John McCain holds a campaign rally at the University of Scranton on Sunday.

Dugald McConnell
CNN producer

It’s a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican in 20 years, and recent polls are showing a lead for Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama of five to ten percent. But Republican Sen. John McCain is blitzing Pennsylvania almost every day: Monday marks the 10th day out the last 15 days that either McCain or his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is campaigning there.

Republicans see their efforts to flip Pennsylvania as crucial, if McCain is to have a path to victory on Tuesday.

“Back in August or September, few people thought it would come down to one or two states,” says Republican Tom Ridge, a former governor of the Keystone State. “But it’s now down to Pennsylvania and one or two others.”

With McCain mostly playing defense in an effort to hold on to states George Bush won in 2000 and 2004, Pennsylvania may be one of the only states where he is still playing offense. Republicans are looking to the state’s 21 Electoral College votes as a way to make up for potential losses in red states where McCain is currently behind, such as Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, and even Virginia.

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George F. Will
Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.

Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate”?

She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes. But does she know that when Lyndon Johnson, transformed by the 1960 election from Senate majority leader into vice president, ventured to the Capitol to attend the Democratic senators’ weekly policy luncheon, the new majority leader, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, supported by his caucus, barred him because his presence would be a derogation of the Senate’s autonomy?

Perhaps Palin’s confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration’s constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans’ Tuesday luncheons. He has said jocularly that he is “a product” of the Senate, which pays his salary, and that he has no “official duties” in the executive branch. His situational constitutionalism has, however, led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch and, when seeking to shield certain of his deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say that he is a member of the executive branch.

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Jane Mayer
The New Yorker

“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”

In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”

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Christianity Today Editorial

Media reaction to Gov. Palin shows ignorance of evangelicalism.

The Vice Presidential nomination of Sarah Palin stunned the American public, especially the mainstream media. For weeks, the focus of Palin puzzlement shifted daily, from her support for aerial wolf hunting to her claiming per diem payments for nights spent at home to Tina Fey’s jaw-dropping Palin impersonation.

But two sex- and gender-related questions caught our attention. First, reactions to news of Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy: liberal pundits gleefully announced that this was going to seriously undermine Governor Palin’s standing with the Republican Party’s evangelical base. Any informed evangelical watcher or evangelical believer could have told them that this is a non-issue.

It is a non-issue because John Newton’s famous line, “I once was lost but now I’m found,” defines the evangelical ethos. We specialize in troubled lives. Stories of transformation from sin and degradation to righteousness and wholeness frame the way evangelicals see life. From the slave-trading Newton to the White House “hatchet man” Chuck Colson, God saves people from their slavery to sin and uses them to restore others. Indeed, those of us who never did anything particularly shocking sometimes have trouble fitting in.

Evangelical pews are full of people whose family lives are untidy. If we get angry when a teen gets pregnant, it is not at the hot-blooded teens but at the fashion and entertainment industries that persistently sexualize the images of the young and set them up for bad choices. It’s no wonder: One recent study showed that adolescents with a sexually charged media diet are more than twice as likely as others to have sex by the time they turn 16. Teen pregnancy is one of the situations in which it is easiest for us to hate the sin but love the sinner.

The second media reaction that caught our attention was liberal puzzlement over conservatives who believe that only men should lead churches and marriages, yet who would not hesitate to have a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency.

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Marc Ambinder
Blogger on The Atlantic

Call it a circular firing squad, or internal dissension, or simply the natural evolution of a campaign that is disappointed with how the endgame is playing out.

There’s a faction within the McCain campaign has begun to whisper about Gov. Sarah Palin to reporters. The faction includes staff members and advisers who consult with staff members. It does not seem to include any members of the senior staff, although the definition of the senior staff here is a bit elastic.

This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign’s message of the day in ways that damage McCain.

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Sammy Gray, inebriated tour guide

Jack Gray
AC360 Associate Producer

Ah, democracy springs eternal. We’re already seeing it with early voting, for which Americans are turning out in record numbers. I walked by a long line the other day in midtown Manhattan and thought I might as well try to get a fresh story for AC360. But I got some strange looks from people – a few even ran away – when I asked if they wanted to appear on CNN to discuss what they were going to do when they got inside the booth. It turns out it was a line to get into a peep show.

I was finishing up a shopping trip to Saks Fifth Avenue today with Sarah Palin, about to go meet Joe Biden for his botox consultation, when it hit me. No, I didn’t forget to polish Anderson’s Emmys. Trust me, one does not make that mistake twice. What hit me is that Halloween is just a week away and I still haven’t decided on my costume. I’ve narrowed it down to either Tony Danza or Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.

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Joe Klein
TIME.com

Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain’s peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama’s quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public’s choice in the general-election campaign.

But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he’s far more comfortable when he’s able to think things through. “He has learned to trust his gut,” an Obama adviser told me. “He wasn’t so confident in his instincts last year. It’s been the biggest change I’ve seen in him.”

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Marc Ambinder
The Atlantic

There’s a suspicion in some McCain loyalist precincts that Gov. Sarah Palin is beginning to play the Republican base against John McCain — McCain won’t let her campaign in Michigan…McCain won’t let her bring up Jeremiah Wright… McCain doesn’t like her terrorist pal talks….

Think ahead to 2010…2011…2012.

Palin is ambitious. Very ambitious.

And if she wants the job, she’s easily the frontrunner to become THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness. She is a favorite of talk radio and Fox News conservatives, and speaks their language as only a true member of the club can. (Her recent Limbaugh interview was full of dog whistles that any Dittohead would recognize. Including her actual use of the word ditto.)

Palin will have plenty of time to become fluent on national issues. She will easily benefit from the low expectations threshold, and will probably even garner positive reviews from the MSM types who disparage her today.

Palin will be judged to be “ready” in four years. George Will and David Brooks and Peggy Noonan will all swoon over her once more. Ok, maybe not George Will.

Palin is an enormously talented politician. When she knows what she’s talking about, or even when she knows enough to fake it, she is very, very appealing, and very good at redirecting questions to whatever her message is.

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Dr. James Dobson

Max Blumenthal
The Daily Beast

After Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama on Meet the Press, Sarah Palin was interviewed by Christian right leader James Dobson on his Focus on the Family radio show. Though Palin did not mention Powell, she attacked Obama as a socialist by referencing his now famous encounter with Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.

“Joe the Plumber, you gotta hand it to him,” Palin told Dobson. “He’s the one who got finally Barack Obama to say what he’d do with redistributing wealth and raising taxes. And Joe the Plumber said that certainly sounds like socialism to him, and I appreciate Joe having the boldness to get out there and ask the question.”

Powell’s endorsement and Palin’s appearance on Dobson’s show are not entirely unconnected. Dobson has long been one of the banes of Powell’s political life―and the right’s warm embrace of Palin is part of what drove Powell away from McCain.

When Powell endorsed Obama, he offered a litany of factors, from Obama’s “transformational” potential to “steadiness.” But Powell, a military man and self-described “Rockefeller Republican,” also declared his disappointment with the “rightward shift” in the Republican Party.

There is a little understood, rancorous subplot behind this vague remark: Powell’s war with the religious right. That conflict began years before the current presidential campaign and, if Powell plays a role in an Obama administration, will almost certainly extend beyond it.

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Former Reagan adviser Ken Adelman discusses why he cannot support Sen. McCain and will be voting for Sen. Obama.