Breaking news: The Supreme Court may hear arguments on whether or not Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible for the presidency. Can another 5-4 heartbreak be far behind?

I'm seeing a lot of handwringing over the USAToday/Gallup poll that has McCain up 54%-44% over Obama, and I wanted to say just a little bit about it. First, it must be agreed that this is an ugly-looking poll. It makes me sick to see it. We should all be glad the election is 57 days away and not tomorrow.

But just keep in mind:

* it's one poll;
* it's a weekend poll, which are usually significantly less reliable;
* it's a poll taken immediately following the convention, likely to be McCain's high-water polling mark;
* it uses a "likely voter" screen, which means it alters the data according to a hypothesis about who Gallup thinks is likely to vote. These assumptions may undercount young voters and discount new registrations altogether—bad guesses, perhaps, in a year with a huge get-out-the-vote operation on the Dem side and in which it looks like young people might actually show up to vote for once;
* and it's a national poll, which means the numbers don't actually matter, at least not before a 5-4 Supreme Court decision abolishes the Electoral College (just this one time only) so whoever the Republican is can be president.

The raw numbers, the registered voter numbers, are a much more sanguine 50%-46%—and I'd guess that that's about where the race stands after the GOP had a very good week of press and Obama has been absent from anything but lies and smears, give or take a margin of error. It's higher than I'd hoped, but not worse than I'd feared.

The latest Rasmussen tracking poll has it at one point, the Gallup tracking at three.

Wait a few days, wait even until next week, to get a sense of where things stand post-convention-bumps. And ignore the polls altogether, if you can; all this poll means—all it could ever mean, even if the 54-44 number really does turn out to be an accurate snapshot of the race at this time—is that we still have a lot of work to do. So: let's get to work.

UPDATE: Or wait just a few hours. CNN has the race dead even, 48-48.

LATE UPDATE: Lots of polls have come out since this one, and it looks more and more like an outlier...

It looks like Antonin Scalia just figured out there's only one thing he'll be remembered for:

"I say nonsense," Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. "Get over it. It’s so old by now.

Sure, whatever, my illegal coup completely trashed American democracy—that's so 2000. Via MeFi.

The American Scene lays out the competing moral claims Clinton and Obama make on the Democratic nomination. I like this article because it acknowledges, as many similar articles do not, that the situation is not strictly black and white. The fact that Barack can't get the job done in big states is troubling, the undemocratic nature of the caucuses and the failure of the delegate system to map directly onto the popular vote is problematic, and on and on. Obama clearly has the better of the argument as the winner under the rules, and accordingly he will be almost certainly be the nominee however long it takes to get there—but it costs me nothing to concede to the Clintons that, yes, the rules are not holy writ and they are not Objectively Fair and Just. They are merely the rules agreed-upon in advance by all parties involved.

My worry, going forward, is that Clinton can see the writing on the wall and will conclude that her only chance for the nomination is to turn her ship around and fly, guns blazing, at the DNC itself. Clinton's last card is a big one, a kind of doomsday device—she can attack the delegate system and the rules themselves, claiming that various features of the primary have perverted the actual will of Democratic voters for reasons X, Y, and Z. From a procedural standpoint, this is nonsense, and from a partisan standpoint it is a total disaster, because if the delegate system is delegitimized in the eyes of Clinton supporters there's no way to declare Obama the winner in a way they will accept and therefore no way to bring the party back together again afterwards. But it remains, nonetheless, a card she can play.

(As I wrote the other night, this total disaster scenario may even be a feature, not a bug; see possibility #3 in this comment thread.)

My point in writing all this is simply to acknowledge that, regardless of its relative lack of merit, Clinton will still have an argument that she should get the nomination over Obama even if she loses the race by every conceivable metric (as it appears she will)—and, worse, such an argument could actually take root in a party still smarting from the injustice of the 2000 election, with a press that is anxious to find some way for the Democrats to improbably let this gift-wrapped election roll, Buckneresque, right through their legs.

Obama supporters need to be ready to counter this.