Unless Republicans have a really good October surprise planned, an illegitimate Obama child for instance, this election is over for John McCain.

According to Real Clear Politics, every state that is not a solid McCain or Obama state, with the exceptions of Georgia and Indiana, is leaning Barack Obama by an average of about 4.8 points.

McCain also received deafening blows in percentage points in CNN’s polls after the debate, with Obama beating McCain in most of the questions by about 20 points, even in the category of leadership.

Today new evidence linking Obama to extremist William Ayers was released, but even that was not enough to stop Obama’s momentum. I can only hope the Republicans come up with something better than that, because this race is becoming uncompetitive very quickly.

As John King said on CNN after the debate, “If the numbers stay the same, game over . . . If you think people give a damn about the William Ayers thing, they don’t.”

David Gergen continued to stick to his guns, saying there may be a hidden Bradley effect in Obama’s numbers and citing the Stanford study that found Obama’s race may cost him as much as 6 points at the polls. Even if this were true, if John McCain does not bring his A game to the final debate next week, Obama’s popularity will continue to increase, putting him outside of the 6 point margin of racism.

Barack Obama still evaded questions, including his refusal to explain how much he would fine small businesses for not giving their workers a healthcare option, but overall, I thought his performance tonight was much better than his performance at the last debate. However, John McCain’s performance remained stagnant.

The Ohio voters in CNN’s undecided focus group agreed. While I would argue that data from the 32 Ohioans should not be taken too seriously, as 32 people is not very representative of Ohio’s total population, Barack Obama’s approval rating went up among the voters by 4 percent while John McCain’s remained the same.

So rather than talk about what Barack Obama did right, as his movement does not need anymore help, I’ve decided to devote the rest of this shorter, midterm week blog to the key mistakes John McCain made tonight and will have to rectify before next Wednesday’s debate.

ONE: I was glad to see McCain actually propose a solution to the economy and say that the new U.S. financial advisor would have to be someone Americans already know and trust, so thank you Sen. McCain for that. I thought revealing his plan to buy up bad mortgages was mistake that could cost him the election, though.

First of all, it’s unfortunate that people who will lose their homes will be without a place to live, however, it’s important to remember that the decision to buy a house outside of their means was theirs alone. We should not have to pay for their mistakes. I know many people think the government should bail out Main St. as well as Wall St., but I disagree. Peer pressure and advertising is not an excuse for making a bad decision. A better version of this plan would be to set up criteria for deciding whether people qualify to have their house bought by the government at the current value. One of the criterions should be, “Could they have afforded the house in the first place had the economy not went south?”

Not only do I feel this policy proposal was a mistake because of my ideology, strategically, it was a mistake because McCain can no longer criticize Obama for his new spending plans. It’s great that McCain is going to initiate a spending freeze, but the deficit is not going to decrease if the governments starts buying up all the bad house mortgages in America. Moving on.

TWO: A town hall participant asks how the “bailout” is going to benefit the average person. Instead of answering the question, McCain insults the man, who just happened to be black, saying, “First of all it’s not a bailout.” He continued to insult him by condescendingly saying that he and most other Americans probably did not know what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were before last week. Maybe the man did not, and I doubt the average American did either, but that’s not something you say out loud, and especially not to someone who is black! He also mentioned his campaign suspension in his so-called answer. Haven’t his advisors told him that move went over poorly?

THREE: McCain’s reference to his bipartisanship, especially the McCain-Feingold act and his work with Joe Lieberman, was effective the first time he mentioned it. But then, he kept repeating it for every answer and it got old. I understand McCain’s strategy is to repeat things enough times so that they stick in voters’ minds, but repeating lines that many times in one debate is simply annoying. Repeat the statements throughout a period of days or debates instead. I stop listening when you start to repeat yourself, and I bet I’m not the only one.

P.S. The more you say that you have successfully worked across party lines and that you have also taken on your party’s leadership, the more I am confused. So, basically your party doesn’t like you, and thus you are forced to persuade Democrats to adopt your ideas?

FOUR: McCain apparently thinks we can conquer healthcare reform, energy independence and reform of entitlement programs all at one time. Can I just say, what the heck was McCain thinking when he said that? This was another opportunity he missed to remind voters that Barack Obama is naïve and too ambitious. Yet, McCain was the one who came off looking out of touch with reality after this question, and Barack Obama actually made sense. When asked the right way, Obama finally told voters where his priorities lied in numerical order. Plus 10 points on the Obama scale. And in case you missed it, energy independence was at the top of his list.

FIVE:John and Cindy McCain talk to a few town hall participants and quickly leave after the major networks switch to their post debate analysis sessions. Barack and Michelle Obama take the time to shake hands with all 80 of the participants and even have quick conversations with them. The participants were supposedly undecided before the debate. No doubt many of them decided to vote Obama afterwards. Nice job, John.

In other news, Obama also exceeded McCain in the number of times he used the word “fundamental” in the debate, 6 times, compared with McCain’s four times, for anyone else who is keeping track.