Some unconvincing spin from Steve Schmidt:

“The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000,” said Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s chief strategist. “We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up.”

Actually, with a week to go in 2000, Gore was only down 2-3 points in national polls:

By contrast, Pollster.com estimates Obama is up by eight points right now:

Update 10/24 10:27 AM: The 2000 graph above, which is from Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin and Pollster.com, has a mislabeled y-axis — it should be “Gore minus Bush” not “Kerry minus Bush”.