“The polls are all over the place, it is hard to put too much stock in any of them. However, a week or so ago everyone said the nationals didn’t matter when Obama was down, only the state polls mattered.”

I posted on another thread my theory as to why this is happening: polling services are not weighting their sample sizes properly. One week they oversample Republicans; the next week they oversample Democrats. There is a very good article on this at Wizbang:

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2008/09/19/how-liberal-trolls-are-working-to-get-mccain-elected-president.php#more

The author concludes that despite O’s current “lead” there are some long-term trends that do not bode well for him. Still, I woudn’t describe his campaign as “desperate” IMO – to give a rough estimate, I think he has a slightly better than 50% chance of winning, mainly due to current financial problems being blamed on the Republicans.