Paul Krugman: The Resentment Strategy. The first few paragraphs give you a sense of how far the convention Republicans have gone to stir up resentment against the Democratic ticket. There is, after all, little more than they can run on, but it's also been in their blood, as far back as Richard Nixon, who brought the Republicans back to power with his "silent majority" coalition of big business, racists, militarists, and old-fashioned individualists. The more they rule, the more they screw up; hence, the more dependent they are on stoking the rage that brought them together in the first place.

By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many fervent Obama supporters -- the candidate's high-flown eloquence, his coolness factor -- have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash. Unlike many observers, I wasn't surprised at the effectiveness of the McCain "celebrity" ad. It didn't make much sense intellectually, but it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr. Obama's star quality.

But the Republicans would be doing this to anyone. They can't, after all, run on their own record.

Matthew Yglesias: A Partisan in Maverick's Clothing. McCain still has two months to run away from the Republican Party, but judging from the convention, he's stuck there, and couldn't get far even if he wanted to. Yglesias points out many cases where McCain has surrendered his independent judgment to the will of the party. He could have gone further in exploring the extent to which the GOP has become a hideous thought control machine.

Billmon: Really Proud. While Krugman is still worrying about that the resentment campaign may work against Obama, Billmon -- who on average is a hell of a lot more critical of the Democrats -- takes some pride in what has happened this year:

But there are loyalties that go deeper than policies, deeper than ideas, deeper, even, than folly and cowardice. When I turn on the TV and see the crowd at a Democratic National Convention -- black and white and every shade in between, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight, old and young, Jew and gentile, I know somewhere deep down in my gut that those are my people, the Americans that I want to be my fellow Americans.

That's a variant on what I've been feeling. I hate the very idea of identity politics, but despite voluminous policy differences that's what this election is coming down to: in part because that's the way the Republicans want to fight it, but also because a lot of Democrats this year don't feel like ducking that fight -- especially after seeing the Republican convention.

Billmon: The Great White Hope. A backgrounder on McCain, posted back on July 31 -- long time ago, but as history it's still valid. Back in the 1980s, after he parlayed his POW record into a Senate seat:

If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won't find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain's fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he'd already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain's media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them -- after the world had already found out he took them. But that's precisely what McCain did. He's never looked back since.

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn't hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

On to 2000, when he ran for president:

As the outsider, one of a number of outsiders, running against the GOP establishment favorite, McCain desperately needed -- and knew he needed -- independents and Democrats to turn out for him in the primaries where they were allowed to do so. But his record and his positions on most issues defined him as a fairly conventional GOP conservative -- what's more, one whose primary passion, national security hawkishness, was way out of fashion. So, McCain and his political advisors used his personal biography (not least his post-Keating Five contrition) to fashion a new political persona that would appeal to independents and/or moderates: McCain 2.0. To demonstrate his bona fides, he even took a totally gratuitous (if entirely accurate) public shot at the religious right, defining them as "the agents of intolerance."

It worked well initially -- well enough to put the fear into Karl Rove and George W. Bush, not to mention the entire GOP establishment. But conservative, hardcore Republican South Carolina turned into the make-or-break primary state, and McCain's supposed appeal to veterans turned out to be much less tangible than the Bush machine's tight connections to the fundamentalist Taliban. So suddenly John McCain, the supposed straight talker, was ducking and weaving around the perennially important issue of whether the Confederate flag should continue to wave over the cradle of the Civil War.

He lost anyway, of course -- but here again, as during the Keating Five scandal, McCain managed to make political vice look like virtue, at least in the media's eyes. In late April, he gave a speech announcing he'd been wrong not to denounce the Stars and Bars. "I chose to compromise my principles," he confessed, and "broke my promise to always tell the truth" in order to win in South Carolina.

With Bush the nominee, McCain waited on the sidelines.

Like Achilles, McCain largely withdrew to his tent for the 2000 general election campaign -- sulking after his defeat, it was said; although, in hindsight, hedging his bets might be a more accurate description. But after the Florida debacle, with the Cheney Administration off to a rocky start and Shrub looking like a possible one-term failed nominal president, McCain re-emerged to re-define himself legislatively as a "maverick" Republican -- opposing tax cuts, slamming the tobacco lobby, embracing campaign finance reform, etc.

But then 9/11 reshuffled the political cards once again. With Bush transformed into the GOP's Maximum Leader, McCain reinvented himself AGAIN as a loyal foot soldier in the war on terrorism -- but managed to keep just enough daylight between himself and the Cheney Administration (on the conduct of the war in Iraq, the use of torture, etc.) to give himself an out if thing went South.

In 2004 McCain flirted with Kerry, but wound up embracing Bush. He got back into the forefront of the neocon war in Iraq, surging even before Bush did. And he started mending his fences with GOP baseheads like Jerry Falwell. Through the primaries he was more unapologetically aligned with Bush than any other candidate, even though it meant backtracking on everything from taxes to Armageddon. And now, with the nomination sewed up, all those GOP aparatchiks who supposedly hated him in his "maverick" days are lined up right behind him: the ultimate party hack.

The poll projections at FiveThirtyEight have Obama up by 3.1% today, his biggest lead that I can remember, with Ohio and Virginia in the blue column, and Nevada teetering. Doesn't seem like McCain got any convention bounce, but it may take a while to work through the algorithms.