The new CBS News/New York Times poll gives Barack Obama a 6 point national lead over John McCain but if NYTimes' Adam Nagourney is to be believed, it's doom for Barack Obama, doom I tell ya, with his frontpage headline blaring "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race."

The Obama campaign's rapid response team wasted no time in pushing back against this framing with a memo that hit the Times on several points including:

[...] c) Obama's 31% favorable rating among white voters is virtually identical to McCain's, which is at 34%.

d) By a 2 to 1 margin over McCain, white voters are more likely to say that Obama would improve America's image in the world

e) "Racial dissension" around Mrs. Obama's 24% favorable rating among whites is an extremely odd description given that Mrs. McCain's favorable rating among white voters is 20%.

f) Enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy is roughly 2.5 times higher among white voters than is enthusiasm for McCain's. [...]

As Nagourney points out in his response to the Obama campaign, much of the data contained in the campaign's memo wasn't covered in depth by Nagourney in his article, but even looking at the results that he did cite, he could have chosen a far different line of argument, such as, say: "John McCain Unable To Define Himself" or the more to the point "John McCain is Screwed."

Digging into Nagourney's piece we find that among Hispanic voters, McCain, despite attempts at outreach to the community, is still paying a steep price for the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of his party.

After a Democratic primary season in which Mr. Obama had difficulty competing for Hispanic votes against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama leads Mr. McCain among Hispanic voters in the likely general election matchup by 62 to 23 percent. Mr. Obama is viewed favorably by more than half of Hispanic Americans, compared with Mr. McCain, whose favorability rating is just under one-quarter. By significant margins, these voters believe that Mr. Obama will do a better job of dealing with immigration; Mr. McCain has been trying to distance himself from Republicans who have advocated a tough policy on permitting illegal immigrants to stay in the country.

Also, this doozy was buried, literally, in the final paragraph:

The poll found that Mr. McCain is yoked to the legacy of President Bush -- majorities believe that Mr. McCain, as president, would continue Mr. Bush's policies in Iraq and on the economy. Mr. Bush's approval rating on the economy is as low as it has been in his presidency, 20 percent; and even while there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think the war is going well, there has been no change in the significantly large number of people who think it was a mistake to have invaded.

How is the McCain campaign handling the reality that the McCain = Bush meme has taken root? Conference calls of the absurd:

On a conference call just now with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann compared Barack Obama's insistence on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to Bush's insistence that we were winning even as things went badly for years.

"I think the American people have had enough of inflexibility and stubbornness in national security policy," Scheunemann said. When asked later by the Huffington Post's Sam Stein whether the campaign was disparaging President Bush, Scheunemann dug in: "We cannot afford to replace one administration that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with a candidate that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq."

Forget "McSame." The candidate who would really continue Bush's policies is "BushBama."