Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

David Gergen: I, adviser to four Presidents, will lay out What Obama Must Do. The fact is, as long as terrorism is the number one threat, the GOP will win. Ignore the polls that say it's not. Here's my recipe for a game changer (and the reason it's needed is that the McCain campaign has been better at impressing voters): lay out your Cabinet. Now. [And do not click this link].

Gail Collins:

Lieberman used to be a perfectly good senator, but somewhere along the line he began thinking of himself as being above the partisan fray, and it had a terrible effect. When he ran for vice president, he was so busy being pompous that he didn’t notice that Dick Cheney had won the debate. (Of all the negative achievements in Lieberman’s career, it’s hard to top making Cheney the most likable man in the room.)

But wait! There's more!

John Nichols:

This column has been pondering and predicting an Obama-Biden ticket for some time now. That's still the best bet, and now that the announcement is finally imminent, everyone is talking about it.

So, what the heck, let's run the Hillary Clinton scenario one more time...

George Will: Teachers, and by extension, Democrats, are bad for children.

David Broder:  I'm in NH, and guess what? You remember when Chris Matthews left DC and discovered people didn't like Bush? Well, outside the Beltway,

The negative judgments about the economy and the Bush presidency were unequivocal. That makes it Obama's race to lose. But there's still a need for reassurance from him.

Breaking.

Harold Meyerson:

The Democratic Party has a compelling story to tell about African Americans and women -- groups, suffering from huge and historic discrimination, that the party has championed and whose interests it has helped advance. For the white working class, the Democrats can point to discrete pieces of economic legislation (some, like retraining programs for jobs that don't exist, hardly worth pointing to), but they offer no such narrative.

Yet if Obama cannot tell this story, of workers deprived of economic opportunity and security through no fault of their own, cannot convey his empathy with these workers and his outrage over Wall Street discarding them like so many gratuitous spare parts, he probably cannot win the election.