Barack Obama is dropping a little in the polls, and John McCain is rising a little in the polls, which is to say the race for president is now a toss-up.

This will change. A little.

Obama will get a boost out of his convention, set to begin Monday in Denver, because after four days of heavily choreographed events, lots of cheering and people wandering around with giant wedges of cheese on their heads (the delegates from Wisconsin), you are bound to get a boost.

McCain will then get his own boost, as his convention begins in St. Paul the following week. He will have his own choreography, his own cheering and his own cheese-heads, and by then he will presumably have figured out how many homes he owns.

So the race may enter the final weeks as a dead heat. This has a lot of Obama supporters worried. What happened to his big lead? Why isn't he doing better? And maybe he should switch his message.

The Obama campaign has heard this before. If there is one word to describe the Obama top echelon, however, it is unflappable.

In the early months of his campaign, when Hillary Clinton was leading him nationally by more than 30 percentage points, a lot of Obama's big contributors panicked. They demanded that Obama abandon his theme of change because it just wasn't working.

His campaign abandoned nothing, however. Change is what the American people wanted then, and change, his people figure, is what the people want now. They do not want quasi-incumbents like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, who represent the old ways. They want, as Obama says over and over, to "turn the page."

In November 2006, a Gallup Poll showed that 67 percent of Americans were not satisfied "with the way things were going in the United States." By last month, the number had grown to 81 percent.

As Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod told me, "People don't want a replica, they want a remedy."

McCain will be no pushover. He will continue to emphasize that in dangerous times change is risky and that experience is valuable.

He is currently running on the same theme that George W. Bush ran on in 2004: Vote Republican, or die. Vote Republican, or the terrorists will win around the world. Vote Republican, or the terrorists will attack us again.

Some consider this below the belt. Some consider this effective. Some say this is, really, the only hope the Republicans have.

At the very least, it is an interesting dynamic: the desire for change vs. the desire to survive.

We'll see which candidate makes the stronger case.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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