(Cross-posted from the Accountable Strategies blog and Blue Mass Group)

John McCain has repeatedly sought to portray Barack Obama as a proponent of earmark and pork barrel spending, using the famous and inaccurate $3 million overhead projector example in the debates.

It would have been nice had Obama hit back on McCain's apparently extensive ties to U.S. military contractors in Iraq.   Now, there's some real pork to talk about.

It's become accepted wisdom that McCain is losing ground in the polls right now because the economy is in such bad shape.

I think the real reason is that Obama has run a smart campaign and McCain has run a dumb one.  McCain and his advisors have made at least three fundamental mistakes in the general election campaign so far--mistakes that seem so basic that I can't understand how these people got as far as they did in politics.

Whoever among the three remaining candidates is elected president in November, my suggestion is that he or she send an aide to the nearest library for a book that I'm pretty sure George W. Bush has never read.

That book is "Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers," by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May.  The book was published in 1986, but its recommendations are timely and common sensical, particularly the central recommendation that presidents should carefully examine the historical and political presumptions on which they base their decisions.

Had Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld read "Thinking in Time" after 9/11 and taken its recommendations about presumptions seriously, it seems to me we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today, five years into our occupation of Iraq.

If you think the media has changed its MO of building up Barack Obama and tearing down Hillary Clinton since the famous SNL sketch, check out the current issue of The New Republic

I'm beginning to wonder whether this isn't a disservice to both candidates.

In the issue, Jonathan Chait describes Obama as "an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate."  Fair enough, but he also describes Clinton in the same sentence as "cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness."