The Obama campaign sent out another fund-raising e-mail this evening, and it reveals that they think their best bet to stop the McCain-Palin momentum is to loudly insist that the woman who directed state officials to cancel plans for the Bridge to Nowhere did not technically “stop” it. It’s not clear what they would deem “stopping” the project; perhaps they set the bar at going to the architect’s office with a Molotov cocktail.

Campaign manager David Plouffe writes, “Their new ad uses what news organizations are calling ‘naked lies’ to reinvent two politicians.” That “news organization” is a blog post by Michael Crowley of The New Republic, who, while usually a pretty good reporter, is not exactly a dispassionate observer of the nation’s political scene. He responded to the news that pro-Bush voters cared more about ‘character and strength of leadership [than] how a candidate stands on the issues’ by a nearly three-to-one margin, by asking in the pages of the U.K. Guardian, “Is it any wonder American politics is the subject of ridicule and derision around the world?”

Crowley’s disagreement with a contention in a McCain ad is about as surprising as reports that Kim Jong Il leads an unhealthy lifestyle. I suppose we should be glad Obama’s ad isn’t quoting Andrew Sullivan or Keith Olbermann.

Beyond that, Crowley’s wrong; Plain did stop the Bridge to Nowhere. Pork opponents may argue that she didn’t oppose it soon enough, or wish she had sought to cancel the project from the beginning. But in the end, when it became clear that the bridge had become a political liability and that the cost to the state was going to be more than she thought worthwhile, she directed state officials to abandon the project and look at alternatives, bringing efforts to build the bridge to a halt. This process of ceasing efforts is usually referred to as “stopping.” Furthermore, she did more than Obama or Biden ever did on this or any other pork project.

Plouffe continues, “Their ad also claims John McCain has ‘reformed’ Washington — which would undoubtedly come as a surprise to the Washington lobbyists who are running his campaign and the special interests who have been funding it.”

McCain passed McCain-Feingold, which, love it or hate it, was a big, wholesale, far-reaching reform. Obama got an “ethics law” passed that requires lawmakers to stand instead of sit when dining on food provided by lobbyists. (No party-line argument here; the first to hit Obama on the meaninglessness of his reform was Hillary Clinton.)

As for “lobbyists running his campaign,” that charge would carry more weight if Ploufe’s boss, Obama chief strategist David Axelrod, wasn’t the head of a firm that does lobbying.

Axelrod avoids any embarrassing contradiction of Obama’s ‘boo hiss lobbyists’ rhetoric by simply not registering as a lobbyist; we are to believe that in all of his and his staff’s contact with lawmakers, while they go about fulfilling contracts to organize groups “capable of contacting policymakers to advocate for our position,” they never actually urge or suggest the lawmakers to support any particular position. (And the Obama campaign charges that its opponents think the public is stupid.)

Plouffe concludes by asserting that a man who has never held a full-time job for four years and a man who was elected to the Senate in 1972 are “ready to bring the change we need to Washington.” (Apparently, Biden just needed three and a half decades to warm up.)