race have spread to Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress are worried that Barack Obama’s faltering campaign could hurt their chances of re-election.

Party leaders have been hoping to strengthen Democratic control of the House and Senate in November, but John McCain’s jump in the polls has stoked fears of a Republican resurgence.

A Democratic fundraiser for Congressional candidates said some planned to distance themselves from Mr Obama and not attack Mr McCain.

“If people are voting for McCain it could help Republicans all the way down the ticket, even in a year when the Democrats should be sweeping all before us,” said the fundraiser, a former Hillary Clinton supporter.

“There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to . . . People are going crazy, telling the campaign ‘you’ve got to do something’.”

And what in particular has got Democrats scared?

Tony Podesta, a senior Democratic lobbyist, said members of Congress were “a little nervous” after Mr McCain shook up the race with his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and intensified attacks on Mr Obama.

Thus explains the gross attacks being made against Sarah Palin by Democrats in Congress, and the Obama campaign. They’re trying to knock her down and get her out of the race.

UPDATE: Obama to go even more negative than he has been…

On the seventh anniversary of September 11, I encourage our readers to put politics aside for the day and share your thoughts and stories from 9/11 here.

Those of you who can’t, please come back tomorrow.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Sadness in things remembered, joy in triumphs resultant. Its been a long, busy 7 years.

Democrats “promised” to lead the most open, honest, and ethical congress in history.

They’ve been the complete opposite.

The latest demonstration of their ethical hypocrisy revolves around Charles Rangel.

Back in July, it was revealed that Rangel had 4 rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem.

More recently, it was discovered that Rangel wasn’t declaring income he was earning from a rental property he owns in the Dominican Republic. Rangel claimed ignorance and blamed his accountant and his wife.

There’s a real dark ethical cloud hanging over Charles Rangel… even the Democratic National Committee chose to give back $100,000 in contributions they get from him.

Now Republicans want him to step down from his chairmanship pending the results of the ethics investigation against him.

Of course, the party-before-country Democrats in the House, led by Nancy Pelosi, aren’t holding themselves to the same standard they held Republicans to back in 2006, and aren’t doing a thing about Rangel.

“Given Chairman Rangel’s continuing ethical lapses, he cannot effectively carry out his duties as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). “[Y]ou, as speaker of the House, must insist that Rep. Rangel step down.”

Democrats countered that Rangel himself has requested investigations, now ongoing, into the matters and that Republicans have been much more lenient with members of their own party facing ethics or even FBI investigations.

“The American people would be better served if Republicans would stop playing politics and allow the bipartisan ethics committee to do its job,” said Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami.

Now isn’t that a laugh! Democrats have been playing politics with the ethics process for years, and all Republicans are saying is that Democrats should hold themselves to the same standard.

See, this is why we need to elect John McCain. Democrats will NEVER hold members of their own party accountable. Here in Western New York, a Democracy Assemblyman won his primary election despite revelations a few weeks ago that he had affairs with at least two interns. Meanwhile another Assemblyman, a Republican, who got in trouble last year for spending the night sleeping on the floor at an intern’s home, and was defeated in his primary election. Go figure.

Democrats always put party first.

Looks like Democrats are seeing that Obama’s is on the verge of screwing up his campaign.

Polls showing McCain tied or even ahead of Obama are stirring angst among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives.

Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall.

“It’s more than an increased anxiety,” said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton’s lead pollsters during his 1996 re-election and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. “It’s a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them.”

Joe Trippi, a consultant behind Howard Dean’s flash-in-the-pan presidential campaign in 2004 and John Edwards’s race in 2008, said the Obama campaign was slow to recognize how the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate would change the dynamic of the race.

“They were set up to run ‘experience versus change,’ what they had run [against Hillary] Clinton,” Trippi said. “And I think Palin clearly moved that to be change or reform, versus change. They are adjusting to that and that threw them off balance a little bit.”

Obama’s going down. I’m loving every minute of it.

Barack Obama, probably kicking himself for being so stupid in making that “lipstick on a pig” remark that was obviously a veiled attack on Sarah Palin, is out there now trying to explain what he meant and criticize McCain for distorting his words, and offering the “same old distractions.”

What really gets me about this is that Obama is acting all high and mighty as if taking words out of context to take advantage of it politically is something that a) only Republicans do, and b) something he has never done.

Now, first, I’ve seen the whole comment in context, and if you look at the reactions of the people behind Obama when he made his comment, it’s clear they knew what he meant. But, let’s just for the sake of this discussion say the remark is being taken out of context. Well, this is a strategy Obama and the Democratic Party employed multiple times during his campaign. Most notably the Democratic Party’s ad that used spliced video of John McCain in order to give the false impression that John McCain believed it would be okay if the war in Iraq lasted a 100 years or more.

More recently, was Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC when he took what was quite clearly a joke made by McCain about being middle class if you made $5 million a year, and treated like it was said straight.

So, in this campaign, Obama has deliberately deceived by treating a joke made by McCain as if it weren’t a joke, and the DNC, on Obama’s behalf intentionally altered McCain’s words in an ad. Who is Obama to whine like a 5-year old that his own words are being used against him?

John Fund reports that the Obama/Democrat Smear Machine set up camp in Wasilla, Alaska almost immediately after she was picked as McCain’s running mate.

Democrats understand Sarah Palin is a formidable political force who has upset the Obama victory plan. The latest Washington Post/ABC Poll shows John McCain taking a 12-point lead over Barack Obama among white women, a reversal of Mr. Obama’s eight-point lead last month.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29.

And we’ve seen what their attempts to dig up dirt have produced…a lot of lies that have been quickly debunked by the facts.

Conventional wisdom says that the race for the presidency will be decided by the independents…

Well, according to Gallup, John McCain is now trouncing Barack Obama in support from the political middle, and also gained 5-point bump from Democrats after the Republican National Convention.

John McCain’s 6 percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention is largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40% pre-convention to 52% post-convention in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.

By contrast, Democrats’ support for McCain rose 5 percentage points over the GOP convention period, from 9% to 14%, while Republicans’ already-high support stayed about the same.

The surge in political independents who favor McCain for president marks the first time since Gallup began tracking voters’ general-election preferences in March that a majority of independents have sided with either of the two major-party candidates. Prior to now, McCain had received no better than 48% of the independent vote and Obama no better than 46%, making the race for the political middle highly competitive.

It’s quite obvious that Obama’s best days are behind him. His biggest liability in the general election is the fact that his meteoric rise in the Democratic primaries were fueled by ironclad adherence to left-wing positions. As the campaign has progressed, we’ve seen Obama try to tip-toe towards the center, with claims of being a uniter who can work with members of both parties. His record, of course, contradicts his new moderated image makeover, and people are seeing that all the wonderful things Obama claims to be (an agent of change, a reformer, opponent of earmarks, etc.) John McCain and Sarah Palin actually are… and have a record to prove it.

UPDATE: A bump, not a bounce? McCain maintains 5-point lead in Gallup tracking poll.

Joe Biden, the one who was supposed to bring foreign policy credentials to Obama’s ticket, likes to take credit for any undeniable display of progress in Iraq, but the one actual proposal he had for Iraq, that ridiculous partition plan, would have made situations in Iraq worse, and Iraqi leaders opposed it.

On Sunday, when Mr. Biden was asked about the current progress in Iraq, he managed to take the lion’s share of the credit: “I’m encouraged because they’re doing the things I suggested . . . That’s why it is moving toward some mild possibility of a resolution.” But we should be grateful that Iraqis did not do as he suggested. Mr. Biden’s frustration with the looming Iraqi civil war in 2006 and early 2007 was understandable. The U.S. was on the verge of total defeat and Iraq was at risk of collapse. But Mr. Biden’s plan would have inflamed Iraq’s already volatile situation.

Biden may have foreign “experience”, but he clearly doesn’t have the judgment.

The Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog notes that OBama is back to his old habit of using someone else’s words as his own.

Campaigning in Terre Haute, Ind. on Saturday, Barack Obama, mocking claims by John McCain and Sarah Palin that they will challenge their Republican Party if elected, got off a pretty good line. “Maybe what they’re saying is, ‘Watch out George Bush,'” Obama said with sarcasm, according to NBC News. “Except for economic policies, and tax policies, and energy policies, and health care policies, and education policies, and Karl Rove-style politics — except for all that, we’re really going to bring change to Washington! We’re really going to shake things up!”

It wasn’t Obama’s line, though. It came from Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, whose cartoon Friday featured these words along with a drawing of McCain and Sarah Palin in front of the White House: “Watch out, Mr. Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we’re coming in there to shake things up!” (See the cartoon here.)

Of course, Barack Obama has been caught plagiarizing before, and given pathetic excuses for it as well.

Sen. Barack Obama said today that he should have given credit to his friend, Deval Patrick, when he used language very similar to some previously spoken by the Massachusetts governor in 2006.

“I was on the stump, and, you know, he had suggested that we use these lines,” Obama said at a news conference a few minutes ago. “I thought they were good lines. I’m sure I should have [given him credit], didn’t this time.”

Obama became a bit defensive when asked by a reporter whether his words were his own.

Obama has also “borrowed” from John Edwards.

And of course, there’s Joe Biden, who knows all about plagiarism…