New polls in Minnesota and Ohio show widening leads for Barack Obama. The lead is 18 points for Obama according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and seven points for Obama in Ohio according to the Columbus Post Dispatch. Further, Barack Obama thinks he can take North Carolina, a state McCain won’t be able to pay much attention to, what with his diddiculties in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And Ken Burns is warning that McCain is no longer a darling of New Hampshire. The electoral college is starting to swing Obama’s way.

The story is curiouser and curiouser in Michigan, a state McCain has abandoned, with McCain courting some severe radicals there. No, G. Gordon Liddy is not the only ex-con and radical who McCain counts as a friend. As a disclamor, my own experience with Liddy, a claim to fame of sorts, is that Tucker Carlson, right before I appeared on his show, called Liddy a “great man.” As I’ve noted before, calling a convicted criminal who helped screw up our democratic processes a hero is, I suppose, the Republican way. As the Michigan Democratic Party notes, John McCain finds comfort around more radicals than just G. Gordon Liddy. I’ll agree that Barack Obama doesn’t need to link John McCain to such radicals as John Rakolta, who bankrolled ads that compared Democrats to Hitler, or racist Terry Nelson, or even Ku Klux Klan defender Richard Quinn. No, we don’t even need to use John Hagee or G. Gordon Liddy in ads designed to show just how enamored John McCain is of radical Americans whose goals are so un-American. Barack Obama does not need to go relentlessly negative, not even to bring Charles Keating, another ex-con who is a friend of John McCain, into attack ads.

Indeed, Barack Obama is courting voters in Virginia who are having very big problems wrapping themselves around the notion of voting for a black man. Perhaps this will be the shining moment in this campaign. In the coal mining hollows of Virginia, hard by the Tennessee and West Virginia borders, Democrats are having a hard time convincing their fellows, union members and Democrats for life, into voting for the first black candidate for President. Hey, those counties of aren’t exactly the most liberal area as concerns race, and the Obama campaign would be well within its strategic sanity to just write them off. they are not. Indeed, they are engaging the people there on the topic of race. That’s bold. Here’s a little of what the head of the local union, Cecil E. Roberts, has to say to his workers, from the LA Times:

Often, union officials show up at coal mine bathhouses during shift changes, when dozens of workers are getting dressed, to make the case for Obama.

The union portrays him as a friend of the coal industry, and argues that Obama is culturally in step with local workers. Union literature tells them that the Democratic nominee supports gun rights, and the literature attacks McCain for opposing legislation that would make union organizing easier.

“Barack Obama Won’t Take Away Your Gun,” says one flier. “But John McCain Will Take Away Your Union.”

A new 18-minute video that the union is distributing in coal states features Roberts, the union president, talking directly about race as he addresses white workers, many them clad in jeans or denim overalls.

“I could just ignore the fact that Barack Obama is African American,” says Roberts, “but I’m not.”

Roberts challenges the notion that a believing Christian could base a voting decision on a candidate’s ethnicity.

“We go to church, sing our songs, pray, come out and talk about, ‘I can’t be for an African American, because of the color of his skin,’ ” Roberts says in the video. His voice rising, he then scolds the crowd: “Can’t do that if you believe in the Bible.”

The contrast here is to the Republicans in the county, who don’t discuss race with voters, evidently letting the anonymous emails about Obama’s middle name, claiming he is a Muslim, to do the job for them. You can imagine the Republicans winking not unlike Sarah Palin as they make sure the folks get the message, while piously claiming they don’t discuss race. The Obama campaign is more bold, and is exactly what America needs on the issue of race, to bring petty and covert racism into the light so that it might be washed clean by the virtues America should be showing. More than digging for votes in the worst demographic presented to them, the Obama campaign is doing God’s work in raising the issue of race and working to get normal Americans to confront it.

One campaign, the Palin/McCain campaign, is courting ex-cons and radicals, many of whom have racist paths. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, seeks to educate people beyond the racisms they didn’t know they felt. The morality of these two campaigns is quite clear. As Sarah Palin falsely accuses Barack Obama of hanging with radicals, McCain himself is picking up checks and votes from some of the ugliest radicals in this country, people who likely applauded when Rove led that ugly campaign against McCain in South Carolina in 2000. The contrast is stark and the conclusion is unmistakeable that the best candidate for President in a moral America is Barack Obama.