Good Monday morning. The Redskins are for real, with wins over the Eagles and the Cowboys under their belts. That's good for Republicans; if the 4-1 'Skins win their final home game before an election, the incumbent party will keep the White House. It's been that way ever since 1936, with just one exception: In 2004, Washington lost to Green Bay, which was supposed to portend a John Kerry win. Here's what Washington is watching today:

-- The Senate will hold a brief pro forma session this morning to prevent President Bush from making any recess appointments. The House is not in session, but California Rep. Henry Waxman will kick off Democratic promises to hold hearings on the recent economic crisis today. Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has a hearing planned on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy this morning. President Bush is at a fundraiser for Congressional Republicans in San Antonio, while Vice President Cheney is in New Orleans raising money for freshman Rep. Steve Scalise.

-- About four weeks to go in the race for the White House and Barack Obama has opened up a clear lead over John McCain. Obama has spent most of the general election battle leading by a few points, though nothing statistically significant. Over the past week and a half, that's changed, largely thanks to the economic roller coaster on Wall Street. McCain's campaign is out of Michigan, they admitted Friday, and the Republican finds himself playing defense much more than offense.

-- Consider the electoral map McCain is facing today. He's virtually ceded one state President Bush won in 2004, as no one thinks Iowa is truly competitive. Another Bush '04 state, New Mexico, is guaranteed to be a serious fight (Obama leads the latest RCP New Mexico Average by seven). And the states both campaigns are most focused on include Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida (Check out our cool electoral college map). What do those states have in common? They all voted for President Bush. Twice.

-- Play out the scenario and things look bad for McCain. Obama has leads in states that add up to 264 electoral votes. Of the eight tossup states, if Obama wins only Nevada, the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives after a 269-269 tie. If Obama wins any other state on the list, he wins the election. McCain's only chance of winning is to run the table. The only trouble is, he only leads the latest RCP Averages in two -- Missouri and Indiana -- while Obama sports leads as small as one-half of one point, in North Carolina, and as big as three points, in Ohio and Florida.

-- Over the weekend, both candidates sought to make the race more about Charles Keating and William Ayers than they did about themselves. GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin took after Obama during several fundraisers yesterday, suggesting he is "palling around" with terrorists. That's a reference to Ayers, the Chicago professor who is an unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground and who held an early meet-and-greet for Obama's first campaign for state senate. Obama was about eight years old when the Weathermen were planting bombs, but the connection is more about associating the Illinois senator with someone different. Ayers is white, but even the Associated Press saw racial undertones in Palin's attacks. Intended that way or not, McCain is trying to paint Obama as different.

-- Obama, meanwhile, will remind voters that McCain is no picture of purity either. The maverick reformer got that way after he was swept up in the Keating Five scandal in the late 1980s, the only Republican along with four Democrats to be tagged by the Ethics Committee. Obama will launch a website detailing McCain's involvement in the scandal, Politico's Mike Allen writes today. The rush to deregulation that caused the Savings and Loan scandals, the Obama campaign will argue, is part of what caused today's credit crisis. Forget whether McCain and John Glenn should have been included among the Five to begin with, an admonishment from the Ethics Committee is a lot easier to explain to voters than the reasons why it wasn't fair.

-- McCain backed into an electoral corner. Both candidates questioning the others' character and integrity. That could all but guarantee that Tuesday's debate in Nashville will be much livelier than the first meeting between Obama and McCain, which some called a snoozer. The town hall format should be good for McCain, the Wall Street Journal's Amy Chozick writes, and the Arizona senator is preparing especially hard at his home in Sedona, per the Washington Post's Abramowitz and Bacon. But Obama is practicing too, at a resort in North Carolina. It's been a long time since a debate made any actual news, but we have hope for Tuesday.

-- Harbinger Of The Day: Republicans, looking for new electoral votes after pulling out of Michigan, suggest they have a shot in Maine's Second Congressional District, where they could pick up a single electoral vote. But two days after they advanced that theory to explain away the Michigan decision, Palin showed up yesterday at a rally in Omaha, Nebraska, the most heavily-Democratic part of the other state in which electoral votes are allocated by district rather than by a winner-take-all system. Palin said it was her call to hold the rally, reports CBS's Scott Conroy, but it still can't be comforting to the GOP to have Palin spend time in what should be easily Republican territory.

-- Today On The Trail: McCain will briefly interrupt debate prep to rally at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, while Obama is sticking to the preparations. Palin has rallies in Clearwater and Estero, Florida, while Joe Biden is off the trail today, following the untimely passing of his mother-in-law yesterday.