Needless to say, this is prompting some rather contradictory headlines.

"Obama Takes Widest Lead Yet in Gallup Tracking Poll" said the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, when Gallup's survey of 2,692 voters found Obama – buoyed perhaps by the coverage of his overseas trip last week – opening a nine-point advantage (49 to 40 percent) over McCain. (The numbers were about the same today, when the daily tracking poll's three-day average put Obama ahead 48 to 40 percent.)

But then The Page wrote today about a new "shocker" -- a separate Gallup poll conducted over the weekend, this one in conjunction with the USA Today, that gives McCain a 49-45 percent edge among likely voters. (When the poll is expanded to include only registered voters, Obama pulls ahead by three points.)

Gallup's daily tracking poll – the one that has Obama well ahead – included about four times as many respondents and has a smaller margin of error, plus/minus two percent, than the Gallup-USA Today survey, in which the margin of error is four percent. And, for what it's worth, Gallup's editor, Frank Newport, chalked up the vast discrepancies to "statistical noise." (That's some pretty loud noise, though.)

In terms of headlines, though, Gallup has managed to do the unimaginable – nearly simultaneously giving each campaign some of the best news it's received in weeks, if not months.

If you look at the national-level data, Barack Obama seems to be underachieving. In the latest Gallup daily tracking poll, the presumptive Democratic nominee holds a scant two-point edge over John McCain. The margin is also two points in Rasmussen's daily poll—which also shows a dead-even race when "leaners" are factored in. Some other recent polls have been a little more favorable to Obama, but the combined weight of the available national data strongly suggests that Obama, despite his personal popularity and the enormous built-in advantages his party enjoys this year, is locked in a much closer race than he should be.

But if you ignore the national numbers and instead consider individual state polls, a realigning landslide suddenly seems to be within Obama's reach. In state after state, he's performing far better than John Kerry did in 2004, and numerous Republican bastions are seemingly in play. Consider Indiana, which George W. Bush won by 21 points in 2004 and which lasted voted for a Democrat 44 years ago—and which Obama leads by one point in the most recent survey. Or North Carolina, which Bush carried by 12 points in '04 but where the latest poll has Obama within three. And so on. In North Dakota, the race is tied. In South Dakota, Obama trails by just four. Ditto for Alaska, perhaps the most Republican state in the union. He also leads in Montana and Colorado and in all but one recent survey in Virginia.

And the trend isn't just evident in red states. In states where Kerry eked out victories last time around, polls now give Obama sizable leads. Kerry nearly fumbled away Minnesota (a three-point nail-biter), but Obama has a 17-point advantage in the most recent poll. Wisconsin and New Hampshire were photo-finishes in '04, but Obama has opened a double-digit lead there. Plus, Obama is running ahead in states that Kerry barely lost, like Iowa (by an average of seven points), New Mexico and Nevada.

On top of all this, Obama is performing as well as any Democratic nominee is supposed to in the biggest blue states—California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts—and leads (in some cases substantially) in every recent swing state except Florida, where the average of recent polls gives McCain a three-point edge.

There are some traditionally Republican states where Obama is performing at a more typical (for a Democrat) level, like Utah, Alabama and Tennessee, but overall at the state-by-state level he seems positioned to win the November election going away. So how is it—with Obama so close to McCain in so many red states and so far ahead in all of the big blue states—that the national polls show such a close race? With all of the dramatic strides Obama is making in individual states, shouldn't his national margin be much wider?

One tempting thought is that the national polls might seem so different because many of the red states where Obama is overachieving are so small. So while there might be palpable movement in his direction in, for instance, North Dakota (which accounts for 0.2 percent of the U.S. population), it's possible that in a national survey of 500 voters, only one North Dakotan—or maybe even none—is actually interviewed.

But if we take the average result from recent polls in each state and weight each state according to its share of the national population, we get an overall national result that's entirely consistent with current national polling: Obama 46.2 percent, McCain 42.7—a 3½-point race. So there really is no inconsistency between the close national horse race and Obama's clearly superior position in individual state polls.

The most obvious explanation for this is the large number of undecided voters included in most polls, which makes it tough for either candidate to break 50 percent in most states right now. In South Carolina, for example, Obama is clearly running better than Kerry did (or Al Gore, for that matter) and trails McCain by just six points in an average of that state's most recent polling. But as surprisingly close as the race is, Obama's raw number—39 percent support, on average—is nothing new for a Democrat in the state (Kerry finished with 41 percent in '04).

The same is true in many other states, red and blue. Obama leads by an average of 17 points in dark-blue New York, but he's only averaging 53 percent of the vote there (while Kerry took 58 in '04). He's slaughtering McCain in California, but only averaging 53 percent support there. And he's opened leads in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but also isn't securing the level of support that Kerry had in those states on Election Day four years ago.

This doesn't mean that Obama is in trouble in any of these blue states or that the number of undecided voters is unusually high. It's simply a partial explanation for how seemingly solid polling data in individual states can translate into lukewarm national numbers.

But things get more revealing if we take the numbers a step further and try to adjust the current state averages to account for the voters who are now undecided or threatening to vote for third-party candidates. For the sake of this exercise, let's award the undecided/third party vote in each state proportionally, based on the current average levels of support for both candidates. For instance, the Massachusetts average now has Obama leading, 52 to 36.2 percent. If we adjust that proportionally, Obama ends up with 58.96 percent to McCain's 41.04 percent. Do this for all 50 states, and Obama ends up with 51.98 percent of the national popular vote, with McCain at 48.02 percent.

This doesn't exactly look like a landslide, and yet in all but four states, Obama's final number would be an improvement—substantial in many cases—over Kerry's '04 performance. In some cases, this means trimming 30-point Kerry deficits in dark red states to 20 or 15 points, a nice accomplishment that won't change the bottom line in those states. But in other cases, it means cutting 15-point Kerry losses in half (or more) and moving within theoretical striking distance in a state. What's striking about this data is that just about all of the improvement in individual states from '04 is on the Democratic side. McCain may end up holding on to the traditional red states that now seem in doubt, but he's not threatening in any of the traditional blue states.

This all shows us two things. For one, even if Obama's surprising standing in red states endures through November, it won't mean he's a shoe-in on Election Day. If he comes close without flipping any of them over, McCain would still have a chance in the Electoral College and Obama would not automatically score a runaway victory in the national popular vote. In that sense, the current national polls that show a tight race are spot on.

But the individual state polls that seem so rosy for Obama aren't misleading, either, in the sense that they reflect the potential for an Obama landslide. Obama is only flirting with the possibility now—his prospects may fade by Election Day—but he has the potential to win over a handful of states the other party has long counted on winning. McCain doesn't.

In other words, the race really is close, and McCain has the potential to win. But only Obama has the potential to win big.

Basically, as Gallup notes, the more you make, the more optimistic you are right now. The less you make, the more pessimistic.

Where would most of New York City fall along this pessimism-optimism divide? The city's median household income, according to the most recent Census estimates, was roughly $46,000 (in 2006 dollars). We're leaning toward pessimistic.

A new Gallup poll finds that "only three candidates would be acceptable to a majority of Republicans." The are, in order: Giuliani with 73%, Condoleezza Rice with 68% and John McCain with 55%.

Read the whole summary here.

-- Josh Benson

What these surveys suggest is that eight months into Mr. Bush’s Presidency, he was already wearing thin his welcome with the American people. This was at a time when his relations with Congress were tense and the Democrats had regained control of the Senate. Despite Mr. Bush’s success with his tax-cut bill, he was in a public fight over stem-cell research, followed by education, immigration and the question of the Social Security “lockbox.” And he was simultaneously pressing for a retrogressive domestic agenda.

After the shocking assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Zogby showed Mr. Bush’s popularity soaring to 82 percent positive and only 17 percent negative. The Washington Post–Gallup poll had Mr. Bush’s approval rating even higher. From then on—really until this year—Mr. Bush maintained a plus rating with the American people, tied almost solely to 9/11.

Like “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, whose approval ratings were at their lowest ebb on 9/10, Mr. Bush was elevated to political nobility by the kamikazes of Osama bin Laden.

His lackluster poll numbers and the unpopularity of his agenda were forgotten or put aside as the U.S. mourned and prepared its response to the attacks.

The image of Mr. Bush fighting back—something, by the way, which any American President would have had to have done under the same circumstances or he certainly would have faced impeachment—allowed him to catapult over the failures of his first eight months.

He was able to push forward an agenda that, under other conditions, might have been rejected as reactionary. Indeed, in 2002, despite a threadbare domestic record, Mr. Bush was able to increase Republican margins in that year’s midterm Congressional elections. In 2003, of course, he launched his war on Iraq, despite the outright opposition of the United Nations and some of our allies, his inability to find weapons of mass destruction and his lack of success in connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. This led to the looting and mayhem that followed Saddam’s downfall, and the insurgency that sprung up thereafter.

Then, in 2004, he won the narrowest re-election race in years. That victory owed much to Karl Rove’s strategy of relentlessly appealing to fears related to 9/11. By framing the campaign in such a way, Mr. Bush was able to glide past a first-term record that was actually hurting him among the electorate. His failures and controversial initiatives accounted for John Kerry’s close finish.

Republican manipulation of 9/11 blinded voters to the fact that Mr. Bush turned Bill Clinton’s surplus into a massive debt, gutted environmental regulations, enacted an unwieldy Medicare prescription bill, ducked national health insurance, weakened mine-safety regulations, reduced scientific research funding, ended trust-busting and widened American poverty.

His foreign-policy record was hardly better, renowned mainly for its repudiation of global treaties that the U.S. had once supported and its shift toward unilateralism, which frayed relations with all of our allies around the planet.

Today, Mr. Bush is in deep trouble in the polls. He has gone downhill since February 2005, when his favorability rating last stood above 50 percent, one month into his second term. His positive numbers now hover from 34 to 40 percent. His collapse follows the disasters he helped to create, including the increasingly vicious Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the botching of Katrina relief, the Social Security and Medicare calamities, the controversial Dubai port deal and others. But what must be especially disheartening for him is that his ratings even in his own party are now 10 to 15 percent lower than his previous level of support. Those low ratings have given Democrats hope of winning control of Capitol Hill this November.

All of this suggests that Mr. Bush is returning to what he was always viewed as before the 9/11 catastrophe—namely, a mediocrity. George Bush, without Osama bin Laden, would almost certainly not have been re-elected President in 2004.

With the passage of almost five years since 9/11, and the calming of emotions from that terrible day, the American people are beginning to view the Bush Presidency for what it really has always been: one of the most inept and feckless since that of Millard Fillmore.

Drudge has numbers from the new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll:

"CNNGALLUP found that 51 percent say they definitely won't vote for Clinton (D-N.Y.) in 2008, another 32 percent might consider it, and only 16 percent vow to back her. That means committed anti-Hillary voters outnumber pro-Hillary voters by 3-1. The poll suggests she can forget about crossover votes - 90 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of conservatives say there's no way they'd back her."

NOTE: Yes, this was in The Post this morning. Wednesday mornings are a little rough around here. Sorry.