It’s been a long campaign, and there are still five solid months left before the election. I’m more than willing to give candidates a pass on what they might say on the stump. After all, they literally working around the clock, traveling across the country, trying to deal with never-ending news cycles and millions of bloggers parsing their every word.

With that disclaimer, John Fund of the WSJ points out that Barack Obama has proven that, yes, he is in fact human.

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him “a one-man gaffe machine.”

I think what people are seeing, and will increasingly see as this campaign moves into high gear, is a candidate that, quite simply, has not been battle-tested. He’s only run for office 5 times. Two of those times he ran as the incumbent. He’s never had to face the grueling schedule and scrutiny he’s finding in this campaign.

This doesn’t necessarily make him unqualified to be president. All it means is that the Democrats are on the verge of nominating a relatively inexperienced candidate who is showing signs of wear on the campaign trail. The Democratic Party shouldn’t underestimate the enormity of the task they are asking of Obama. The next 5 months will reveal a lot more about the true identity of Obama.

I was tipped off (via) to a great website called FiveThirtyEight.com run by Nate Silver. The site’s name refers to the total number of electoral votes in the U.S. presidential election. It’s a great site for analyzing polling data and crunching numbers.

We’re just about to a point in this campaign when the general election polling data will mean something. Once Clinton drops out of the race, if she indeed takes that step, then the Obama vs. McCain match-up will come into greater clarity. All of the national head-to-head polls up to this point have been somewhat meaningless for two reasons. First, the general election isn’t a straight popular vote contest. The Electoral College remains the mechanism for choosing the president. Second, as long as Clinton has remained a part of the campaign, it’s impossible to get an accurate read on how well Obama will do as the nominee versus John McCain.

With all of the said, as of today, FiveThirtyEight has McCain edging out Obama by a margin of 270.6 to 267.4. I’m a little more confident in McCain’s ability to top Obama, but I think this analysis is pretty sound. There are a relatively small handful of states that will be critical battlegrounds for both candidates. These include Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and to a lesser extent, Virginia, Indiana, and Colorado.

Once the Democratic primary season ends next week, things may begin to become clearer. The next big step will be for the VP process to work itself out.

This post is mainly for my wife, who missed this because she fell asleep on Saturday night. If only the entire episode of SNL was as funny as this.

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So Barack Obama was in Oregon this weekend, and he attracted an estimated crowd of 75,000.

That’s impressive. How impressive? Well, some argue that the crowd that showed up represents 5% of the registered voters in Oregon.

I’m trying to source that stat. From the best I can tell, the number of registered voters in Oregon, as of November 2006 is just shy of 2 million. The monthly data for April 2008 from the Oregon Secretary of State’s Election Division puts the number at just over 2 million [PDF].

Let’s take 2 million as a nice round number. What is 5% of 2 million? That would be 100,000.

The crowd size has been estimated by various sources as being anywhere from 72,000 (attributed to the Portland Fire Bureau) to 80,000 (attributed to just “fire officials”). Regardless, let’s call it 75,000.

That number would only represent 3.75% of the registered voters in Oregon. It’s still an impressive number, but if we’re going to fall all over ourselves, let’s make sure we get our numbers straight.

The lesson that the GOP and John McCain ought to learn from this display of support is simply that Oregon probably isn’t going to turn red in November. Perhaps it’s better to spend time in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and Wisconsin than in Oregon.

There is a movement afoot by some in the media to try to equate the problems Barack Obama has had with Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the relationship that John McCain has with Rev. John Hagee.

That logic falls apart for a couple of reasons. First, McCain has never been a part of Hagee’s church, not as a member or regular attender at any point. Second, McCain has never called Hagee a spiritual mentor or adviser. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, McCain has been quick to repudiate many of the stupid things Hagee has said over the years.

Make no mistake — Hagee has made a lot of dumb statements over the years, and his theology is pretty dubious. Actually, calling it dubious is being generous.

It’s guys like Hagee that Republicans (and politicians in general) ought to avoid like the plague. Hagee suffers from the same affliction that so many tele-mega-vangelists do — they know they’re right about everything, and aren’t afraid to tell you, and in their self-assuredness, they wield immense amounts of power.

Five years ago, I pointed out the absurdity of Hagee banking $1.25 million as an annual salary. But that kind of extravagance is almost commonplace among the tele-mega-vangelist set.

Hagee’s theology is a mix of run-of-the-mill prosperity gospel, hyper-Pentecostalism, anti-Catholicism, premillenial dispensationalism, and, of course, over-the-top Zionism. If you’re John McCain, and you really want to appeal to evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike, this is not the guy you want on your side.

Hagee and Jeremia Wright might both be nutty in their own ways, but the Hagee rap won’t stick to McCain because, unlike Obama, McCain didn’t sit in the pews for years and fail to raise an objection.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the day after losing West Virginia by 40 points, Barack Obama picked up the endorsement of John Edwards. Former Sen. Edwards represents the kind of voters that Obama really needs to win — and didn’t in West Virginia. Blue collar workers from former industrial strongholds have proven that they won’t vote for Obama. The mainstream media likes to paint this reluctance as racism. I’m sure that has something to do with it, but I think it’s probably got a lot more with Obama’s image as an elitist.

What’s clear is that Obama’s problems in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio spell real electoral headaches for the Democrats. These are places that Democrats MUST win if they want a President Obama.

If McCain can energize those Rust Belt voters who haven’t responded well to Obama, then the Democrats are seriously on the ropes. If Edwards is on the ticket with Obama, then that might put the Tar Heel in play, but I wouldn’t count on it.

On the other side, McCain really needs to secure places like Colorado, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. A case could be made that having a Mitt Romney on the ticket would be the kind of move that would keep conservatives in the fold, while also strengthening McCain’s chances in Michigan and the mountain west states.

Regardless of the map today, Obama needs to find a way to identify with blue collar white voters. So far, that’s been his biggest liability.