Obama continues to gain ground in the Gallup tracking poll, making this the 8th straight day in which the race has either stayed steady or moved in Obama’s direction:

It’s hard to know exactly what’s caused this shift, but it’s plausibly connected to the trend I lament in a new TAP Online column wherein national security has totally vanished from the campaign. In most polls, McCain seems to do better than Obama on national security. So when the public attention shifts away from national security and toward, say, a giant financial crisis, that benefits Obama. Under the circumstances, you can see the interest in trying to make sure the attention stays on the economy. But one thing I don’t note in the article that is worth mentioning somewhere is the fact that this strategy leaves Obama pretty hostage to events. A terrorist attack, a crisis abroad, or even a new tape from bin Laden could easily throw the election back to McCain if Obama doesn’t lay the groundwork for an argument on those issues.

I’m just now getting into the story of Sarah Palin’s purloined electronic letters because I’d been busy keeping my Palin-focused attention on stuff like:

• The alleged energy expert keeps making false assertions about the scale of Alaska’s energy production.
• The alleged reformer is stonewalling an ethics investigation she said she’d cooperate with.
• The alleged take-on-her-own-partier won’t take a stand on the re-election of corrupt Alaska incumbents Ted Stevens and Don Young.
• The McCain campaign’s fact sheet justifying their claim that she said “thanks but no thanks” to Congress on the bridge to nowhere doesn’t remotely justify the claim.
• Palin’s sinking popularity.

And when you think about it, that last factor really doesn’t bode well for John McCain’s campaign since he seemed to have been enjoying a brief-but-now-gone Palin bounce that gave him a brief-but-now-gone lead over Barack Obama. But this turn of events, insofar as it grabs public attention, gives the McCain campaign the opportunity to change the story and to shift back into their favorite mode — taking umbrage at Palin’s treatment by the cruel, cruel world:

“This is a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law,” McCain’s campaign manager said. “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities, and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.”

Would it be possible that someone working for McCain actually did this in order to shift attention off Palin’s mounting problems? One assumes that the vetting process has left the campaign in the possession of various pieces of personal information that could be useful in gaining access to someone’s account.

Irony truly is dead as Lynn Forester de Rothschild endorses John McCain on anti-elitism grounds:

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don’t like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

On an unrelated note, the stakes have rarely been higher in an election for extremely rich people than they are in this one. Barack Obama’s tax proposals don’t raise a ton of new net revenue and, as a consequence, have tended to be viewed as pretty moderate. But one reason they don’t raise all that much net revenue is that he’s offering large tax cuts to the majority of people and those offset the substantial tax hike he’s proposing on the rich. Justin Wolfers has a good chart on this:

Looks like a big money haul for Barack Obama in August with the campaign reporting $66 million and 500,000 new donors. That brings their total number of donors to around 2.5 million which is a staggering total. All told, he has $77 million cash on hand. That’s a lot of money and, I think, assures us that the Obama campaign will be able to meet its goal of outclassing McCain’s ground operation.

That said, when pondering Obama’s fundraising feats, it is worth recalling that there’s nothing stopping Sheldon Adelson from giving “Freedom’s Watch” $60 million or, for that matter, $600 million if he decides that swamping the airwaves with conservative messaging is really important to him.

A remarkable number of liberals of my acquaintance seemed ready to move into panic mood after it turns out that Sarah Palin can deliver a competent attack dog speech. I don’t see why. It was competent, but no more than that. And it wasn’t a speech that even tried to do either of things that John McCain’s campaign needs to do — separate McCain from George W. Bush or convince people that McCain can improve the economy. It didn’t even try to address those subjects.

This stops the downward spiral, maybe, until perhaps people focus on the fact that Palin’s signature accomplishment as Governor of Alaska was to oppose a bridge project that she in fact favored, but McCain was losing the race before Palin was ever announced. Stopping the slide doesn’t get you to a win.

John McCain raises a record $27 million in one month, while Barack Obama takes in $51 million in July which isn’t a record, but is clearly a larger number:

On the other hand, the RNC has way more money than the DNC and that should make up the difference.