Powder Springs, Ga.?

Almost as misguided as his European trip:

ATLANTA -- Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama is scheduled to host a town hall meeting at McEachern High School in Powder Springs at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The town hall meeting, which is open to the public, follows a fundraiser for the Obama campaign in Atlanta Monday night.

To paraphrase Joe Namath's famous Super Bowl III prediction, I guarantee Obama will not win Georgia. I grew up in Lithia Springs, about 10 miles down the road from Powder Springs, and I can tell you that whatever the turnout for this rally, whatever the news reports or polls may say, Obama will not win Georgia.

Just like sending him to Montana for the Fourth of July, this trip to Georgia is a serious blunder by Obama's campaign managers. They are violating a cardinal rule of politics: Hunt where the ducks are.

Every day spent campaigning in states that Obama can't possibly win is a day not spent in Colorado, Nevada, Ohio -- key swing states that might decide the election. In the wake of their primary upset of Clinton, Obama's top staffers are clearly overconfident, and this may prove their undoing.

For crying out loud, two recent polls -- by Rasmussen and Strategic Vision -- show McCain leading by 7%-8% in Florida. Why send Obama to Powder Springs when he should be in Orlando?

The tepidity and incompetence of the McCain campaign may make all this moot, but if somehow the GOP gets its act together before October, the Democrats will look back on these summer months -- when the Obama campaign wasted its resources on European travel and symbolic ventures to hopelessly Red states -- with bitter recriminations.

BTW, Obama's Gallup lead slipped to 4 points Monday. There is no basis for the apparent belief at Obama HQ that the Democrat is an inevitable victor, coasting to a certain triumph, who will pay no price for pointlessly campaigning in unwinnable states.