Obama camp keeps eye on ball

While everyone’s attention was focused on Tuesday night’s debate, the well-organized ground game of the well-financed Barack Obama campaign kept on grinding away at its voter registration drives.

Missouri is a target state for Obama -- next door to Illinois, once fairly reliably GOP but recently trending Democratic. Why try to persuade traditional voters to go for your man when you can just sign up thousands of new, already committed ones?

With Missouri’s voter registration deadline expiring at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Obama volunteers were registering new voters virtually around the clock Tuesday. In St. Louis, they had nine “Would you like change with that?” drive-through centers where motorists could complete the registration in three minutes.

In Kansas City, according to an Obama news release, volunteers had been working the grocery stores, beauty shops and diners daily since early summer, racking up about 20 new voters apiece per day.

The goal was to enroll 75,000 new voters before the deadline.

Just for fun, make a note to check out the Missouri voter tallies come Nov. 4. See if it made a difference in the electoral vote count.

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Rep. Frank is cut from SNL skit

Not every comedy sketch on “Saturday Night Live” has to do with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Take the skit about the Washington financial bailout bill. In a parody of a C-SPAN news conference replay, “Nancy Pelosi,” the House speaker, introduces a series of alleged victims of the Wall Street mess, including “Herb and Marion Sandler.” (In real life, the Sandlers are prominent supporters of liberal and Democratic causes who assembled a vast array of subprime loan packages at their Golden West Financial, which they sold to Wachovia for $24 billion before the bottom fell out.)

A graphic beneath the “Sandlers” reads, “People who should be shot.”

On Monday NBC yanked the skit from its website, fueling online rumors the show was caving to pressures from well-connected Democrats.

A spokesman explained, “Upon review we caught certain elements in the sketch that didn’t meet our standards. We took it down and made some minor changes.”

Executive producer Lorne Michaels said the Sandlers were distraught but had not demanded the changes. He noted that the “People who should be shot” line was deleted, as was a reference to their “corrupt activities.”

But a little more than that was cut. What also was excised was any mention of the involvement of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) in the Sandler subprime mess.

Frank heads the House Financial Services Committee and is an ardent protector of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which participated in the subprime problem.

In the original skit the Sandler character thanks the Frank character, “as well as many Republicans, for helping block congressional oversight of our corrupt activities.”

“Frank” replies enthusiastically, “Not at all!”

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Bob Barr runs into tough times

We have, what, 23 days left until the election? The Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain and Palin is trying to figure out how to make up six, nine or maybe even 11 points in the polls.

And over at Libertarian Bob Barr’s Atlanta offices, folks are almost ecstatic to report they are at 3% in Virginia. That’s 3% total, not points behind.

In Florida his campaign says they’re just under 4% total, in Colorado just over, and in Ohio all the way up to 5.2%.

“Those states are vital for us,” a brave fundraising letter proclaims, “as it is in those battleground states where the election will be decided.”

Barr’s campaign is built around adversity: the media conspiracy that denies it free publicity, the difficulty of raising money in hard times, efforts by state parties to keep them off ballots.

In her recent fundraising plea, Ashley Petty said a financial crisis has hit the Barr campaign. She’d just come back from the mailbox and last week’s armload of donation checks had dwindled to a mere handful.

“I’m asking you to really dig deep,” she wrote.

She suggested supporters devote $5 a day for the rest of the campaign.

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Excerpted from The Times’ political blog Top of the Ticket, at latimes.com/topofthe ticket.