Editor's note. If you have thoughts, please drop me a line at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Yesterday we encouraged you to visit two exciting new web sites: www.stopobamainfo.org and www.mccainprolife.org. These two sites are founts of vitally important information about the 2008 presidential election.

In addition to the abortion positions and voting records and statements of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, one of the many other features that will show up on these two sites, created by NRL PAC, will be stories just like this one to keep you up to date.

Polls are suggestive, often likened to a "snapshot." This is true, because where the public seems to be today may turn out to be miles from their final destination. Just ask "Presidents" Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

What we can say in the immediate aftermath of Obama's whirlwind trip aboard can be summarized in two related categories.

#1. For all the adulation a fawning press wrapped him in during his foreign policy trip, Obama does not seem to have benefited much. He remains somewhere between three and six percentage points ahead of McCain in most polls. (Rasmussen has the margin at 2%.) But yesterday USA Today revealed the results of a poll conducted for the newspaper by Gallup which found McCain ahead of Obama by four percentage points among "likely voters" (as opposed to, say, registered voters), a ten-point swing among this category for McCain in just one month.

This inability to "seal the deal" is disconcerting to the Obama campaign and its hordes of media supporters. It's too much like what happened after he accrued a decisive delegate advantage over Senator Hillary Clinton: she pummeled him in the last phase of the primaries.

But it's easy to understand and unintentionally quite funny.

As many have pointed out, this election is a referendum on the unknown Obama. In that sense the picture of Obama is like an old Polaroid instamatic whose photos gradually developed from blurry to opaque to clear. People aren't ready to commit to someone they correctly sense they barely know.

#2. There are some who argue that Obama of late has been getting worse press than McCain. This is hard to swallow on any level. Suffice it to say that this counter-intuitive assessment does not take into account the glorious visuals that basked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in an uncritical glow. Nor does it count the impact of the three networks sending their lead anchors along with him, treating Obama's trip as if it were a coronation for the next President.

What is true is that there is a natural re-evaluation that always tamps down the media's love affair with the front runner (however briefly) which is compounded by the Obama campaign's tight grip on access to the candidate which ticks off reporters.

This means there will be occasions, like yesterday's column by the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, which begin with Cohen asking an unnamed prominent Obama supporter to "Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire." And the very telling answer will be very similar to the one he/she gave to Cohen--not a substantive policy or bill, but Obama's spellbinder of a speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. But these will be blips on the screen, an occasional bump in the road.

It is still impolite in a lot of circles to raise questions about Obama, given that his candidacy is "historic" and "about the future" and about "giving us hope." But day by day, however slowly, doubts are beginning to crop up.

Which is all the more reason why you should be accessing www.stopobamainfo.org and www.mccainprolife.org and passing that information along to your friends, family, and colleagues.