Obama loses momentum during awful August

By last weekend, the alarm bells were ringing in earnest at Barack Obama's HQ. August had turned into a disaster for the Democratic nominee. At precisely the moment the candidate should have been heading towards his coronation in Denver with quiet confidence, John McCain had seized the initiative. While the young senator from Illinois practised surfing in Hawaii, the elderly McCain was busy in the rhetorical trenches, bellowing "We are all Georgians" and staking out an order of battle for the Third World War.

Obama lost the battle of the headlines on Georgia and a week later he was in another no-win mess at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback evangelical church in Lake Forest, which is heartland Republican terrain in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Obama and McCain each had their solo hour,

answering Warren's questions. McCain won big, with grave, clipped answers on the moral failure of his first marriage, his strategic differences with Ronald Reagan, his opposition to abortion.

What McCain did at Saddleback was bring the important Christian evangelical vote back into his column. A week earlier a friend of mine who's an evangelical from near Spartanburg, South Carolina ('the buckle of the bible belt') called me to say all the evangelicals he knew were going to sit this out because they didn't trust McCain. After Saddleback he phoned back to say how impressed he'd been with McCain and predicted that the radio preacher James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family, might finally endorse the Arizona senator.

Beset with gloomy quotes from leading Democrats about the need for their candidate to ratchet up his game and whack McCain, Obama's camp tried to break the remorseless rhythm of bad headlines. They leaked the news that Obama would name his running-mate as vice-presidential candidate