I believe that somebody up north already made this point. Oh yeah, it was me!

Though the real election is nine months away, Sen. Barack Obama would fare slightly better than Sen. Hillary Clinton in a head to head match-up with Sen. John McCain if the general election were held today, a new TIME poll reveals.

Obama captured 48% of the vote in the theoretical match-up against McCain's 41%, the TIME poll reported, while Clinton and McCain would deadlock at 46% of the vote each. Put another way, McCain looks at the moment to have a narrowly better chance of beating the New York Senator than he does the relative newcomer from Illinois.

The difference, says Mark Schulman, CEO of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll for TIME, is that "independents tilt toward McCain when he is matched up against Clinton But they tilt toward Obama when he is matched up against the Illinois Senator." Independents, added Schulman, "are a key battleground."

I received some negative blowback when I made this point on Thursday, but that certainly will not deter me from stating this obvious truth.

Independants are indeed the key to winning this campaign, and what they want is somebody who is going to shake things up. They want a new approach to the job of President, not necessarily a new gender doing it the same old way.

Somebody made the point that we should not just select our nominee using electability as our yardstick, and I agree. But if you have two candidates that seem very similar, and whose policies are relatively close, then electability is a good last litmus test to apply before you make your final decision.

The Republicans have been planning to run against Hillary for many years. If you remember back before the campaigns even started the pundits were all saying it would be Hillary versus McCain.

Do you think electability was not a factor in the Republican choice of John McCain? Most conservatives hate the guy!

But they are terrified to run against Obama. Oh sure they are going to have some tricks up their sleeves to use, he is a Muslim, he has a history of drug use, he is a black dude, but none of it will have the affect of stealing his support. It may further convince those who would never have supported him anyway, but not the ones who see him as above all of the old political tricks of yesteryear. (Don't forget that when Obama ran for the Senate the best the Republicans could come up with to defeat him was to recruit Alan Keyes, a black man, to campaign against him. Too bad for them that Alan Keyes is nuts!)

If Obama stays above the level of mudslinging he will prove to be unstoppable.

And that is simply a fact.