I’ve got great news for Joe the Plumber.

You’re 20 days away from having a great, great president and his name is Barack Obama.

Join the fun with your ballot next month and, for the first time in a decade, you’ll have avoided voting against your own economic interest.

The racial under(and over)tones of the McCain attack campaign on Barack Obama are so pervasive, I often wonder if some of the gems pass straight from the unconscious to the campaign trail without the handlers even noticing them.

In the last week, McCain has joyfully indicated that he plans to “whip” Obama in the debate and his team has started using the theme from Rocky at campaign stops (you know, Rocky, the white dude with a fondness for turtles who fought the flashy black champion).

Some have pointed out that, at least in the first movie, Rocky lost. I think it is more telling (especially in light of McCain’s Veep pick) that Rocky – much as we all loved the lug – was an absolute fucking idiot.

My guy is finally ahead. This hasn’t happened in presidential politics for awhile. As much as it seemed clear (like, uh, really clear) to me, in recently past elections, that my guy should be ahead, he wasn’t.

But now he is. I mean look at the polls. My guy is winning, by a lot.

And all it took was the collapse of the economy, a banking catastrophe, a stock market crash, a failed and expensive war, a dramatic drop in the world’s esteem for America, a sitting president with the lowest approval ratings ever measured (each time he spoke last week, the market plunged immediately), an over-stretched military, a housing crisis, a jump in joblessness, an overall sense that we are going in the wrong direction, an incredible low level of confidence in the notion that anyone in any position of leadership knows how to get us out of this or any mess, all combined with an opposing candidate who has been erratic, off-message, sluggish, poorly organized, unimpressive, unclear, angry, weird, old, badly handled, endlessly irritating to his own party, and who picked a lying, scandal-laden, and remarkably (hilariously if this were fiction) idiotic sidekick (I am a vegetarian animal-loving pacifist and frankly, the moose-killing is by far my favorite of her qualities). Just mix that with stadiums filled with idol-worshipping fans and the most money ever raised by anyone doing anything other than bailing out the world’s banks (in the next three weeks, my guy will be on the tube more than Regis) and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success.

If we had only known, a long time ago, that’s all it took to get one of these damn things won.

(Even with all this, it ain’t over yet. Scary, eh?)

Turns out Obama is a decent family man.

At a recent town hall event, John McCain got a very big taste of the fruits of his negative and often shameful campaign.

After many angry and offensive questions, one finally got to the candidate. A woman took the microphone and said:

“I’m scared of Barack Obama… he’s an Arab terrorist…”

“No, no ma’am,” McCain interrupted. “He’s a decent family man with whom I happen to have some disagreements.”

Senator, please tell the same to your campaign team, speech writers and inner demons.

At the New Yorker Festival, Donna Brazile shared some thoughts about the desperate attempts by Team McCain to inject race into this campaign.

It’s definitely worth your time to check it out.