by Mark Silva
The short-lived bounce of Barack Obama's European tour is gone, and the presidential contest between Obama and John McCain has settled back down to a dead-heat, in the measure of the daily tracking surveys of the Gallup Poll.
The three-day average of surveys run Wednesday through Friday found 44 percent of those surveyed supporting Obama, the Democratic junior senator from Illinois, and 44 percent supporting McCain, the Republican senior senator from Arizona.
The Gallup track, which has portrayed a virtual tie between the two at many junctures since March, had found a 9-point advantage for Obama in the days following all of the attention that he received with his march across Western Europe.
"But that bounce disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged,'' Gallup's Jeff Jones reports.
"More broadly, Obama has enjoyed an average 3-point advantage since clinching the Democratic nomination in early June,'' Jones notes. But "for the moment, McCain has erased that small advantage.'' Take a look at the longer-range tracking of McCain and Obama here.)
McCain also aired a series of attacks against Obama after that trip - with television ads potaaying Obama as an empty "celebrity'' and accusing Obama of playing basketball instead of visiting wounded American soldiers (Obama has called the McCain campaigns comparison of him with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton a "cynical'' distraction from the real issues of the contest, and Obama did visit troops in Kuwait, where he also played basketball, but refrained from visiting a military hospital in Germany when the military objected to the potential for politicizing it - McCain, for his part, maintained that if the Pentagon had attempted to stop him from visiting the soldiers, there would have been "a seismic event.'')
So the two may have accomplished at least this: Confirming the old Newtonian science of political dynamics --- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, for every European tour, perhaps, a bounce in the polls, for every run of attack ads, for sure, a slide in the polls. In the weeks ahead, McCain and Obama will find yet more opportunity to influence their own standing: The running- mate picks.
Posted by Mark Silva on August 3, 2008 9:00 AM