A terrific, refreshingly feisty attack today from the Illinois Senator.  First, McCain's response to a question about how many homes he owns:

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” Mr. McCain told reporters for The Politico in an interview in New Mexico on Wednesday.  “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

Obama's response to that response:

This puzzled me.  I was confused as to what he meant.  Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’  He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll have to check with my staff.’  True quote!  ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’  So they asked his staff and he said, ‘at least four.’  ‘At least four.’

Now think about that.  I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong.  But if you’re like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.

By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes.  There’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America.  You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-laureate economist, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of what ordinary people are going through to understand that we can’t afford eight more years or four more years or one more year of the failed economic policies that George Bush has put in place.”

Awesome.  Hard-hitting, clear-cut class-warfare at its finest.  The man did not know how many homes he owns.  Who is more out of touch with the average person, than the man who does not know how many homes he owns?  I love it. 

But we've seen this before, right?  Obama lands a solid hook to the body, then backs away, as if nothing happened.  Wanting to seem above the fray, he backs off before anyone notices he landed a punch.  He thinks he's winning points that way.  If the last few weeks and the last few polls are any indication, that strategy is a failure.

So, can he sustain this attack?  Can he repeat the "houses" line again, and again, and again, just like was done to him with his "bitter" remark from months ago?  Can he discipline his surrogates, each and every one of them, to go out to every single cable talk show and repeat this, over and over and over again?  Can he put it up on the air in negative ads, not just in the regional markets of the swing states , but nationally?  Can he create a media narrative that sends McCain throttling back on his heels?  In short, can the professor keep himself from getting bored with it?

Campaigning with Mr. Obama today is Gov. Tim Kaine, who also hit the theme of Mr. McCain’s houses early this morning on CNN.  “I understand that Senator McCain was asked yesterday this question, ‘How many houses do you own?,’ and he couldn’t answer that question,” Mr. Kaine said.  “He couldn’t count high enough, apparently, to even know how many houses he owns.”

The Obama campaign also quickly cobbled together a TV ad for a national cable buy about the McCain homes, juxtaposed with residents dealing with foreclosure.  It estimates that Mr. McCain owns seven homes, with a total worth of $13 million.

Now, two major labor organizations and Brave New Films teamed up earlier this week to produce a Web film that intersperses shots of some of those properties with the tale of a woman who lost her home in a mortgage foreclosure.

I think my questions are getting the right answers.

UPDATE: Here's the ad.  That was quick...