White House hopeful Barack Obama professes no anxiety about polls that show his longstanding lead evaporating, but senior Democrats are rattled at the Republicans' Sarah Palin-inspired charge.
Since his shock decision a fortnight ago to select the little-known Alaska governor as his running mate, John McCain has risen steadily in opinion surveys on the back of a re-energized conservative base.
Obama, however, appears confident that the Palin surge will fade as her novelty value wears off, as the media digs deeper into her record, and as voters reappraise which ticket would best bring change to a fretful nation.
"I don't spend a lot of time looking at polls because a year ago today, I was down 20," he said Wednesday in Norfolk, Virginia, referring to his long-odds bid to wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton.
"So if I spent my time worrying about polls, I'd be in big trouble. Right now it is neck and neck and you know what, that's probably how it was going to be inevitably," the Democrat added.
"Because you have to earn the presidency, it's not a cakewalk," he said.
"This is a big decision for people and the country is wrestling with some of its own contradictions and where we need to go, and that's going to take some time for the voters to sort things out."
Since Palin signed on, pollsters at Gallup report a big swing by white women and independent voters to the Republican ticket. Their latest daily tracking poll Wednesday had McCain on 48 percent to Obama's 43.
An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll Tuesday showed a statistical dead heat with Obama on 47 percent to McCain's 46 percent, down from a three-point edge for the Democrat last month and a six-point lead in July.
McCain is competitive despite other polls that suggest four-fifths of voters believe the nation is on the wrong track after eight years under President George W. Bush, years that have seen war in Iraq and the economy slide.
The Obama campaign is urging its jittery supporters to stay calm, pointing to his poll lead in crucial battleground states and to a fired-up base of Democratic volunteers poised to get out the vote nationwide.
But the Palin effect appears to be reverberating in some of those pivotal states. A CNN-Time-Opinion Research Corp. poll Wednesday had Obama down five points in Missouri and four points in Virginia.
While he was up by six in New Hampshire, Obama's lead of four points in Michigan appeared uncomfortably small given how hard he has pressed a message of economic change at rallies in that rust-belt state just this week.
And the shift in national perceptions is stoking alarm among some Democrats about the response to McCain's Palin bounce, as Obama labors to craft a strategy to take on the Republicans' new star from the north.
"They seem to be intimidated by the Palin pick. They seem to be intimidated by how the Republicans are coming at them on change," Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff to president Bill Clinton, told the New York Observer.
"My concern is that I see them as totally reactive right now as opposed to getting out there on their own and saying what the hell they are about," said Panetta, who is advising the Obama campaign.
"And you cannot win if you are constantly on defense."
David Bonior, a former Michigan congressman who managed John Edwards' failed shot at the Democratic nomination, said in the Los Angeles Times that the latest poll findings were a "real concern."
"We can't lose white women and expect to do well in this race," he said.
In that analysis, Obama needs to deploy the Democrats' big guns -- the Clintons -- to take the fight back to Palin among white working-class voters.
He was due to have a fence-mending lunch with Bill Clinton in New York Thursday after months of mutual sniping during the campaign for the Democratic nomination.
Hillary Clinton, campaigning this week in Florida for Obama, did not go on the offensive against Palin and instead stuck to the issues of most concern to struggling voters such as the economy, healthcare and education.
Obama himself is sticking to his guns on the issues while hurling colorful digs at the McCain-Palin combine, saying their own promise of change after two terms of Republican hegemony under Bush is like applying "lipstick on a pig."
"We are going to hammer away at the fact that the stakes in this election are too high," he said in Norfolk, battling back against Republican charges of anti-Palin "sexism" over the pig jibe.
