A Rasmussen Reports daily poll carried out Friday and published Saturday put McCain of Arizona, the Republican putative presidential nominee, at 43 percent, tied with Obama of Illinois, his Democratic opponent. It was the first time McCain had pulled even since Obama became the undisputed Democratic nominee with the withdrawal from the race of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., on June 3, Rasmussen said.

"It remains to be seen whether this recent tightening of the race reflects real change or is merely statistical noise," the Rasmussen pollsters cautioned.

But they also said their sampling of 1,000 potential voters with an error margin of plus or minus 2 percentage points now showed McCain enjoyed a favorable-unfavorable advantage of 56 percent to 41 percent, compared with weaker figures of 44 percent to 41 percent for Obama.

The results of a Newsweek poll released Friday showed more sobering news for Obama. It kept him in the lead, but only by 3 points -- 44 percent to 41 percent. This marked a dramatic 12-point cut in the advantage Obama enjoyed in the previous Newsweek poll a month earlier, when he led McCain by a crushing 51 percent to 36 percent.

The Newsweek survey also showed McCain leading Obama far more strongly among swing voters by a margin of 41 percent to 36 percent, a complete turnaround from the June results, which gave Obama a double-digit decisive lead in this crucial voting group by 48 percent to 36 percent.

It is, of course, possible that the Rasmussen and Newsweek polls are both inaccurate: The June Newsweek results gave Obama a far stronger lead than most other polls, which have shown Obama enjoying a consistent 6-point lead over the past month with remarkable unanimity. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg polls reflected a similar lopsided margin for Obama.

And even if the Rasmussen and Newsweek results are accurate, and come to be supported by other polling data, clearly, the race is still young, with much room for reversals of fortune and strong opportunities for both candidates.

In most recent presidential elections over the past generation, the outcome of the race -- whether it was decisively won, or whether it would prove to be a cliffhanger -- only crystallized after both major candidates had held their nominating conventions. There has been no unanticipated last-minute surge since Republican challenger Ronald Reagan pulled far ahead of incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 race. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both saw their chances evaporate in massive GOP media offensives launched right after what had appeared to be successful Democratic conventions in 1988 and 2004. And they never came close in the final two-month stretch of the race to making up that lost ground.

McCain's surge defies Conventional Wisdom in other respects. While the mainstream media generally have been respectful of him, they have trended more toward Obama. And Obama has gone into overdrive to act centrist and reassuring. Newsweek's writers, in fact, suggested this had backfired on him.

Core Democrats were being turned off as Obama appeared to be much more a typical cynical politician, they suggested. In fact, this should have come as no surprise as he, like Clinton, is a graduate of the tough, grass-roots, take-no-prisoners Democratic Party machine in Chicago and Illinois. But the Newsweek writers also noted Obama's slippage among key swing independents also was a consequence of this clear attempt to woo them.

In previous columns we have maintained that, contrary to most mainstream media Conventional Wisdom, McCain has been scoring major points with the public with his energy proposals.

Obama and fellow Democrats have sneered at McCain's proposals to dramatically boost offshore oil drilling and coal mining within the United States, arguing it will take seven years for the expansion of oil drilling to have a significant impact.

This, in fact, is a wild oversimplification and exaggeration. And Obama's own energy proposals of solving the problems of soaring oil import costs and the balance-of-payments pressure on the U.S. economy by a crash program of expanding alternative and renewable energy resources verges on science fiction.

Newsweek reported its own polling data suggested that suspicion over Obama's true religious identity had become remarkably widespread, with 26 percent of respondents saying they believed he had been sworn in to the U.S. Senate on the Koran -- he wasn't. And no less than 39 percent told the magazine they believed Obama had attended an Islamic school in Indonesia as a boy.

What is striking here is that the Obama campaign, which is vastly better funded than McCain's and enjoys the reputation of being vastly better run, recognized the danger in these allegations and has focused on refuting them. It is certainly getting that message out: The problem revealed by the latest polling data is that so far, all too many people are just refusing to believe what the Obama campaign says.

In a year when most Republicans as well as all Democrats accept the likelihood that the Dems will sweep both houses of Congress, Obama has failed to land a pre-emptive knockout blow on a GOP old-timer in his 70s, with a potentially weak base in his own party.

As we predicted months ago in these columns, Obama is not coasting home against an isolated GOP maverick; he is up against a tough old U.S. Navy fighter pilot and Top Gun who is out there swinging and punching hard. This race is still young and wide open.