The air game is flashier, but the ground game wins games

(Because we don't use enough sports metaphors around here at p3.)

It's not a very well-kept secret that Oregon isn't a battle-ground state this fall.

In Oregon, "the McCain campaign is being run by guys with cellphones," [Pacific University prof Jim] Moore says. "That's a real surprise to me." He says the campaign has no Oregon director, and that all of its 11 designated field offices, listed as such on its website in late September, actually are existing Republican Party offices. McCain's Oregon campaign is being run out of its West Regional Headquarters in Nevada, Moore says.

But at least the Oregon GOP is making an effort.

Meanwhile, 538.com has some astonishing pictures of McCain field offices the contested states of Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina--and even the Senator's home state of Arizona. In some offices one or two lone phone dialers sit in an otherwise-empty suite of rooms making Get Out The Vote calls. Others stand empty--all that's missing is tumbleweeds or a sun-bleached ox skull beside a dead tree and a poisoned water-hole.

You feel sorry for the volunteers, abandoned by a campaign that they haven't yet abandoned themselves. (Doesn't look like the basis for a 50-state GOP presence after the election, win or lose, either. Something to consider if your state GOP approaches you about 2010.)

But it's hard to sympathize with the McCain campaign, who are spending the last of their cash on the flash of TV-radio ads that have no hope of adding to their election numbers without the fundamentals of those unmanned phones getting people to the polling places on Tuesday. It's just bass-ackwards strategy.

Long-time p3 correspondent and political nabob Doctor Beyond sent me this comment after seeing the 538.com pictures:

I always assumed that I would live to see an African-American or woman as president. I never thought I'd live to see a Democratic presidential campaign outspend and out organize a Republican presidential campaign. Take me, Jesus.

Yup.