Feel That? It's the Race Shifting: Noonan

Barack Obama’s victory once seemed inevitable—but in the past month, a glimmer of real hope has emerged for John McCain, writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. McCain's creeping up in the polls—even on YouTube—while Obama’s squeaky-clean image in the press has been somewhat sullied by suggestions he’s “arrogant, aloof and ethereal.” It's "small stuff, and there will be a lot of twists and turns before this is over, but there's movement down there beneath the crust of the Earth."

Obama’s trouble, Noonan notes, is that “he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” As he plays the role of president with moves like his massive Berlin speech, it didn’t occur to him that people might think he was getting too big for his britches. Meanwhile, McCain is still “his scattered self”—but he seems to be connecting with the “silent majority,” or, as Noonan puts it, “the old America.” (More Barack Obama stories.)