Q: Ron Brownstein is the political director of Atlantic Media, including the National Journal. Ron, take us right to the front lines of this election. Where are we in the numbers?

Brownstein: Well, in the numbers we're sort of -- you know, Tammy, after all of this incredible roller coaster of a year -- were just sort of circling back to where we started, a race that is proven largely by discontent over the country's direction and dissatisfaction with President Bush. I mean, we are seeing, for example, in our Allstate/National Journal polls we released this week in Pennsylvania and Minnesota and Wisconsin, or national polls, like NBC/Wall Street Journal, out in the last few days, about 67 to 70 percent of Americans disapprove of President Bush, and somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of those people, depending on the poll, are voting for Barack Obama.

Obama has been able to, over the last few weeks, tamp down concerns, or perhaps address concerns, about his readiness to be president, his experience, his temperament, and thus allowed the election to kind of flow back toward being a referendum on the direction of the country. And that is a very tough environment for John McCain and the Republicans, when you do have this 70 percent disapproval of a president from their own party.

Q: So McCain is reading the same polls you are, and that is why he turned against the president yesterday?

Brownstein: Well I think, clearly there is no way -- the closer that John McCain is linked to George Bush the more trouble he faces. You know, he is doing well by historic standards in separating himself. It's important to remember that we have two elections in sort of the period of modern polling where we had a president step down, so we could look how people felt about the outgoing president and how they vote. In 1988, 11 percent of the people who disapproved of Ronald Reagan on his way out the door voted for George H. W. Bush, his party's candidate; in 2000, 9 percent of the people who disapproved of Bill Clinton on his way out the door voted for his party's candidate, Al Gore -- so on average about 10 percent.

John McCain now is running between 20 and 25 percent of the people who disapprove of Bush. By historic standards it's a great performance, but it's not enough. Because Bush's approval rating is so low and his disapproval rating is so high, McCain has to win an incredible -- roughly a third of the people who disapprove of Bush, and that is asking an awful lot of any candidate.

Q: Let's go to the states. What states can McCain possibly win at this moment?

Brownstein: Well, we could sort of slightly turn it around and say, which ones can he possibly defend? If Barack Obama holds every state that John Kerry won, that would give him 252 Electoral College votes, and I will come back to that in a moment. Two states that Bush won in '04, by common consent are pretty much gone -- that would be Iowa and New Mexico. And that would bring Obama to 264, just six short of the 270 he needs to win, which means that if John McCain cannot win anything that John Kerry won, he has virtually no margin for error. If Obama holds all the Kerry states, adds Iowa and New Mexico, then he would become president by winning any one -- any one -- out of Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri -- and even Nevada would get him to a tie.

So you can see that leaves McCain with virtually no margin for error. He is trailing especially in Virginia and Colorado at this point, and that explains why they are putting so much focus on Pennsylvania, a state that has voted Democratic four straight times, where Obama leads by double digits in, I believe, every poll that has been published in the month of October, including our own just yesterday. But McCain has to bang against that brick wall, because if he cannot take away those 21 Electoral College votes, he leaves himself in a position with essentially no margin for error in the other seven -- or eight, even -- Bush-won states that Obama is seriously contesting for. McCain could win Ohio, Florida, hold North Carolina, hold Indiana, even hold Virginia and still lose in that scenario even by just losing Colorado.

So you can see why it becomes so crucial for him to try to take away some Kerry territory. It's not easy. All the trends that we have talked about -- dissatisfaction with the president, dissatisfaction with the country's direction -- are even more intense in these blue states than they are in the country overall.

Q: So are more people voting against the Bush administration by voting for Obama, or are more of them voting for Obama because they like him and his plans and what he is saying?

Brownstein: Well, I think, you know, that is a really critical question -- how you interpret this. There is no doubt that a lot of people are voting for Obama. More people are voting for Obama than voted for John Kerry as a share of his vote. I was out in Florida on Sunday looking at the ground game and then in Monday in Orlando -- 50,000 people came out to see him. There are a lot of people very excited about Barack Obama, but that last increment of the vote, I believe, is more of a desire to change the country's direction, a rejection of the direction that President Bush assessed to the country over the last eight years than I think it is an affirmative endorsement of Obama, and his challenge will be to move -- if he wins -- will be to move forward in a way that keeps those voters with him.

You know, he has the potential here -- and again, you know it hasn't happened yet -- but he has the potential to be the first president since Ronald Reagan to come in while bringing in a substantial number of House and Senate members from his own party. They would have a lot of momentum behind them, but Tammy, the last three times Democrats have had unified control of the House and Senate -- you know, '64 to '66, the first two Carter years, '77 and '78, and the first two Clinton years, '93 and '94 -- each one of those was punctuated by a very bad first midterm election that turned sharply toward the Republicans. So if he does win and does bring in a lot of Democrats he has got to figure out a way to govern that brings all those voters along who are not necessarily buying into the whole package, at least at the outset.

Q: Both campaigns are talking about taxes. McCain is saying Obama's tax-and-spend, tax-and-spend, and today the Obama campaign launched a tax calculator Web site. I mean, is it all down to taxes now in these final days?

Brownstein: No. I don't think -- you know, there is not one argument. I mean, I think the inconsistency or the zigzag nature of the McCain campaign is partly a reflection of his own kind of impulsive nature as a politician; he is somewhat impetuous, but it is also in many ways a reflection of this larger fact, which is that the natural trajectory of this race, when you have 70 percent presidential disapproval, is to flow toward the out-party, towards, you know, the party that is not in the White House, as sort of the vehicle of voters' discontent. McCain is constantly looking for ways to disrupt that natural kind of reversion to the mean in this election, and so I don't think they're going to stick with any one thing.

I think certainly the size of government -- "he's big government," you know, "I am going to save you, I am going to cut taxes and cut spending" -- is a core of the McCain argument, but I don't think it is the only one. I think we are going to see cultural arguments. We are going to see experience arguments -- anything they can do to try to disrupt what is a very strong current in the direction of the challenging party.

Q: Can you explain to me the "Joe the Plumber" tour? How does it resolve any of those issues and help the McCain campaign?

Brownstein: Well, the "Joe the Plumber" tour reflects the reality -- you know, we are not talking about "Joe the Lawyer" or "Joe the Management Consultant," and that is pretty telling. If there is an opening for John McCain, if there is a weak link in the Obama -- or a weak brick in their, you know, in their fortress -- it is his standing with white working-class voters that has been the question from the beginning.

The biggest question, I think, about Obama politically was, could he win enough white working-class voters to get by? In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton beat him among white voters without a college education 2 to 1, you know, and he was barely able to get by, because he won such a high percentage of black votes and won enough upscale, better-educated whites.

We talked about this last week. Obama could win without performing particularly well among the white working class because he is going to do very well with Hispanics, very well with blacks and very well with better-educated, more affluent -- you know, "Joe the Lawyer," "Joe the Architect" -- McCain's best hope is to drive down Obama's numbers among those working-class white voters. John Kerry only won 38 percent of them. Obama is actually polling higher than that in most polls now, largely because of the economic discontent.

But if there is any opening for McCain in the electorate it's probably with those voters, and I think even more -- as I think I said to you before -- even more with Joe the Plumber's wife than Joe the Plumber, because John McCain is already doing very well with working-class white men; where Obama has really improved from '04 to '08 is among those non-college white women. Bush won 60 percent of them in '04. Obama in most surveys is leading among them today, and that is one of the biggest things that have moved in the electorate between '04 and '08, and that is where McCain has to find a way to go -- and obviously at one point they thought Sarah Palin was going to help them with those voters, and she does have a kind of a cultural connection there. But economic issues are kind of overshadowing that right now, and Obama is getting the votes he needs among those voters.

Q: So based on your analysis, all the zigzagging, as you call it, the McCain campaign has been doing makes complete electoral sense. If that's true, then why are they all shooting each other, or as Politico says today, the "circular firing squad"?

Brownstein: Well I think -- I am not saying it makes complete electoral sense. I am saying it is understandable as more than simply a campaign that doesn't have a good compass. I mean, the reality is that if George Bush's approval rating was 55 percent, John McCain would not have had to pick Sarah Palin. He would not have had to suspend his campaign and come back to Washington.

No doubt McCain's own instincts as a politician play into this, and I think you are seeing over the last month probably the greatest deficiency in sort of his personal temperament, in terms of the qualities that you would want in a president. He is impulsive. He is impetuous. Someone once said to me there is a reason they only had one seat in those fighter planes, you know? I mean, he is someone who, you know, who likes the dramatic gesture, and I think he has not projected the kind of emotional stability and temperament that many voters want in a president.

But having said that, if you had a campaign that was operating, as George H. W. Bush did in '88, with a president leaving office with a 55 or 57 percent approval rating, you don't have to constantly be looking for ways to disrupt the basic trajectory of the race. You know, if you are throwing a Hail Mary pass every 10 days because the race is settling back into a pattern in which you lose, you know, what's the completion percentage on Hail Mary passes? I mean, you know, some of them are going to get intercepted.

So I think that they have made some mistakes. Certainly I think McCain's own instincts are just not systematic enough in many ways for running a presidential campaign. They have not been as organized or as strategic as they should be. But having said all of that, they are operating in an environment in which they have constantly felt that if they allow the race to kind of proceed along a normal trajectory they will lose, and that they have got to find a way to shake it up, and some of those moves have backfired.

Q: Thank you, Ron Brownstein.

Brownstein: Thank you.