Danation: Red, orange and blue

John McCain

The past couple of weeks have been great for John McCain. A quick primer, in order to illustrate the point: When you vote for president, you're actually not voting for president; you're voting for electors. How many electors a state has depends on its population; we have 27 here in Florida. Whoever wins the popular vote in a given state wins all that state's electors. The electors then convene the electoral college, vote for whomever they're supposed to and whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes is the next Mr. President. (At least, most of the time it works out like this. We have had a few so-called faithless electors throughout American history, who've not voted the way they're supposed to, but they've never actually swayed an election.)

Several Web sites keep track of state-by-state polls, total them and offer a likely answer to the question of "If the election were held today, who would win?" My favorite of these is Electoral-vote.com, which I read religiously every day. Until this past Friday, Barack Obama had been winning for the entire campaign season. But Friday, the measurement at Electoral-vote.com had it at 270 for McCain, 268 for Obama. Those numbers held throughout the weekend, and, as of this writing, have not changed despite numerous new polls.

The news isn't all bad for Obama, though. For starters, this electoral map shows that, in order for McCain to win, he needs to win the toss-up states of New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Indiana, all of which he is currently winning. If Obama steals but one of those states away — most likely New Mexico, where the senator from Illinois has had a reliable margin of victory until the most-recent polls — the election flips to him. Also, these numbers likely represent a high-water mark for McCain, coming as they do right after the Republican National Convention. Convention bounces happen every four years and, just as often, the increase in polling disappears after a few weeks in light of changing events. In this case, a big, upcoming game-changer is the first presidential debate, which takes place Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi. And good for Ole Miss; it's a fine feather in the cap of a university that needs something to crow about, what with having one of the worst football teams in the SEC — one that will be getting lit up by the Florida Gators in The Swamp the day after the debate. But I digress. We're talking about the debate here, not the gridiron bloodbath that will undoubtedly follow it.

Still, why should the bloodletting wait till Saturday? What follows is a few questions that the first debate's moderator, PBS anchor Jim Lehrer, might ask the candidates, keeping the focus on the debate's themes of foreign policy and national security.

1. Sen. McCain, you've said we could be in Iraq for 50, even a hundred years, as long as American troops weren't being killed, and drawn comparisons to our long-term stays in Korea, Germany and Japan. First, as none of these last three countries had a postwar insurgency, how do you propose to turn the bomb-scarred streets of Baghdad into the body-part-free byways of Berlin and Seoul? Second, given our military commitments in the Middle East, why the hell are we still in Germany and Japan, anyway?

2. Sen. Obama, you've sworn to have our troops out of Iraq within the first 16 months of your presidency, which comes to about two combat brigades each month. Two combat brigades means more than a thousand Humvees, as well as trucks, helicopters and more, that must be driven through the war zone to a port in Kuwait and then cleaned, processed and put on ships. That's thousands of vehicles, never mind the men themselves, each and every month for the next 16 months. Logistically, how the hell do you intend to pull that off?

3. Sen. McCain, in her first post-nomination interview with Charlie Gibson, your running mate, Sarah Palin, left the door open to declaring war on Russia if it remained hostile to the west. So … seriously? War with Russia? I mean, she was just joking, right? While we're on the subject of extending American belligerence abroad, how do you feel about invading and/or bombing Iran? Pakistan? How 'bout Indonesia? Brunei?

4. Sen. Obama, after President Bush announced a renewed commitment to Afghanistan a few weeks ago, you remarked that the president's "plan comes up short" and added, "It is not enough troops, and not enough resources, with not enough urgency." After pulling out of Iraq, exactly how many troops would you send into Afghanistan? How long do you intend for that war to go on? Just as we asked John McCain in the first question to say how he would achieve a peaceful Iraq, we must ask you: Define winning in Afghanistan. Does it look anything like "winning in Iraq"?

5. Sen. McCain, your energy policy thus far has particularly harped on domestic drilling. Indeed, the oil industry is currently airing commercials that maintain we have enough oil and gas to power 60 million cars and heat 160 million households for the next 60 years. But what happens after that? Even if we drill on every acre of the country, isn't that just like sticking so many fingers in the dike? Will added domestic drilling end our dependence on foreign oil — and thus wars for the same — or is it a Band-Aid on a compound fracture?

6. Sen. Obama, final question. You maintain that the United States needs to use diplomacy well before it resorts to warfare. But you were for surreptitious missions into Pakistan to hunt terrorists before McCain, who initially criticized you for this. You also want to crank up the war in Afghanistan. So what's the real change here? Are you really for more diplomacy or is your "to do list" of countries to be bombed just different than McCain's?

Finally, closing statements. Remember that these statements may not include the words hope, change, reform, bold, my friends or any reference to the Vietnam War and/or prison camps.

Send more must-ask questions to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com. For more of Sweeney's stuff, visit Huffingtonpost.com.