Frank Rich’s “How Obama Became Acting President” is a must-read.

Cartoon by Barry Blitt

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was wrong about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, theyre still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American bloodletting and be paid for by the Iraqis.

He points out that McCain and Bush are shamelessly stealing Obama’s ideas:

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidates flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.

On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran appeasement, would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obamas, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journals op-ed page: Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.

Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a general time horizon. In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obamas, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nations troops by early 2009.

While Obama hogs the spotlight, what’s McCain up to?

Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bushs de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCains behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.

Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to lose a war isnt even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.

Leaving us to decide between BarackStar and McSurge.

The election remains Mr. Obamas to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what weve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obamas post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. Thats some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nations big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

Thank you, Frank Rich, for noticing that while McCain campaigns on his judgment of the surge, Obama was against the war in the first place. The media has been giving John McCain a free pass on his multiple gaffes, while holding its collective breath in hopes that Obama will make even a fraction of a slip-up. Obama has been consistently ahead of the curve on the idea of change; he didn’t just adopt it when it was convenient.

Despite what the headlines want you to believe, it’s not even going to be close (Pollster.com).