John McCain Leads Barack Obama at Political Prediction Market for First Time

A "back and forth" between Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in regard to women and race seems to have taken a hefty toll on the Democratic nominee.

For the first time, online prediction market intrade.com had John McCain leading Barack Obama by a half point (49.5 to 49) Wednesday afternoon. Obama had fallen nearly 3 points in just a matter of hours.

The McCain camp has lashed out at Senator Barack Obama for a comment he made Tuesday that they deemed "insensitive to women" and, in particular, Republican running mate, Sarah Palin.

"John McCain says he's about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, 'Watch out George Bush -- except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics -- we're really going to shake things up in Washington,'" he said.

"That's not change. That's just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing."

Within minutes, the McCain campaign announced a conference call focused on the remark, which they said was a deliberate reference to Palin's line: "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Palin used the line in the opening remarks of her convention speech, and she frequently uses it on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, New York's first African American Governor, David Paterson, said Tuesday that John McCain and the GOP were deliberately using "racial coding" during the Republican convention.

"There are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign," Paterson told Crain's Business Forum, when asked whether racism would hurt Obama's chances to become President," Paterson is quoted in the New York Daily News as saying.

"The Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black,'" said Paterson, the state's first black governor.

"But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican convention. A 'community organizer.' They kept saying it, they kept laughing, like what does this mean?"

McCain's campaign fired back later that Paterson was playing the race card, twisting a legitimate criticism by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin into a racial complaint.