It's not that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah, but. . .

Stanley Fish, writing in the NY Times, puts his finger on why Obama is clobbering McCain in the polls:

I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”

Fish has written the finest piece of poli-literary campaign analysis I have read in a long time.