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Josh Marshall gives an insider’s view from the pundit class showing that this campaign has cost John McCain his long-cultivated reputation and it will likely never return.

a McCain biographer and former champion of the Maverick Myth: “McCain’s recent conduct of his campaign - his willingness to lie repeatedly (including in his acceptance speech) and to play Russian roulette with the vice-presidency, in order to fulfill his long-held ambition - has reinforced my earlier, and growing, sense that John McCain is not a principled man. In fact, it’s not clear who he is.“

One of the major outcomes of the attacks of 9/11 is the clear contest between forces that believe that the world civilization so based on trust can endure the counter views of the terrorist. The question for me is to what degree do our USA national reputation and organizing principles engender trust and freedom.

Barack (Lets reason together) is clearly for recapturing our lost status and McCain wants to extend the tough guy image of the Bush doctrine (Fear US - USA reserves the right to attack first).

This is especially understood - but not excused - in those of my generation and older, both from a black and white perspective.  For blacks its owed to us based on time in the country - as if a quota could make such a tactic make sense or even worse is he black enough to get back what racism over these many years has taken from us. On the other end are whites that figure that any black person smart enough to become President must be smart enough to take back from them all the advantages that they have accumulated.

House Republican leaders did not put much pressure on their rank-and-file members to back the rescue package." John Boehner, Roy Blunt and other "leaders" of the House Republicans thought they could strike a public pose as if they really cared about the credit seizure that looms over the country while secretly hoping to pin the bill's passage on Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, (and by association, Barack Obama).

They wanted Speaker Pelosi to pass the bill without much Republican cover so they could tell their constituents that the Democrats were just "picking the taxpayers' pockets again."

I agree with the critical flaws in the bill that Dennis Kucinich articulated this morning on Amy Goodman's show, Democracy Now! I don't believe in a government welfare program for Wall Street swindlers who had the audacity to pump up the paper value of one of their hidden, unregulated derivatives, "credit default swaps," from $631 billion in 2001 to $62 trillion in 2008! I think some people should be indicted; some people should go to jail.

In one of the most incendiary columns ever written, "Race And The Presidential Election," Bill O'Reilly sets the race-bait bar to record-breaking...depths. Short of saying that Barack Obama wants to sleep with your pearly-white daughter, O'Reilly uses just about every button meant to alarm his white fans to the fact that Barack Obama is BLACK and that just his running for, let alone becoming, president, could set off race-laced fireworks.

"Obama's second dilemma is convincing skeptical white voters that he and his wife are sympathetic to their concerns. Let's be honest--few white Americans would tolerate a Reverend Wright for five minutes, much less 20 years."

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.

Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.

Alegi, 72, said Europeans are appalled by the Republican administration's willingness to set aside conventional civil rights for detainees captured in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ken Sherman, a Hamilton, Ont., resident who was selected as a delegate pledged to Barack Obama, said that when he visits Europe, he uses his Canadian rather than American passport because international anger over U.S. foreign policy. "In the last five years with George Bush, I don't pull out my American passport unless I need it." But Obama's rise has made Sherman, 71, prepared to embrace his American citizenship again. "Something has happened in the past two years that has made me proud to be an American again. People are rising up." Wayne Weightman, a 46-year-old Cambodian lawyer, came to Vancouver to support Barack Obama who, he believes, can revive respect overseas for America.

In addition to Logan, they include Valerie Jarrett, CEO of real estate management firm The Habitat Co. and now co-head of Obama's transition team; Jim Reynolds, CEO of investment bank Loop Capital Markets; John Rogers, CEO of mutual fund icon Ariel Investments; Quintin Primo III, CEO of commercial real estate development company Capri Capital Partners; and Frank Clark, CEO of electrical utility Commonwealth Edison.

Later, during his second year in the U.S. Senate, Obama called Clark, among others, to discuss whether it made sense for him to mount a bid for the Presidency. Clark, 62, is one of Chicago's elder statesmen and chief of ComEd, a subsidiary of energy giant Exelon (EXC) and the largest electric utility in Illinois, serving nearly 4 million customers in Chicago and Northern Illinois. He didn't mince words: "Your window of opportunity is now," Clark recalls saying. "Go do it."

"Our generation has been limited in terms of how far we can dream," Logan said on Tuesday night just minutes before Obama took the stage. The son of two teachers who worked on Chicago's South Side, Logan majored in accounting and economics at Florida A&M University, a predominantly black college, and later earned an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago. "We've too often been under the impression that we can only serve our own. We've had constraints applied to what we can achieve."

Several themes coalesced over the two-day period. A prominent one was the oft repeated, "Did race trump gender?" Dr. Cynthia Neal-Spence, Associate Professor of Sociology at Spelman College, spoke about the dilemma of the black female. Asking, "Are we as a group more gender conscious or race conscious?" she then suggested "the media coverage had helped black women to choose sides." Despite Obama offering a post-racial approach, she sensed the same "tensions resurfacing that were in place during the suffragette movement." She also saw the media's analyzation as being "racialized."

Although feminine for Sarah Palin is an asset, "feminine" attributes in general are considered a negative. "The process of gender," as phrased by Vojdik, is a methodology employed by the Republicans where they "feminize" a male candidate -- to his detriment.

Frank Rudy Cooper, Associate Professor of Law at Suffolk University, spelled out that "Obama had to deal with the media representation of black masculinity." He posited that Obama had to be "a unisex president." Despite trying to run a "post-racial campaign, Obama had to be careful avoid "the angry black male" stereotype by not being too aggressive. Cooper explained that in pitting McCain against Obama, the masculine vs. feminine style is emphasized. Obama's empathetic style has been criticized, and as "feminization is a slur," he is forced into a precarious balancing act.

Here are the numbers from a poll of 500 uncommitted voters… How did the debate impact vote preferences? 15% say they are now committed to Obama 14% to McCain 70% are still uncommitted Would make the right decisions about the economy? McCain: 41% before the debate, 49% after Obama: 54% before the debate, 68% after Understands your needs? McCain: 35% before the debate, 46% after Obama: 60% before the debate, 80% after Prepared for the job of president? McCain: 80% before the debate, 84% after Obama: 42% before the debate, 57% after Did candidates answer the questions they were asked? 57% yes, 42% no — for both candidates Obama continues to dominate the “economic” and “understands my needs” categories.

Long on plot (and it will thicken), it did what literature does best: the backward glance, the standing on shoulders, the salute to ancestors and other sources of wisdom.

He is our first (in the best sense of the word) aristocratic president," author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell told The Times. "Bush was a buddy. Clinton was the kindly uncle. Obama is a prince."

Some, like memoirist Patricia Hampl, praised Obama's plain speaking. "I was glad," she said, "that he denied himself rhetorical flourishes and gave a speech as refined and restrained in its power so that political language itself was restored to its greatest value -- saying what the speaker means."

Mr. Kaine will succeed Howard Dean as the party chairman when the party elects officers at its meeting here this month. By tradition, the committee defers to the choice of a sitting president.