Worth reading: Atlantic magazine's three-part pre-election issue, now on the newsstands and online.

The fun piece (for this Obama supporter, anyway) is Joshua Green's "The Front-Runner's Fall," detailing the chaos in Hillary Clinton's campaign as she slipped behind Barack Obama during the primary season.

In "Reconcilable Differences," Ronald Brownstein assesses Obama and John McCain from the standpoint of which would be most likely to govern - and govern successfully - in a bipartisan way. We're in a period of extreme political partisanship, writes Brownstein. "Its price is a paralyzing inability to confront the most difficult problems facing the nation...." On such issues as immigration, health care, and Iraq, he says, "meaningful progress is virtually impossible without bipartisan support."

The third part of the Atlantic package should be required reading for the Obama campaign: James Fallows' "Rhetorical Questions," an analysis of the televised debates of the primary season. Fallows warns that although McCain isn't a strong debater, he could come out ahead if Obama doesn't sharpen and focus his answers. Fallows also takes what he learned from watching the debates and makes some predictions. Among them: If Obama wins the election, it won't be because voters agree with his policies and programs "but because of ‘his cast of mind'" - how he thinks.

"Every administration," writes Fallows, "turns on the president's cast of mind: Bill Clinton's startling gifts of intelligence and even more startling lack of self-discipline; George W. Bush's toxic combination of decisiveness and lack of curiosity; Ronald Reagan's sunniness and lack of interest in detail."

Fallows worries that Obama could end up like Jimmy Carter, "offering his noble qualities only to be overwhelmed by ignoble reality...." But he ends with this comment from Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: "I see Obama as like this: things will come over the transom and he'll approach them as a thoughtful sophisticate. He'll think."

We could do a whole lot worse.