As rescue workers try to save people in the aftermath of a real hurricane (the kind where people die), investors nervously wonder when we will see the end of the financial hurricane (the kind where some people wish they were dead) currently roaring through the marketplace. In both cases, people were warned. The fact that some did not heed the warnings is a testament to certain qualities within human nature that seem to be immutable.

These qualities are often on display in politics, as a remarkable thing is happening in the race for President of the United States. Barack Obama, who should be a shoe-in, is blowing it, and I think Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin has hit upon the reason...

With top Dems fearing Barack Obama is in a hole, the Obama campaign has made a weird decision. It's going to dig that hole deeper, harder and faster.

No more Mr. Nice Guy, Obama vows. He's going to really start hitting John McCain now. He's going to make voters understand that McCain equals four more years of George Bush.

It's a weird decision because Obama has been doing exactly that for four months. The problem is not that Obama hasn't hit McCain hard enough or linked him to Bush often enough. The problem is that he hasn't done anything else.

How about a new idea? How about putting some meat on the bony promise of "change"?

Bingo. McCain, who should be the more dour, hard-edged candidate, is looking like the optimist with this approach, while Obama looks more mean-spirited and backward-looking. With the choice of Sarah Palin, and a convention that sought to create a new image for the GOP, separate and apart from the Bush-Cheney image, McCain has the Democrats on the defensive, and the polls are beginning to show it.

Look at the RealClearPolitics Electoral Map. It now has McCain with the advantage. Look at the latest polls, and it is hard not to conclude, as Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have done, that McCain and the GOP are gaining ground. John P. Avlon, looking at different numbers, see independents swinging toward McCain.

In the wake of Sarah Palin, John McCain has opened up a 15-point lead among independents, according to a new Gallup Poll — and Barack Obama has a real problem.Since the GOP convention and his selection of the Alaska governor as his running mate, McCain has changed a months-long tie among independents into a 52 to 37 percent advantage. Support for McCain among self-described "conservative Democrats" has jumped 10 points, to 25 percent, signaling the shift among swing voters to McCain. The candidate’s surge tracks the script the campaign had written for the party convention. Joe Lieberman’s sleepy but substantively centrist speech was the preamble to McCain reframing the Republican Party around national security, fiscal conservatism and corruption reform. The result: the elevation of the independent maverick.

Bingo.

Obama, of course, still can win, despite the fact that things right now seem to be moving against him. But he needs to win the debates. Like Reagan in 1980, he must give assurance to voters that he can be trusted with the defense of the nation, and that he is the man to lead us out of the recession we are certainly in or are about to enter. He must hope that McCain looks old and tired. If the opposite happens, if Obama looks too cerebral and academic (and boring), or too uncertain, and McCain looks solid and tough, then it could be curtains for Obama.