Does Obama have it all locked up? My colleague at Thomas Jefferson Street, Robert Schlesinger, thinks so. And he may very well prove to be right. When we look back over the course of the campaign some time after November 4, we may very well conclude that Barack Obama sprinted to a lead during the two weeks following the coagulation of credit on September 18. Obama's coolness during the financial crisis, combined with John McCain's impulsiveness, convinced many voters that Obama was the safer choice, the story line will go. And Obama's big advantage in television advertising contributed to his advance in target states, as Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini argues. As Robert notes, Obama's current leads in several Bush '04 states means that McCain must change the basic tenor of the campaign in order to win; eking out a narrow margin in one or two states won't do it in the current state of opinion. And no one has a clear idea of how McCain can change the dynamic. So, the argument goes, Obama has this thing locked up.

But maybe not.

The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating story on the regions with the most underwater mortgages, together with an invaluable map. When you look at the map, you'll see that the areas facing the greatest impact are also the areas most affected by immigration. The Inland Empire of California, metro Phoenix and Las Vegas, south Florida—all have had heavy influxes of Latino immigrants or of Anglos leaving immigrant-dominated places like Los Angeles and Miami-Dade counties. Homeowning here was in effect subsidized by the toxic-waste mortgages pumped through the system by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other improvident financial institutions. Now evidence is accumulating that Latino migrants are returning to their home countries because of the housing bust (construction jobs have disappeared), tougher immigration law enforcement, and a longer-term demographic trend that may be having an effect: a sharp decline in birthrates in Mexico and other Latin countries about 18 years ago. For speculation, some of which goes farther than I would, on how immigration has interacted with cheap mortgages, you can see any number of items in Steve Sailer's interesting blog. I hope to look further into this when I have the time—but campaign 2008 is calling.

Has anyone else been struck by what seems to be a rising discrepancy between the various tracking polls? Gallup currently shows Obama +11, and Rasmussen shows Obama +6. But the Obama margin is notably less in Reuters/Zogby (Obama +2) and Hotline (Obama +1), with Battleground (Obama +4) in the middle. This doesn't cast doubt on the Obama lead. All of the tracking polls but Hotline have Obama winning between 47 percent and 52 percent of the vote. All but Gallup have McCain winning 43 percent to 46 percent of the vote. But the Obama margin in the realclearpolitics.com average has been going down. CBS and Democracy Corps, which if anything usually lean just a little to the Democrats, have Obama +3, not a huge lead. Is it possible there's a little more fluidity in this race than we have come to think?

In the second presidential debate last night, John McCain finally attacked the Democrats and Obama for opposing tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—I have been puzzled why he has not been doing this for the past three weeks—and presented something like the mortgage proposals advanced by conservative economist Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Lindsey. To be effective, such themes must be reiterated again and again.

It's not clear that McCain has the discipline to do this in campaigning or the funds to do it in television ads. Obama has been outspending him something like 3 to 1 in target states over the past few weeks. Obama's message has been that the economy is messed up because of eight years of George W. Bush policies and deregulation and that McCain would provide more of the same. That seems to me to be a flawed argument in several ways, but it appears to be having an effect. I have noted earlier in the cycle that TV advertising had not seemed to be as effective as in previous cycles. Obama heavily outspent Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania but didn't move the numbers much; Clinton won all three. But now, as the public is in search of a narrative in unprecedented times, Obama's advertising does appear to be having the intended effect. It's hard to explain his lead in current polls in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida in any other way.

Politics ordinarily has a certain predictability. Yet presidential politics this year has often seemed to resemble what science writer James Gleick described in his book Chaos. "Chaos," he quotes one physicist as saying, "eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability." Time and again this year, unpredicted and seemingly unpredictable developments have reshaped the presidential race. And they don't seem to stop coming.

At the beginning of the year, things seemed fairly simple. Democrats had a big lead in party identification and seemed headed to victory. Democrats seemed likely to settle on a nominee quickly, while Republicans seemed headed for a long, drawn-out primary fight. But three developments changed the shape of the race, to the benefit of Republicans.

Here's an interesting article on why federal agencies have had such a difficult time purchasing information technology. It seems that government management procedures are just not supple enough to cope with high tech. Once upon a time, government spurred technology development, most notably with the Manhattan Project but also with many military contracts. In the last 20 years or so, the private sector, or at least the information technology sector, seems to be sprinting ahead of government.

Seventeen. That's how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress has cooperated only once. In spring 2007, as House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank likes to point out, the House did pass a bill in response. The Senate did not act until 2008; Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd spent most of 2007 camped out in Iowa running for president. The legislation passed by Congress in 2008 enabled Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to put Fannie and Freddie into federal conservatorship this summer when they failed. But it didn't prevent them from spewing a huge amount of toxic waste, in the form of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, into our financial institutions from 2004 to 2007. As Stephen Spruiell points out in The Corner on National Review Online, Fannie and Freddie spewed out $1 trillion worth (face value) of subprime mortgages between 2005 and 2007. That's a whole lot of toxic waste. For more detail, consult the items referred to in my previous blogpost on this subject (most of the comments seem to have been disputes about the plot line of the movie It's a Wonderful Life, which I should think could be settled by consulting a reference work).