As the presidential campaign draws to a close, it's commonplace to hear 2008 heralded as an excellent year for women. But has it been?

First Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran the most serious presidential campaign of any woman in U.S. history. Then Gov. Sarah Palin, the first woman on a Republican ticket, sparked an initial rush of excitement. Never before have women played such a prominent role in national politics, the reasoning goes, and that has laid the groundwork for even greater advancement the next time a woman runs.

But both women's campaigns devolved into such strife, their candidacies provoking such frenzied passions and mocking caricatures along the way, that it's only fair to ask whether the first woman's path to the White House was eased this year -- or whether Clinton and Palin simply unearthed the land mines without defusing any of them. If Democrat Barack Obama wins on Tuesday, he will have broken a huge barrier. But another one still awaits.

On Tuesday, Palin will emerge, win or lose, as the figure most transformed by her brief time in the public eye. After bursting onto the national scene as a moose-hunting mother of five who could rescue John McCain's campaign, the Alaska governor wound up sinking in the polls and getting entangled in a classic "girl story" about her now famous Republican National Committee - financed shopping spree. Her campaign handlers promptly threw her overboard and anonymously declared her a "whack job" and a "diva" -- hardly a moment of profound advancement. In the end, Palin seems to represent less "an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism" (in the words of the contrarian feminist Camille Paglia) than the stereotypical former-beauty-queen-made-good who seeks affirmation about her abilities while people just titter about her clothes.

Clinton moved along a different trajectory, from the lofty status of former first lady and commanding front-runner to the scrappy underdog in the Democratic primaries, fighting her way to the end of the contests and winning a sweeping 18 million votes in the process. But the New York senator's uncharacteristically tearful moment on the eve of the New Hampshire primary will forever be linked to her victory there, deservedly or not. And after her campaign ended, some of her supporters threatened to revolt if Obama picked a woman other than Clinton as his running mate. "That's feminism?" one senior Obama adviser asked me pointedly at the time.

More than just groundbreaking candidates, Clinton and Palin became cultural flashpoints. That Clinton would be ridiculed and mimicked and scrutinized came as no surprise to her team -- many of them had seen her go through a similar wringer in the White House and upon her arrival in the Senate -- but some of her advisers chalked the rough treatment up as much to her being a Clinton as to her being a woman. As the 2008 primary campaign went on, however, they increasingly spoke of a genuine double standard rooted in gender; by the end, they openly complained of sexist treatment in the media, which goes some way toward explaining why Clinton declined to criticize Palin once McCain chose the Alaska governor as his running mate.

Palin lost her luster soon after the Republican convention, stumbling on basic substance in interviews, hiding from most of the media and making claims about her record (such as having opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere) that were debunked. But rather than move to confront her weaknesses, her campaign swiftly seized on sexism as a reason Palin was being grilled in the first place. Most notably, the Republican campaign arranged a conference call to denounce Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" because just days earlier, Palin herself had made a reference to lipstick ("Disgusting comments, comparing our vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, to a pig," said former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift, a McCain surrogate). Professionals will argue about the political wisdom of that tactic -- it did, after all, distract attention from more serious issues that were failing to boost McCain's standing -- but few would cite it as a trailblazing moment in the history of gender politics.

More recently, another Palin subplot, in addition to the $150,000 boutique wardrobe, had emerged -- her attractiveness, and whether McCain had picked her on that basis. A recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer noted the swoon among several neoconservatives when they met Palin in Alaska in 2007. ("Exceptionally pretty," said Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.) In a focus group conducted by the Democratic pollster Peter Hart last Sunday in Ohio, undecided voters were asked which of the four candidates they would most like to sit next to on an airplane. One initially picked Palin, saying, "Geez, I'm a 29-year-old male." (He then changed his answer, saying he'd rather sit with Obama.) Obama views Palin as such a liability that he ran an ad last week featuring her winking. And Palin allies are blaming her McCain handlers for her fall, starting with top communications adviser Nicolle Wallace, who helped arrange the CBS interview with Katie Couric that began Palin's downward slide. The complaints have ballooned into an ugly cat fight. Progress? Really?

Prominent women in politics have been largely focused on the good news -- that Clinton and Palin were there at all. And regardless of which ticket wins on Tuesday, a woman will have a rightful claim to being head of the opposition party. Meanwhile, many Democrats, still scared of picking the scabs from the primary wounds, have embraced Obama's ascent as a positive harbinger of its own.

"Every time we break down one barrier, the other quickly comes down as well," said Donna Brazile, the onetime campaign manager for Al Gore. "Throughout the year, most observers have tried to put race versus gender -- like, what is the greatest disadvantage? As if some of us don't represent both."

Brazile urged people to look beyond the presidential tickets for signs of advancement. "It took us 88 years to get here," she noted. "We have a speaker of the House, a secretary of state, a phenomenal woman who ran for the Democratic ticket and a woman competing to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. It has elevated the process."

Many women in the feminist movement's dominant, largely Democratic wing seem to feel that Clinton's campaign, however flawed, was a step forward -- while Palin's was a step back. "If Hillary cracked the glass ceiling, I think Sarah Palin slipped on some of the pieces of glass," said Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY's List, which supports female candidates who favor abortion rights.

Except, of course, that Clinton didn't actually crack that glass ceiling. Rather, she dented it (18 million times, as she famously pointed out in her final speech in June). And along the way, her candidacy fractured the traditional women's movement: The abortion-rights group NARAL endorsed Obama (deeply angering the Clinton campaign and wounding the candidate personally), while EMILY's List and other groups stood by her, even after it appeared that she wouldn't have enough delegates to win the nomination.

That has left today's feminist movement struggling to define its mission or wondering whether it even has one. Is the goal to promote and elect women everywhere, or is it to support the candidate viewed as the best for the job, whether male or female? Wouldn't the latter be the more progressive course? Is the common purpose to back candidates who back abortion rights and liberal policies? The questions became unexpectedly urgent when McCain picked Palin in August, but they were already bubbling up by the early spring.

Then, in a strikingly similar fashion, conservative women broke into two angry camps as they struggled with whether they were obliged to stand by Palin. McCain's high command had hoped that Palin would peel away resentful Clinton supporters; in fact, she has driven away some GOP stalwarts. The conservative writer Kathleen Parker led the Republican defections, followed by former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who disgustedly waved Palin off in one of her Wall Street Journal columns as an unqualified empty vessel who "doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts." The exodus was rooted in disdain for Palin's intellect, but in a way, the Republican departures have been even more disloyal than the feminists who chose Obama over Clinton: Parker, Noonan and others were not abandoning Palin for another partisan of stature, as the Democrats had in their primaries. They were just abandoning her.

Along the way, there have been rogues with their own takes on gender politics. Ann Coulter, a conservative provocateur who openly loathes McCain, declared herself a Clinton supporter. Paglia praised Palin's "frontier grit and audacity" (even though she has said she still intends to vote for Obama), and Ellen Lafferty, a former editor of Ms. magazine and a Clinton supporter, showed up onstage recently at a Palin rally.

But the massive wave of Clinton supporters that Republicans predicted would sweep toward McCain has never materialized, at least not according to the late-October polls. Palin's selection has turned out to be the one example in recent history of a vice presidential pick having a measurable effect on the direction of the race -- a negative one.

In the months and years before she announced her candidacy, Clinton was often asked whether the country was ready to elect a woman president of the United States. "Well, we won't know until we try," she always said.

Having tried, heading into 2009, the question is still out there.

By Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post, November 2, 2008

January, you may recall, was a rough month for the pollsters. All the polls showed Sen. Barack Obama poised to follow up his big win in the Iowa caucuses with a knockout blow to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. But he lost, sending the 13 firms that did public pre-election polls there scrambling for explanations.

Could polling be similarly embarrassed this month, misjudging the last chapter of this epic presidential election? Thoughts of the Granite State jolt me and my fellow pollsters awake in the dead of night during these final days.

Sen. John McCain certainly says that the polls are misleading, arguing that most surveys have "consistently shown me much further behind than we actually are," as he put it last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." Of course, blaming the polls is standard operating practice for trailing candidates, their partisans and contrarians everywhere. And of course, we won't make the same mistakes that led George Gallup to declare that Thomas Dewey had Harry Truman beat in 1948: We won't use outdated sampling techniques, and we won't assume that the race is over and stop polling. Nor is our polling window as absurdly small as the four nights between Iowa and New Hampshire. Even so, could McCain be onto something? In the latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll of likely voters, Obama has a nine-point lead, larger than Dewey's five-point margin in the late October Gallup poll in 1948. Other reputable national polls this year show similar or even larger Obama leads. But could we still make big mistakes? Can the polls be trusted?

As the polling director of The Washington Post, I get that question just about every day, even in less intense periods than this. Some question the scientific basis of polling, refusing to believe that interviews with hundreds or thousands of randomly selected respondents could accurately represent the opinions of many millions. Others see basic bias (refreshingly, these accusations come from all sides) or point out new wrinkles, such as the growing number of adults in the United States who have only cellular phones that pollsters mostly don't call. Added to the mix this year is a lingering skepticism about the accuracy of polling contests between white and black candidates -- doubts that persist despite decades of data suggesting that these polls perform no worse than others -- and heightened concerns about the way we define "likely voters."

I don't consider any of these fatal or even very serious problems, but that doesn't mean I'm immune to pollster's paranoia. We could all be wrong -- at least theoretically.

Simply put, we may be wrong about who is likely to vote on Tuesday. One of the trickiest parts of political polling is determining which of the people interviewed in pre-election surveys will really vote. It's relatively easy for us to identify such sharply delineated groups as the population of all adults living in the United States or even all registered voters, but the pool of actual voters is a group that exists at a single point in time, on Election Day (plus those casting ballots early and by mail).

Even a few days away from an election, that group remains an unknown population. Not everyone who says that they will vote will actually do so, in part because when asked about their intentions, people want to sound like good citizens. So pollsters develop models to whittle down their samples to account for people's tendency to overstate these things.

These "likely voter models" vary widely from pollster to pollster. This year, the Gallup Organization is publishing two models. Its "traditional" model factors in respondents' reports of whether they voted in previous elections to determine who is a "likely" voter. But Gallup's new, "expanded" model drops this requirement, putting more young and minority voters into the "likely voter" category.

In Washington Post-ABC polling, we ask a series of questions about whether and how people plan to vote, whether they have voted before and basic knowledge about the voting process. We then feed all this information into a range of models, corresponding to different levels of turnout. We report a single model, but only after assessing the quality and impact of all of them. Likely voter modeling is a craft, bolstered by science.

I'm also often asked about the rising use of cellphones. The number of people ditching their home telephones has spiked in recent years, with the highest percentages among young adults and nonwhites. Does this affect the polls? Probably not -- or at least not yet. The exclusion of cellphone users appears to have no more than a minimal effect on the results. But even if these voters turn out to have been systematically underrepresented in this year's polls, that would actually mean that Obama had an even larger lead, because these voters overwhelmingly back him over McCain. And both the Gallup and Washington Post-ABC tracking polls interview complementary samples of voters who have only cellphones to make sure that we're not missing something. (Few state polls include cellphone interviews.)

Others who doubt this year's polls raise the question of a "Bradley effect." This syndrome gets its name from the bid by Tom Bradley, then the African American mayor of Los Angeles, to become governor of California in 1982. He headed into Election Day with a big seven-point lead in the last publicly released poll, only to lose narrowly. Some attributed this startling result to a quiet form of racism that revealed itself only in the voting booth, and the 1982 case has been trotted out ever since to cast doubt on the accuracy of pre-election polls in contests between white and black candidates.

But there is good reason to doubt that racism was the cause of Bradley's defeat, and decades of polling in other campaigns with black candidates should mute some of the skepticism. No "Bradley effect" has shown up for years, and a new analysis by one Harvard University researcher, Daniel Hopkins, shows that any such effect that existed in African American politicians' contests in the late 1980s and early 1990s has now disappeared.

There is also the possibility of a pre-election "bandwagon effect." Post-election surveys frequently overstate support for the winner, and with 70 percent of respondents in a recent Gallup poll saying that Obama is headed for victory on Tuesday, perhaps voters are beginning to overstate the likelihood that they'll vote for him. (There's no precedent for something like this happening, but hey, it's been a weird year.)

I worry more about a basic concern: whether we are getting a truly random sample of opinion. Pollsters bank on the fundamental notion that the people who answer our calls are similar to those who don't, and we have reams of data justifying those assumptions. But what if the people who pause to take a pollster's question are significantly different from those who don't?

After all, fewer and fewer people have been taking our calls over the years. The Pew Research Center, which has done extensive research into declining survey-response rates, has found that poorer, less educated whites -- who tend to hold somewhat less positive views toward African Americans -- are also harder to get on the phone than those who have higher incomes and more formal education. My fellow pollsters and I give this a pretty academic name, "differential nonresponse," but it's a live, practical concern.

Despite my list of worries, a few things remain clear to me: Not all polls are created equal. We've been bombarded with polls that fell far short of the methodological rigor required for a good survey. If you mix in bad polls with the good ones, as happens all over the Web, you just may get dodgy results.

I also remind myself that humility is built into my field's DNA. The mathematics of the "random sample" on which all polling is based says that five times out of 100, we will be badly off the mark. Call it the pollster's law of averages.

But these seem to be topics for another day. The polls appear to be in general agreement that Obama is ahead; the only question is by how much. And this time, the pollsters' findings are being reinforced by the work of two other groups of campaign obsessives: the political scientists who use predictive models drawn from past election results to predict the next one (the one professor whose forecast had McCain headed for victory has "adjusted" his model), and the reporters out there knocking on doors and interviewing voters.

That reassures me because it suggests that 2008 is not like 1980, a year in which some late polls showed a close race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But shoe-leather reporting -- such as the 50-state roundup, led by David S. Broder, that The Post published the Sunday before the election -- found that Reagan was surging. Today, all the indicators -- not just the polls -- suggest that Obama is the candidate with momentum. If that changes over the final days, quality polls will still be the single best gauge of why things shifted.

Of course, if the trustworthy polls continue showing Obama ahead and McCain wins, it would be a monumental failure for political scientists, reporters and pollsters alike -- an indictment worse than New Hampshire, worse even than 1948. I think the quality pollsters have done a good, professional job this year. I don't think we'll get bitten. Even so, I'll be a little worried until it's all over. I'm not sure what kind of night I'll have on Tuesday. But I'm sure I'm going to have a nervous one on Monday.

With the nation possibly on the brink of electing Barack Obama, what fascinates me isn't the transformation promised by the "Change You Can Believe In" candidate.

It's the change that had to occur within the rest of us to get him here.

Grief expert Molly Fumia has written that to be joyful in this world is "a brave and reckless act." Such courage springs not from the certainty of human experience but from the surprise. It takes courage in a cynical world, she says, "to be happily surprised."

What could be braver or more joyfully stunning than the nation's embrace of a presidential candidate who is the son of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father -- the product of a union that not so long ago would have been banned by 30 states? Some are dismayed by this astonishing event; others seem almost blase, viewing it as "inevitable progress."

But change of this magnitude doesn't just happen. We make it happen. Few of us know how to get our minds around something so seismic, so we pretend it isn't such a big deal. Yet while media types prognosticate about the "Bradley effect" and people waving monkey dolls at rallies, Americans have been quietly wrestling with their private response to this once-unimaginable phenomenon.

It's one thing to believe that you aren't prejudiced. It's another to exercise your largely untested tolerance through your vote for the world's most important job.

We shouldn't pretend that such choices are easy. Doing so dishonors the hard work it can take to transcend being raised in homes, communities and a nation where racism was actively asserted, subtly suggested or bubbled beneath the surface. As a black American, I should have easily rejected the whispers that suggested that I, and nearly everyone I loved and admired while growing up, was inferior. Yet for years, I worried that my hair, skin color, body type, speech, intelligence, loyalty, morals -- all the things I worked to perfect as a girl, student, daughter and citizen -- were deemed less worthy because I was a Negro.

If I could absorb such self-limiting claptrap; if the mother who adored me could describe my slightly kinky hair as "not nearly as bad" as her own; if one of my sons could say at age 4 that he disliked his terrific day-care center because "there are too many black people there"; and if the blond best friend of another son could tell his mother that he didn't like black people and that his buddy Darrell just couldn't be black -- how could I doubt racism's subtle insinuations in everybody's psyche?

Traces of intolerance, it seems, are in the water we drink, the air we breathe. One can't just stop drinking or breathing.

But if you're white, whom do you tell that you're struggling with voting for Obama not because of rants about "socialism" but because of deeply rooted fears that are difficult to examine, let alone admit?

If you're black, do you allow this unforeseen turn of events to challenge your assumptions -- and allow that racism may be less intractable, and people more open-minded, than your experience suggested? Isn't that what Michelle Obama's much-maligned comment about "really" being proud of her country for the first time as an adult was about -- being proud as a black person? As a descendant of slaves whose observations and experiences taught her to worry as most black women do: that prejudice might prevent her daughters' wonderfulness from being embraced, her own brilliance from being acknowledged and her fellow citizens from trusting their children's future to any black man, even one as extraordinary as her husband?

The pride that such women feel over their countrymen rallying after Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina and every other crisis is real -- and informed by the knowledge that that's what Americans have always done. But even the most optimistic black folks doubted America was capable of this.

Being happily surprised by your neighbors' openheartedness is a good thing. It lifts everybody -- and we need to be buoyed as the nation wades into waters this unfamiliar.

Change is scary. Certainly, some "undecideds" are actually quite certain -- of their reluctance to help launch a black man, no matter how eloquent or inspiring or seemingly attuned to their needs, into the presidency. The campaign's undercurrents exert tremendous pressures on us all. Witness the hoax by the McCain volunteer who reported that a backward "B" carved into her face was the handiwork of a big black man angry about her presidential choice.

Hoping to spark anti-Obama backlash, she instead showed how insanely such undercurrents can spur some to behave.

Now that even stable people are saying that the change they crave most is for the election to be over, I have a suggestion:

For one shining moment, let's call a halt to our red-blue bickering and predicting. Rather than glancing back at our racist past or peering into our uncertain future, we'll allow ourselves a brief celebration of now. We'll be brave and reckless enough to be happily surprised by one undeniable change:

Against all sensible odds and reasoned predictions, untold numbers of Americans of every persuasion have opened their hearts, minds and souls to the possibility that a black man is the best choice to lead them. Whatever happens, an immeasurable amount of light has illuminated our darkness. Once such doors have been pried open, it's hard shutting them as tightly as before.

That's a change worth believing in.

By Donna Britt, The Washington Post, November 2, 2008

KIRTLAND, Ohio -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is spending Halloween at three campaign rallies across Ohio, where she won a key victory in the Democratic primary campaign. Today's rallies are part of a series of appearances the New York senator has held with Democrats nationwide, campaigning both for the Obama-Biden campaign and Democratic congressional candidates.

"I was thinking about dressing up. And I really wanted to be scary," Clinton said at her first stop, acknowledging the holiday. "I've done the princess stuff, and this time I wanted to be really frightening, so I thought I would dress up like George W. Bush," she said to cheers.
"Then I realized John McCain took that costume."

Clinton later added: "This is our chance my friends. It's going to either be trick or treat. The trick -- we can't fall for that again. The treat is new leadership with a new president, in Barack Obama."

The senator spoke to a crowd of 800 to 1,000 people at Lakewood Community College, located in Lake County, a swing county in this swing state. Clinton won 62 percent of the county's Democratic votes during the primary. She bested Obama statewide 54 to 44 percent.

Gov. Ted Strickland (D) introduced Clinton to the crowd noting that, "Ohio and Ohioans have expressed their deep admiration of her, their deep respect for her in the primary election.

"We are proud of the fact that Ohio spoke so strongly. But we are equally proud that now that the primary is over, and we are facing the general election, that Hillary Rodham Clinton is working her heart out to make sure that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States of America."

By Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post, October 31, 2008

IRONTON, Ohio -- Hillary Rodham Clinton told her supporters today in Ohio's pivotal Appalachian region that Barack Obama offers the best path for a return to the economy the nation saw during her husband's administration.

Clinton later made a campaign stop at a union hall in Northside.

She appeared in southern Ohio area, where she racked up margins as high as 4-to-1 over Obama in the Democratic primary she won in March. The region, where unemployment rates range into double digits, has been a swing area in general elections with President Bush carrying it the last two elections after Bill Clinton led it the two elections before.

"As I recall, when Bill Clinton was in the White House, we saw the economy work for everybody," she told some 400 people at Ohio University's branch campus in Ironton.

"If you worked for me, I hope you will work for Barack and Joe (Biden)," she told a cheering crowd. "The alternative is just not very pleasant to contemplate. You know, George Bush has practiced what John McCain has preached."

She cited tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, less regulation, and lack of progress on health care and energy and said again, it will take a Democrat to improve things after a Bush administration.

She was joined by Gov. Ted Strickland, a key supporter of hers in the primary and an Appalachian native. Strickland cut short his introductory remarks after he kept getting interrupted by Clinton supporters shouting to her. "I can take a hint," he said.

"I like her better now," said Arlene Vallon, a former airline employee who said she supported Hillary Clinton and will vote for Obama. "Now she seems more authentic, more relaxed."

Rob Portman, a Republican former congressman from southern Ohio, said he sees good enthusiasm and support for McCain in the region and hears operators of small businesses in the area express concern that Obama's tax plans will make it more difficult for them.

"I think he (Obama) needs help in this area because she defeated him soundly," Portman said. "I don't know how much of her support will translate into support for him."

Clinton remains popular among working class voters, a demographic Obama needs Tuesday if he is to be successful in Ohio. Polls show the race close here in a state McCain needs if his White House bid is to be successful.

"I'm not asking you to make a leap of faith," she said. "I'm asking you to think about the difference between a Republican administration and a Democratic administration. You know, within recent memory we can make that comparison."

"No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio and we intend to keep that tradition intact," Strickland said in Kirtland.




By DAN SEWELL, Associated Press, October 31, 2008

MIAMI - When the Boston Tea Party's presidential candidate Charles Jay went to register to vote in Florida this summer the clerk at the elections office wasn't sure what to do.

"I've never heard of it," she said of his new political group, which joins the Christmas Party and Surfers Party of America among Florida's registered third parties.

Jay was unshaven and going on a few hours sleep, "I had to tell her, 'I'm the presidential candidate,'" he said.

Jay, 47, is on the ballot in Florida, Tennessee and Colorado. It is the first time his party has had a presidential nominee since Libertarians dissatisfied with their party formed it in 2006. And while Barack Obama's slogan is "Change we can believe in" and John McCain's is "Country first," Jay's party is telling voters that it is, "Time to party like it's 1773!"

"Obviously this is a party that wants low or no taxes, and I think we're just naturally rebellious," said Jay, linking his party to the colonists who tossed tea into the Boston harbor to protest British taxes. "We're bad boys and bad girls."

In speeches he often invokes colonists' cry, he said, "no taxation without representation."

Jay said he and his party, which counts 500 members nationwide on its Web site, also have one clear goal. What they want, their party's single-sentence platform, is to reduce the "size, scope and power of government at all levels."

Their four-point program is the same as former Republican primary candidate Ron Paul's: to bring troops home from Iraq and other locations around the globe; to repeal the USA Patriot Act and other laws the party believes infringe on privacy and civil liberties; to not increase the national debt; and to end taxpayer bailouts of corporations and corporate subsidies.

Jay, meanwhile, is frank about the fact he isn't a career politician. He has hosted radio shows, worked in television and promoted boxing. Now he lives in Hollywood, Fla., and develops content for companies' Web sites. He is not married and has no children.

Four years ago he ran as the presidential candidate for the Personal Choice Party along with Marilyn Chambers, who Jay describes by saying, "you know, the porn star." In Utah, the only state they were on the ballot, they got just shy of 1,000 votes.

This time he may do better. The party isn't on the ballot in Massachusetts, site of the original tea party, but it is on the ballot in Colorado.

"We don't have any oceans or harbors to keep the party alive, but they're on the ballot," said Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for the Colorado Secretary of State.

"It's not like we're going to win the election," said Thomas L. Knapp, who founded the party in 2006 and is now one of its four vice presidential nominees - a way to generate interest in some states by putting a local person on the ticket.

Jay said he's like any other candidate running in a race where an opponent is heavily favored - a Democrat in a heavily Republican district or vice versa. Like those candidates, his goal is to get people to hear his message and provoke people to think about their choices.

Currently the party has 51 registered voters in Florida - more than six other parties recognized by the state - but Jay said he'd be happy to get 5,000 votes nationwide. For him, it's a win just to be on three ballots, to be invited to third-party debates and to talk at a number of high schools.

Still, Jay isn't sure if he'll run again four years from now. Being a third-party candidate has been tiring. He has spent $4,000 of his own money on travel and things like campaign buttons. He answers his own e-mail and picks up his own suits from the dry cleaners. In early October, he was in Nashville rushing to a third-party candidate debate when all traffic stopped. McCain's motorcade needed to pass. Jay, sitting in his Dodge Stratus rental car, had to wait.

Earlier this month, he spoke to students at a South Florida middle school and took questions.

"Who do you want to win the presidential election?" one student asked him.

"I looked at the teacher," Jay said. "And said, 'I don't know if I want to answer that one.'"

By JESSICA GRESKO, Associated Press, November 1, 2008

DES MOINES -- Barack Obama returned to Iowa today to trade hugs with the voters who first validated his improbable quest to win the White House. In a state where he once engaged voters in coffee shops, he drew a cheering crowd of 25,000.

"People of Iowa, I will always be grateful to you," Obama said. "Think about the journey we've made."

He recalled the long slog in 2007, when polls put him miles behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and critics questioned almost everything about his methodical campaign. When he needed an emotional boost, Obama and his wife Michelle tended to look to Iowa.

"We started the campaign right here," Obama said. "Back then, we didn't have much money and we didn't have many endorsements. We weren't given much chance by the polls or the pundits. We knew how steep our climb would be."

The tide turned in the weeks before the Jan. 3 caucuses, where Obama handily beat Clinton and former senator John Edwards. His primary campaign would become a roller coaster as he and Clinton traded wins for five more months -- longer than either candidate had expected, win or lose.

"On the day of the Iowa caucus, my faith in the American people was vindicated," Obama said, clearly buoyed by the reception, the sunshine and the polls that show him leading Republican John McCain in advance of Tuesday's election.

"What you started here in Iowa has swept the nation. We're seeing the same turnout," Obama called out. "A whole new way of doing democracy started right here in Iowa and it's all across the country now."

Obama still has some business to take care of. Polls show him ahead in Iowa, which President Bush carried four years ago. But the McCain campaign believes it has a shot here, and is deploying vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to Dubuque on Monday.

The Obama campaign, racing across the country and playing to huge crowds in the final days of Campaign 2008, would love to end the race with a win here, where it all started.

"As great as all these moments are," campaign strategist David Axelrod mused as he watched Obama bask in the cheers, "I don't think we'll ever quite capture the feeling of that last night in Iowa when we won. This is hallowed ground for us."

By Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, October 31, 2008

LAS VEGAS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama looked to pick up three red states on the final Saturday of the campaign, while Republican John McCain defended GOP turf before breaking to appear on "Saturday Night Live."

The candidates' travel plans heading into the campaign's final weekend had them almost completely focused on states that President Bush won in 2004.

"We are four days away from changing the United States of America," Obama told voters Friday night in Indiana, one of about a half-dozen Republican states that remains up for grabs late this election season.

McCain's campaign argued the Arizona senator was closing the gap in the final days and he was closer than reflected in public polling. Privately, McCain's aides said he trailed Obama by 4 points nationwide in internal polling.

"We're closing, my friends, and we're going to win in Ohio," McCain said during a stop in the state Friday. "We're a few points down but we're coming back and we're coming back strong."

An Associated Press-Yahoo News poll of likely voters put Obama ahead, 51 to 43, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. But one in seven voters, 14 percent of the total - said they were undecided or might yet change their minds.

The candidates focused on winning over the undecideds and encouraging their supporters to get to the polls.

Obama planned final get-out-the-vote rallies in Nevada, Colorado and Missouri for Saturday. He was scheduled to campaign in Ohio all day Sunday, including a Cleveland rally with singer Bruce Springsteen, then hit Virginia and Florida on election eve.

McCain had eight states on his final three-day itinerary besides the detour to New York City for "Saturday Night Live," hosted by Obama supporter Ben Affleck. Monday's schedule called for him to visit several states, ending with a midnight rally in Arizona where Obama was running television ads.

"We want to win everywhere," Obama said of his decision to air the commercials in his opponent's state.

By BEN FELLER and NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press, November 1, 2008

CHICAGO (Reuters) - It wasn't quite a Halloween nightmare on Obama street, but journalists on Friday drew a rare flash of anger from the normally unflappable Democratic presidential nominee.

Barack Obama had taken a break from the campaign trail for a few hours of Halloween fun at home with his family four days before the election, but ended up visibly annoyed when news crews dogged their footsteps in their Chicago neighborhood.

"That's enough. You've got a shot. Leave us alone," Obama told reporters as he walked down the block with his 7-year-old daughter Sasha in her costume on the way to a party at a neighbor's home.

Obama, usually cool in public during a campaign that has turned him into the frontrunner for the White House, did not disguise his irritation when his surprise walk caused news photographers and camera crews to scramble for position on the sidewalk.

He grew especially testy when a Polish television cameraman tried to approach them.

"Come on guys, get back on the bus," he pleaded with journalists, many of whom had accompanied him from the airport to Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.

Obama, wearing sunglasses but no costume, and his daughter, dressed up as what campaign aides said was a "corpse's bride," then broke into a sprint, leaving the journalists behind.

Secret Service agents and vans followed closely behind, and stunned trick-or-treaters broke into shouts of "Obama, Obama" as he rushed past.

There was no neighborhood trick-or-treating for the Obama family. "He didn't want to cause a disruption to the neighborhood," campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Instead the family attended a Halloween party behind closed doors at a friend's home. Obama's 10-year-old daughter Malia had planned to dress up as an "evil fairy," the campaign said.

The fact that Obama took time out for Halloween showed a candidate feeling confident about his chances on Tuesday, with polls showing him leading Republican nominee John McCain.

Obama flew straight from a rally in Iowa to Chicago, where he stepped onto the airport tarmac with a pumpkin -- brought on a campaign swing through Florida -- under one arm.

After the brief stop at home, he planned to be back campaigning on Friday night at a rally in Gary, Indiana.

By Matt Spetalnick, Reuters, November 1, 2008

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, The Associated Press has learned.

Zeituni Onyango (zay-TUHN on-YANG-oh), referred to as "Aunti Zeituni" in Obama's memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango's case.

Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

Onyango's refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, noncriminal violation of immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system. Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the U.S.

The AP could not immediately reach Onyango, 56, for comment. When a reporter went to her home Friday night, no one answered the door. A neighbor said she was often not home on the weekend. Onyango did not immediately return telephone and written messages left at her home. It was unclear why her request for asylum was rejected in 2004.

The Obama campaign declined comment late Friday night.

Onyango is not a relative whom Obama has discussed in campaign appearances and, unlike Obama's father and grandmother, is not someone who has been part of the public discussion about his personal life.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Kelly Nantel, said the government does not comment on an individual's citizenship status or immigration case.

Onyango's case - coming to light just days before the presidential election - led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring that any deportations before Tuesday's election be approved at least at the level of the agency's regional directors, the U.S. law enforcement official told the AP.

The unusual directive suggests that the administration is sensitive to the political implications of Onyango's case coming to light so close to the election.

The East African nation has been fractured in violence in recent years, including a period of two months of bloodshed after December 2007 that killed 1,500 people.

The disclosure about Onyango came just one day after Obama's presidential campaign confirmed to the Times of London that Onyango, who has lived quietly in public housing in South Boston for five years, was Obama's half aunt on his father's side.

It was not immediately clear how Onyango might have qualified for public housing with a standing deportation order.

By EILEEN SULLIVAN and ELLIOT SPAGAT, Associated Press, November 1, 2008

WASHINGTON - That smiling guy walking down the street? Odds are he's a Barack Obama backer. The grouchy looking one? Don't ask, and don't necessarily count on him to vote next week, either.

More John McCain supporters feel glum about the presidential campaign while more of Obama's are charged up over it, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Saturday.

The survey shows McCain backers have become increasingly upset in recent weeks, a period that has seen Obama take a firm lead in many polls. One expert says the contrasting moods could affect how likely the two candidates' supporters are to vote on Election Day, possibly dampening McCain's turnout while boosting Obama's.

While 43 percent of the Democrat Obama's backers said they are excited over the campaign, just 13 percent of McCain's said so, according to the survey of adults, conducted by Knowledge Networks. Six in 10 Obama supporters said the race interests them, compared to four in 10 backing McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona.

On the flip side, 52 percent of McCain supporters said the campaign has left them frustrated, compared to 30 percent of Obama's. A quarter of McCain backers say they feel helpless, double the rate of those preferring Obama, the Illinois senator.

More McCain supporters also feel angry and bored, while Obama's are likelier to say they are proud and hopeful.

All of this is a bad sign for McCain, according to George E. Marcus, a political scientist from Williams College who has studied the role emotion plays in politics. Negative feelings about a campaign can discourage voters by making them less likely to go through what can be a painful process: Voting for someone who will lose.

"If I'm getting my head handed to me by a tennis player, my brain is saying, 'Do I want a second match? No,'" Marcus said. "Why do something that's going to lead to failure?"

Marcus said such emotions can be overcome by outside events, such as a campaign or neighbor urging a person to vote. There's also the danger exuberant Obama backers might decide not to vote because of overconfidence. The Obama and McCain organizations combined have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for those very reasons.

Obama leads McCain among likely voters in the AP-Yahoo News poll, 51 percent to 43 percent.

Supporters of McCain cite a dislike for Obama, dissatisfaction with the campaign's tone and frustration with how news organizations have treated their candidate.

"Flat disgusted, how's that?" said Billie Hart, 80, a Houston Republican backing McCain. "Because that's the way I feel about it. I don't like the individual."

Many Democrats say they're energized by a candidate they perceive as different from most politicians and who can make a real difference.

"Elections have always been so ho-hum," said Kathleen Rockwell, 61, an Obama supporter from Redmond, Wash. This time, "I feel connected. And that feels good."

The AP-Yahoo News poll, which has followed the same group of 2,000 people since last November, underscores how individuals have reacted to the campaign's currents. For many McCain supporters, it's not been a happy period.

Three in 10 McCain backers who report being frustrated now said in September they weren't. That is quadruple the number who became less frustrated.

At the same time, one in five McCain supporters are not interested in the campaign now who said they were in September. Half that number gained interest. By similar margins, McCain backers report becoming more angry, bored, overwhelmed and helpless and have become less excited, proud and hopeful.

"I'm real interested in having it over," said Michele Roos, 64, a McCain supporter from Newport News, Va.

Enthusiasm by Obama backers has largely stayed steady since September, though slightly more of them - 31 percent - now say the campaign makes them feel proud.

"I didn't like the candidates before," said Angelique Sims, 38, an Obama supporter from Shawnee, Okla. "I like his character. I like the things he represents. He represents my views."

A closer look at the numbers show how that emotions are playing out to Obama's advantage in several pivotal groups of voters.

Forty-eight percent of those under age 30 who support Obama say they are excited over the race, compared to just 21 percent of those young voters who back McCain. That age group has been a reservoir of strong support for the Democrat.

Just 44 percent of whites supporting the Republican say the campaign interests them, compared to 58 percent of whites and 72 percent of blacks supporting Obama.

At the same time, half of McCain supporters age 65 and up say they're frustrated, compared to three in 10 of Obama's older voters. Also saying they're frustrated are 53 percent of whites backing McCain - compared to 40 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks behind Obama.

The AP-Yahoo News poll of 1,753 adults was conducted Oct. 17-27 and had an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. Included were interviews with 803 Obama supporters and 703 McCain supporters, with error margins of plus or minus 3.5 and 3.7 points respectively.

The poll was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

By ALAN FRAM and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press, November 1, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was a race so long that John McCain seemed to run it twice, once as the Republican front-runner who fell, then as an insurgent on a shoestring.

Or, as Barack Obama often described an odyssey of two years: "There are babies who've been born and are now walking and talking since we started this campaign."

But even that doesn't fully capture the sprawling race for the White House, down now to a choice between Obama, a Democrat bidding to become the first black commander in chief, and John McCain, a Republican in search of one final comeback.

___

Images from the canvas:

- A grinning Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican presidential hopeful, ordering his campaign bus driven around the track at the NASCAR oval in Daytona Beach, Fla., last winter. A political consultant's nightmare — candidate's bus goes in circles, past endless rows of empty seats.

- Former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, confessing to an extramarital affair with a woman hired to make videos for his presidential run. "I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic," he explained.

- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, previewing a television commercial for reporters in Iowa and announcing, as aides looked on in disbelief, that it wouldn't air because it violated his pledge to run a positive campaign. In it, Huckabee questioned GOP rival Mitt Romney's character: "If a man is dishonest to obtain a job, he'll be dishonest on the job."

- Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, but talking, talking, talking about himself. He used the word "I" 94 times in one 10-minute stretch in Iowa, and mentioned her only seven.

- McCain's campaign, taking advantage of Hurricane Gustav to keep an unpopular President Bush from taking the stage at the Republican National Convention. Bush instead addressed delegates via satellite from the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney appeared not at all.

- Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, bestowing the famous family's blessing on Obama when it mattered, in midwinter. Then months later, ill with brain cancer, rallying the Democratic National Convention in Denver. "The work begins anew, the hope rises again and the dream lives on," he said to the roars of thousands.

___

On both sides of the political divide, the campaign taught new lessons about religion, gender and - especially - race.

Obama, a Christian, struggled for months to combat false Internet-spread rumors that he was a Muslim. Romney, a Mormon, followed an example set by John F. Kennedy, who had attempted to ease voter fears about Catholicism. "A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith," Romney said.

Gender politics was particularly tricky.

In a race for history, little that Clinton did sparked more conjecture than the moment she suddenly choked back tears in New Hampshire.

Months later, in defeat, she said proudly she and her legions of supporters had been able to put "about 18 million cracks" in the glass ceiling that has kept women from advancing to the White House.

Republican running mate Sarah Palin, only the second woman named to a national party ticket, could joke that lipstick was the only difference between a hockey mom like herself and a pit bull.

But Obama drew criticism several days later when he said McCain's call for change in Washington was like putting "lipstick on a pig."

___

Racial politics was a constant presence.

In mid-March, Obama was thrown on the defensive when it was disclosed that his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had accused the United States of bringing on the Sept. 11 attacks by spreading terrorism. His candidacy in peril, Obama delivered a speech in Philadelphia that was an appeal to overcome racism and the black anger and white resentment it spawns.

He criticized Wright, yet said, "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother."

Later, after Wright resurfaced, Obama decided he could, after all, disown him.

This campaign showed dramatically how a politician could go back on his pledge and profit politically.

Obama first said he would accept public financing for the fall campaign, then declined it and raised unheard of amounts.

"You didn't tell the American people the truth," said McCain, unable to keep up with the advertising onslaught.

___

From the start, the Democratic race had room only for two.

"I'm in it to win it," the former first lady had said in entering the campaign.

So, of course, was Obama as he joined her in a race no Founding Father could have imagined — a black man against a woman, a presidential nomination the prize.

He promised change, she offered experience.

The long war in Iraq was the dominant Democratic issue then, and that helped Obama.

In the Senate in 2002, Clinton had voted to authorize the invasion, determined to show that a woman was tough enough to be commander in chief. Obama, a mere state legislator in Illinois, had given a speech opposing the war.

That difference was his early ticket, and Iowa activists punched it for him in the state's caucuses, the first test of the campaign.

Clinton salvaged her candidacy in New Hampshire, and the long slog was on.

From the start, racial and other differences were striking. Obama ran up outsized victories across the South. The former first lady recovered smartly as the economy began sliding and the industrial states began voting, but it was too late.

Obama's money, organization and eloquence eclipsed hers.

Dream Ticket?

Not.

The former first lady was interested but Obama looked elsewhere. Instead, he turned to Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, a veteran of three decades in Congress, well versed in foreign policy, to be his running mate on a ticket to change America.

The convention ended in spectacular fashion, more than 80-thousand jammed into Denver's Mile High Stadium on a perfect summer night, and Obama pledged an end to the "broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush."

___

Unlike Obama, there was nothing meteoric about McCain's rise.

After losing to George W. Bush in 2000, he was the front-runner eight long years later.

Then came a shocking organizational collapse in mid-2007. His support faded, a casualty of his position on the war and immigration, his funds dried up and his aides set on one another.

Somehow, he limped on.

And when Huckabee gained his improbable victory in Iowa, McCain suddenly had a new path to the nomination. As it always had, it ran through New Hampshire.

Within weeks, Mitt Romney spent $40 million of his own fortune to no avail. Giuliani's bus spun out. The other pretenders faded away.

Given a lengthy head start on Obama, McCain seemed to sputter. He spent weeks trying to raise money and gain the support of conservatives who had never thought much of him. Even his own aides said he either had no sustained campaign message or wouldn't stick to it.

One day, after a prepared speech at the Naval Academy, he told reporters on the Straight Talk Express that he was in the early stages of vetting candidates to serve as his running mate. Aides looked on in dismay, bordering shock, as they watched the candidate trump his own carefully scripted event.

Soon, McCain shook up his operation. The long seances with reporters at the back of the bus were history.

Behind as he headed into the convention, McCain uncorked a vice presidential surprise.

He chose Palin, a self-styled maverick with conservative views, to appeal to conservatives. Then he pivoted smartly, presenting himself as a man of the middle as he accepted the nomination.

"Change is coming," he promised, an attempt to move away from Bush.

"I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can. My opponent will raise them. I will cut government spending. He will increase it."

He left his convention with the lead.

___

The came the economic crisis, the retirement savings of millions shriveling by the day. An unpopular Bush on television daily, the personification of government's inability to stop the financial carnage.

Obama said the mess was a final judgment on eight years of Bush economic policies that McCain had supported. He outlined the changes he wanted to see and stuck with them.

McCain, of different temperament, did not.

He said the economy was fundamentally strong. He called for a blue ribbon commission to find out what had happened and why. He announced he would suspend his campaign to return to Washington until there was a solution. He changed his mind and resumed campaigning in time for the first debate.

He invoked Joe the Plumber.

"I am not President Bush," he said as the polls slid south on him.

A few days later, the White House announced the president had cast an absentee ballot for McCain.

Delighted, Obama's campaign couldn't wait to spread the word.

___

One night after the last combative debate, the two men met again at an annual charity dinner in New York, cracked jokes, paid tribute to one another.

Obama said few Americans had served their country with "the same honor and distinction" as McCain, a former Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam.

McCain found Obama a man of "great skill, energy, and determination. It's not for nothing that he's inspired so many folks in his own party and beyond.

"I can't wish my opponent luck but I do wish him well."

By DAVID ESPO, The Associated Press, November 1, 2008

I thought 1960 was the best campaign I'd ever cover. But 2008 has that election beat.

I remember the precise moment when I became convinced that this presidential campaign was going to be the best I'd ever covered. It was Saturday afternoon, Dec. 8, 2007. I stood in the lobby of Hy-Vee Hall, the big convention center in Des Moines, watching an endless stream of men, women and children come down the escalators from the network of skywalks that link the downtown business blocks of Iowa's capital. They were bundled in winter coats against the chilly temperatures, and the mood was festive -- like a tailgate party for a football game. But the lure here was not a sporting contest; it was a political rally.

Sen. Barack Obama had imported Oprah Winfrey from Chicago to make the first of her endorsement appearances. The queen of daytime television, professing her nervousness at being on a political stage, was nonetheless firm in her declaration: "I'm here to tell you, Iowa, he is the one. Barack Obama!"

It was startling that almost a year before Election Day, 18,000 people had given up their Saturday shopping time to stand (there were no chairs) and listen to an hour of political rhetoric. In all the eight Iowa caucus campaigns I'd covered over four decades, I'd never seen anything like this. In fact, I'd not seen voters so turned on since my first campaign as a political reporter, the classic Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960.

That year, the old Washington Star sent me to Beckley, W.Va., to get a ground-level view of the Democratic primary between Sens. John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. Raleigh County and all of West Virginia were made-to-order for Humphrey, who had the backing of the United Mine Workers and the Democratic state leadership, which was wary of endorsing the Roman Catholic Kennedy in an overwhelmingly Protestant state.

What I found during my week in Beckley, however, was an energized group of young Kennedy enthusiasts, egged on by the candidate's kid brother, Ted. When I walked the country roads and knocked on the doors of the wood-frame cabins, I met a surprising number of voters who were ready to give the youthful senator from Massachusetts a chance. Despite the odds, I reported, Kennedy could win Raleigh County -- as he did.

The day after the Oprah-Obama rally, I went down to Obama's Des Moines headquarters and found Mitch Stewart, his caucus director, happily pawing through a mountain of blue, white and green cards -- each bearing a name, phone number and e-mail address filled out by the people who had packed Hy-Vee Hall. A team of volunteers was beginning to sort the cards by location, distributing them among the 38 offices Stewart had already opened across Iowa. "Phoning will begin tonight," he said.

Nothing comparable was happening that Sunday at the headquarters of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, the caucus favorites, so I reported that Obama might win.

He was not the only long shot who was beginning to move -- and not the only reason this race has been so enthralling.

Even earlier, right after Thanksgiving 2007, I had made my first trip to New Hampshire for this election. I watched a Republican debate at Dartmouth College. The following day, I visited with Mike Dennehy, a young man who had become Sen. John McCain's favorite operative in the Granite State during the 2000 primary, in which McCain had upset then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Dennehy had stayed loyal to McCain after Bush won the nomination, and he was still with the senator, though most of the other campaign veterans had been thrown overboard in the summer of 2007, both perpetrators and victims of a spending spree that had left McCain penniless and seemingly without hope. Dennehy told me that something was happening in New Hampshire: The crowds at McCain's town meetings, which had earlier numbered in the tens or twenties, had begun to grow to 50 or 100. "It's beginning to feel like 2000 again," he said.

Despite the political and journalistic consensus that McCain was finished, he refused to quit and almost single-handedly resurrected his candidacy in a way no one had done since Ronald Reagan took on President Gerald Ford in 1976. On Dec. 2, I wrote that "if the Republican Party really wanted to hold onto the White House in 2009, it's pretty clear what it would do. It would swallow its doubt and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president." (Huckabee, another long shot, was on his way to winning Iowa on the GOP side.)

In January of this year, you could have gotten great odds against Obama and McCain being the finalists in this election. Obama was challenging the obvious front-runner, Clinton, a former first lady and seasoned senator who had more money and better connections than anyone and offered the history-making prospect of becoming the first woman president. More credentialed and experienced rivals -- including Senate veterans Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, former vice presidential candidate Edwards and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- were competing for the non-Clinton vote.

As for McCain, his barriers seemed insurmountable. His angry tirade against the right-wing preachers who had backed Bush in 2000 had alienated him from that wing of the party. He had become the chief cheerleader for an unpopular war in Iraq and the chief GOP spokesman for an immigration bill that most of his party despised. There were younger, more attractive alternatives, including Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Huckabee.

But the voters -- bless 'em -- ignored the oddsmakers. They were determined to do their own thing -- set the nation on a new course, sharply different from that of George W. Bush. It did not matter much to them that McCain was too old, by conventional standards, to be running or that Obama's mixed-race background broke the historic color line on the presidency.

It was the emergence of these two implausible but impressive candidates that gave 2008 its special stamp. But they prevailed only after fierce struggles. McCain pocketed victory in New Hampshire but lost Michigan to Romney. He then turned to South Carolina, where he enlisted Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tom Coburn and even Jack Kemp to vouch for his conservatism, and won narrowly over Huckabee. When he beat the field in Florida at the end of January, the fight was over.

Obama could only wish for that quick a verdict. In South Carolina, Clinton deployed her most powerful weapon, her husband Bill, and for the first time in my life, I saw a former president commit -- and in effect squander -- the prestige and loyalty he'd won in office to the ambitions of his wife. But South Carolina was not the end. Every time Obama seemed to be within one win of clinching, Clinton came back -- in California, New Jersey, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Obama could not shake her, but finally he wore her down.

The drama continued at the conventions. In Denver, the Democrats staged a celebration of newfound unity culminating in Obama's oration to a massive crowd in a football stadium. In St. Paul, the Republicans cheered McCain's surprise choice of a new heroine, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as his vice presidential candidate. Listening to the roars that rocked the hall, I was transported back to San Francisco's Moscone Center in 1984, when Walter Mondale made Geraldine Ferraro the first woman on a national ticket. In both cases, the euphoria was as genuine as it was short-lived. Neither woman was able to establish herself as a plausible "heartbeat away" from the presidency.

That was one of many disappointments in the general election. A potentially captivating experience was lost when Obama declined McCain's invitation to join him in weekly town halls, to stand together and answer voters' questions. The traditional debates were lackluster affairs, with few dramatic moments.

Two things have made these final weeks notable in my eyes. One is the unbelievable volume of television ads, especially on the Democratic side, financed by the unprecedented fortune in private contributions that Obama acquired after he broke his word and rejected public financing, with its $84 million spending limit. That put McCain at a serious disadvantage and probably dealt a death blow to the post-Watergate efforts to limit the role of money in presidential politics.

Second was the continuing tension over the unspoken issue of Obama's race. It had flared in the primaries, in part because of Bill Clinton's campaigning and in part because the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's Chicago minister and an important mentor for 20 years, was revealed to hold incendiary anti-white views. Obama delivered a personal, historically sophisticated address on race , as stirring as any such speech I had heard since the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In the end, he broke completely with his minister and, thanks in large part to McCain's personal aversion to any suggestion of racial campaigning, the issue never fully emerged in a negative way this fall, sparing the country what could have been a divisive experience.

For decades, I have said that the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign was the best I ever saw. But most of the drama in that contest came after Labor Day. This time, the excitement was generously distributed over a whole year, with moments of genuine humor from Huckabee, a torrent of uninhibited conversation from McCain and Biden, and rare eloquence from Obama and both Clintons. The country faces a choice between two men who both promise the nation a more principled, less partisan leadership.

And meanwhile, what a show it has been -- the best campaign I've ever covered.

By David S. Broder, The Washington Post, November 2, 2008

DOVER, N.H. - Former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen was on stage with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a half-filled community center gymnasium, basking in the cheers of her supporters as she offered up, yet again, the generic message of change that has served Democrats so well this year - and has put Republican Senate candidates on the defensive in 11 states across the country.

"Everywhere I go, people are struggling," Mrs. Shaheen, the Democratic candidate for Senate, said on Tuesday. "Health care and the cost of college are increasingly unaffordable. Wages are stagnant. Home values are dropping. Energy costs are still at record highs, and our debt and our deficit are soaring. But we don't have to stand for it. We can tackle these challenges head on, and we can make a difference."

Mrs. Shaheen, who is in a bitter rematch with Senator John E. Sununu, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country, did not offer much in the way of specifics. For weeks, polls have shown no need for her to do so, and with just days left in the race, she was not taking any risks. All year, her main theme has been to tie Mr. Sununu to President Bush, and it seems to be working.

"I think she looked at the numbers, the same numbers that we were all looking at, and decided that she never, ever, had to go out on a limb this year," said Dante J. Scala, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. "All she had to do this year was present herself as a plausible, suitable alternative to the incumbent."

"She has run a very low-risk campaign," Professor Scala added.

But in a state that prides itself on spirited political discourse, lack of specificity can be its own risk. "Shaheen's campaign has been a vapid series of Democratic sound bites without new ideas or systematic thinking about how the economy, war, health care, the deficit and energy link to one another," The Portsmouth Herald wrote, endorsing Mr. Sununu on Thursday.

Such endorsements are likely to have minimal impact in this increasingly Democratic state, where recent polls show Senator Barack Obama pulling far ahead in the presidential race.

Mrs. Shaheen's risk-averse approach to the issues helps explain why a cartoon posted on the politickerNH.com Web site ridicules Mrs. Shaheen as the driver of a car stopped at a green light, refusing to move without knowing what the polls say.

Her campaign is taking every step to prevent slip-ups. When a staff member saw Mrs. Shaheen's husband, William Shaheen, talking to a reporter after the rally in Dover, the Shaheens' youngest daughter, Molly, 22, was sent running over. "Daddy," she said, pulling him away, "I need to speak to you really badly."

The New Hampshire race is emblematic of Senate contests around the nation that have Democrats within reach of the 60-seat majority needed to break filibusters. And in many ways, Mrs. Shaheen, 61, is the archetypal candidate, a seasoned politician with wide name recognition and great fund-raising prowess.

Democratic Senate contenders this year include three former governors (in New Hampshire, Mississippi and Virginia), two well-known representatives (in New Mexico and Colorado), and a popular mayor (Mark Begich of Anchorage, in Alaska). Polls show Democrats ahead in all of these states except Mississippi.

On the issues, Mrs. Shaheen has hewed closely to the national Democratic agenda. She supports wider domestic oil drilling and more nuclear power but as part of an energy policy focused primarily on renewable sources. She generally supports Mr. Obama's health care plan, and has called for swift redeployment of troops from Iraq. She originally supported Mr. Bush's tax cuts but now favors repealing them.

Some political analysts say it is odd to see Mrs. Shaheen so carefully in line with her party, given that she was elected three times as governor and ran for Senate in 2002 as a centrist, much more in the mold of Bill Clinton than Mr. Obama. If elected, her votes might well reflect those moderate tendencies rather than the more left-leaning politics of the voters who have increased the ranks of New Hampshire's Democrats in recent years.

"The issue for New Hampshire's quirky, flinty voters, is fundamentally who is Jeanne Shaheen?" said James W. Pindell, the managing editor of politickerNH.com. "For many voters, the idea that you are voting for a Democratic agenda is good enough."

Perhaps no issue underscores Mrs. Shaheen's cautious approach more than her position on the $700 billion financial bailout. She waited until after the package was approved by Congress to announce that she would have opposed it because it lacked sufficient taxpayer protections. Mr. Sununu voted for it.

Mrs. Shaheen's campaign said her opposition to the bailout showed a willingness to break with the Democratic leadership. "She has never shied from disagreeing with her party," said Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman.

Still, in a televised debate on Thursday night, Mrs. Shaheen struggled with a question from Mr. Sununu challenging her over independence: "Jeanne, can you give an example of a national issue where you opposed the leadership of your party?" Mrs. Shaheen stumbled a bit as she described her opposition to efforts by President Clinton to ban road construction in forests and limit logging, a view that aligned her with the timber industry and put her at odds with environmental groups.

In a previous debate, Mrs. Shaheen stumbled on a similar question, submitted by Skipper W. Morris, an independent voter from Nashua who said he favored centrist politicians. "Help me decide which of you will be more independent," Mr. Morris said.

Mrs. Shaheen restated her main talking points, and in an interview later, Mr. Morris said she had lost his vote. "She basically just spouted the party line," he said.

Throughout Thursday's debate, Mr. Sununu accused Mrs. Shaheen of taking politically expedient positions, especially in response to a question about one of his campaign's advertisements, which quoted her in 2002 expressing support for the Iraq war and Mr. Bush's tax cuts.

"This isn't an ad about whether you supported Iraq," he said. "This is an ad about integrity, about taking one position when it's politically convenient because you think it's popular and then changing your position later on."

But if Mrs. Shaheen can seem less comfortable in front of an audience, Mr. Sununu, 44, often comes across as abrasive. He scolded a moderator for not giving him enough time to answer. When questions about negative advertising began with a clip of one of his opponent's advertisements, he sniped, "I certainly hope you are charging Jeanne Shaheen for the air time."

And while Mr. Sununu, an engineer educated at M.I.T., often sounds as if he is lecturing, Mrs. Shaheen is a disciplined campaigner - though stilted and awkward at times - who is rarely ruffled and methodically drives home her points.

She calmly explained why she had changed her views on the Iraq war, a sentiment shared by many voters in New Hampshire, where intense antiwar sentiment led to a Democratic sweep in 2006. And she quickly returned to tying Mr. Sununu to Mr. Bush.

"Unfortunately, what we have seen from John Sununu is that he has continued to support George Bush's position on the war in Iraq, down the line with every vote, with every appropriation," she said.

And when Mr. Sununu demanded to know why 15 newspapers that endorsed her in 2002 were now supporting him, Mrs. Shaheen shot him a rare sly smile.

"I don't know," she said. "But I hope they help you in the same way they helped me in 2002."

By David M. Herszenhorn, The New York Times,October 31, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - Patrick Campbell worries Barack Obama will raise his taxes but thinks John McCain will send people off to war. He says that leaves him leaning toward Obama ... maybe.

"I'm split right down the middle," said the 50-year-old Air Force Reserve technician from Amherst, N.Y. "Each one has things that are good for me and things that are bad for me. And people like me."

With the sand in the 2008 campaign hourglass about depleted, Campbell is part of a stubborn wedge of people who, somehow, are still making up their minds about who should be president. One in seven, or 14 percent, can't decide or back a candidate but might switch, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll of likely voters released Friday.

Who are they? They look a lot like the voters who've already locked onto a candidate, though they're more likely to be white and less likely to be liberal. And they disproportionately backed Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed run for the Democratic nomination.

For now, their indecision remains intact despite the fortunes that have been spent to tug people toward either McCain, the Republican, or the Democrat Obama. Fueling their uncertainty is a combination of disliking something about both candidates and frustration with this campaign and politics in general.

"We have a lot of candidates who have never really hurt, have never had to struggle" economically, said Jeff Wofford, 28, a pastor and Republican from High Ridge, Mo., who may back McCain. "A lot of candidates are interested in working the political system but aren't really interested in changing things."

Overall, the share of these voters - sometimes referred to as "persuadables" - has barely budged from levels measured in June and September AP-Yahoo! News polls, conducted online by Knowledge Networks.

But the survey - which has repeatedly quizzed the same group of 2,000 adults since last November - shows considerable churning below the surface. Of those now changeable, nearly three-quarters said in June their minds were made up, and half said so just last month.

"These tend to be people with a lower level of knowledge about the election; they don't follow politics as closely," said Michael McDonald, a political science professor from George Mason University who studies voting behavior. "If they can't distinguish between the candidates at this stage, the question is if they will vote."

Election Day is Tuesday. The survey found Obama leading McCain among all likely voters, 51 percent to 43 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Almost four in 10 persuadables lean toward McCain, and about as many are considering backing Obama, while the rest are either undecided or lean toward other candidates. Viewed another way, about one in every 10 supporters of Obama or McCain says he could still change his mind.

Even so, persuadable voters could be especially fertile hunting ground for McCain in the closing days of a contest in which most polls show him trailing.

These people trust Obama less than decided voters do to handle the economy, the Iraq war and terrorism. They are less accepting that the Illinois senator has enough experience to be president. And by a 17 percentage-point spread, more see Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin favorably than unfavorably, unlike the narrow majority of voters already backing a candidate who dislike her.

On the other hand, these wavering voters can be equal-opportunity skeptics. A quarter don't trust either Obama or McCain to deal with the economy and a third are uncomfortable with both on the federal deficit.

"I don't have a feel for either one of these guys," said Jeff Condatore, 47, an independent and computer analyst from Ringwood, N.J. "I don't like any of the choices."

Nearly two-thirds express frustration and a quarter anger over the campaign, far broader disaffection than decided voters voice. Only 12 percent say they are excited about the race, one-third the figure for voters backing a candidate.

Just four in 10 persuadables report being contacted by political workers urging them to vote in the presidential contest, compared with just over half of those who've made up their minds. That could reflect the campaigns' targeting their resources to more motivated voters or to problems locating these less involved people.

Asked where they disagree with Obama, changeable voters most frequently mention taxes and the economy, health care, abortion and social issues such as gun control, and personal traits including his race and his honesty. For McCain, it's the economy and taxes, health care, foreign policy and abortion.

"I don't think anything will change if Obama is elected. If McCain is elected, I don't think anything would change either," said Susan Miller, 42, a Los Angeles accountant tentatively backing Libertarian Bob Barr.

Persuadable voters don't differ noticeably from those who have made up their minds by gender, age or education, though more of them report feeling stress from personal debt, according to the poll.

Half are independents, more than double their proportion among decided voters. But, as with decided voters, more persuadables are Democrats than Republicans. Four in 10 supported Clinton's candidacy this spring.

"She got cheated, I thought," said Chris Markle, 25, who's from Schenectady, N.Y., and now leans toward McCain. "I'm kind of upset about that."

The AP-Yahoo! News poll of 1,040 likely voters was conducted Oct. 17-27. It included interviews with 147 likely voters considered persuadable, meaning they're either undecided or back a candidate but say they might change their mind, and 893 likely voters considered not persuadable. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 8.1 percentage points for persuadable likely voters and 3.3 points for those considered not persuadable.

The poll was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press, October 31, 2008

Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign has collected a record-shattering $640 million, but only two of his staff members are among the 15 highest-paid workers in the general election, according to campaign finance records. The rest, including the three highest paid, are employed by Senator John McCain.

The Obama campaign, despite having more than 700 field offices across the country, compared with fewer than 400 for Mr. McCain, has spent slightly less on rent than its counterpart.

And even though Mr. Obama has raised $400 million more than Mr. McCain, he has spent less on fund-raising consultants.

Mr. Obama has devoted enormous sums in this election to nearly everything, including more than $280 million for advertising and $31 million for his campaign's payroll. His half-hour prime-time commercial on Wednesday, which cost well over $3 million, was perhaps the most visible flexing of his financial muscle.

But the Obama campaign, under the watchful eye of its manager, David Plouffe, has worked hard to maintain a reputation for frugality. The campaign has escaped the glare that has come with spending excesses that dogged other candidates, including the millions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton handed to her pollster Mark Penn, John Edward's $400 haircuts and the large outlays for consultants and other expenses that nearly bankrupted Mr. McCain's primary campaign last year.

"It's both extravagant and frugal at the same time," Joe Trippi, a former top adviser to Mr. Edwards and the manager of Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, said about Mr. Obama's operation. "Extravagant in its mission and ambition but frugal in how they implemented it."

McCain campaign officials pointed to steps they have taken to save money, a challenge made urgent after the campaign's implosion last year. But the campaign has also had far less to work with, constrained by the $84 million given to it for the general election under the public financing system.

Having opted out of public financing, Mr. Obama has spent far more than the combined total spent by President Bush and Senator John Kerry in 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Obama campaign's gaping advantage is sharpest in its advertising budget and payroll. Last week, the Obama campaign spent nearly twice as much as Mr. McCain and the Republican National Committee on television advertising. Mr. Obama's payroll had nearly 800 employees in the first half of October, twice as many as Mr. McCain's, with far more Obama-paid workers in closely contested states than McCain-paid workers.

Nevertheless, a review of F.E.C. records shows that the Obama campaign has used several methods to keep expenses down.

Both campaigns have relied heavily on volunteers. The Obama campaign has increased its ranks beyond salaried employees who receive regular paychecks and benefits by enlisting hundreds of local per diem workers for get-out-the-vote efforts. The Obama campaign has made $3.2 million in per diem payments, many no more than a few hundred dollars and most often made for brief periods during the Democratic primaries. The McCain campaign has reported relatively few per diem expenditures.

Unlike its Republican counterpart, the Obama campaign has frequently used a provision in campaign finance law that allows supporters to donate work space for the campaign. The campaign has credited more than 250 people with making in-kind rent contributions totaling $210,000.

When Mr. Obama's field workers arrived in Kentucky before that state's primary in May, Flora Templeton Stuart, a lawyer in Bowling Green, offered to make her office and its seven phone lines available on weekends and evenings for about three weeks. The campaign booked a $100 in-kind contribution from Ms. Stuart, who said she felt more than compensated by being invited to stand behind the stage when Mr. Obama spoke at an event.

"My reward," she said, "was to hug him."

The use of in-kind donations for office space can be problematic if the estimated value is substantially lower than what it would cost to rent the same space on the open market. Kenneth A. Gross, a lawyer in Washington who specializes in election law, said the F.E.C. was usually reluctant to challenge a campaign's estimates as long as some in-kind credit had been recorded.

To be sure, a close look at campaign finance data shows that the Obama campaign has indulged in its share of luxuries. It has spent more than $5 million on renting arenas and other places for Mr. Obama's sprawling campaign events. Obama campaign officials also appear to have devoted significantly more than Mr. McCain's organization to polling, about $3.8 million since July, compared with just over $1.1 million for the McCain campaign.

The Obama campaign spent more than $57,000 at the Four Seasons in Amman, Jordan, during the candidate's overseas trip in July, although a spokesman said that much of that was for rooms for the traveling press corps and that the campaign would be reimbursed by the news organizations. The campaign spent about $60,000 on the staging for Mr. Obama's speech in Berlin on that trip. Then there is the $140,000 that the campaign has spent at companies that make American flags, apparently mostly for campaign events, compared with just $7,000 spent by the McCain campaign.

But these seem to be more the exception than the rule.

The three highest-paid staff members in the presidential campaign since July, when the general election campaign began in earnest, were Mark Salter, Mr. McCain's speechwriter; Robert DeServi, who produces the campaign's events; and Trey Walker, who manages Mr. McCain's campaign in the mid-Atlantic region. The highest-paid Obama staff member was Julianna Smoot, his finance director.

The Obama campaign's rules for limiting expenses are strict. Workers at the Chicago headquarters are reimbursed for trips to the airport only if they take public transportation. Staff members on the road receive a $30 per diem for meals, compared with $40 for members of the McCain campaign. In the primaries, the Obama campaign required workers to drive if they were going somewhere less than a five-hour drive away.

"Even though the budget was large," Mr. Plouffe said, "because of the aggressiveness of the strategy, you really have to watch every dollar."

The best-compensated people in campaigns are usually not staff members but consultants. Media consultants have typically received some of the biggest paydays from presidential campaigns, earning 6 to 7 percent of the total advertising purchases by Democrats in the last several elections. The Republicans saved money in 2004 by paying flat fees to their media strategists. Democratic campaigns, including Mr. Obama's, began clamping down as well in this election, capping the fees.

Mr. Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, said his firm, where Mr. Plouffe is a partner but is on leave, is likely to collect about 1 percent of the total amount spent on advertising. Democratic media consultants divided amongst themselves nearly $9 million in 2004, approximately what the Bush campaign paid its consultants for a more extensive advertising effort. Mr. Axelrod said he believed that the media firms involved in the Obama campaign would collect a similar amount, even though it has aired tens of millions of dollars more in advertisements.

Mr. Axelrod likes to joke that at the Obama headquarters, if someone waves a hand in front of the automated paper towel dispenser in the men's room, a section of paper towel is dispensed; wave at it again and a note spits out, "See Plouffe."

By Michael Luo and Mike McIntire, The New York Times, October 30, 2008

VIRGINIA BEACH - Senator Barack Obama is spending the final four days of his campaign mining for votes in places where Democrats have not turned out at full strength in recent presidential races, hoping to offset other areas in swing states where his candidacy may need a lift.

As Mr. Obama arrived for a rally here on Thursday night, the finishing touches were being etched into his itinerary for the last 96 hours of the contest. He is scheduled to visit at least eight states across three time zones, focusing on liberal and conservative regions from Nevada to Florida where his strategists believe the Democratic margins could be increased by one or two percentage points.

"Don't believe for a second this election is over. Don't think for a minute that power concedes," Mr. Obama said, imploring his supporters to consider the critical importance of their ballots. "We have to work like our future depends on it in this last week - because it does."

While Mr. Obama is briefly swinging through Iowa on Friday afternoon, aides described it as a valedictory return to the state that is most responsible for propelling his candidacy after he won the caucuses there in January. Mr. Obama also wanted a site near Chicago, where he is planning to take a three-hour respite from politics to celebrate Halloween with his two daughters.

His aides say they think the electoral battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Wisconsin and New Mexico are trending toward Mr. Obama, though advisers do not rule out a last-minute visit to any place that suddenly looks troublesome. Instead, he will focus his attention on six states that President Bush won four years ago.

After a late-night rally on Friday evening in Indiana, Mr. Obama heads Saturday to Henderson, Nev.; Pueblo, Colo.; and Springfield, Mo. He is scheduled to make a three-city fly-around on Sunday. And on Monday, he is set to dash through Florida, North Carolina and back here to Virginia.

The breadth of Mr. Obama's travel underscores the number of Republican-leaning states that his advisers believe remain within his reach. It is a wide path to claiming the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, a strategy intended either to offer a multitude of options to get there or pave the way for a larger margin of victory.

Mr. Obama, who traveled from here to a late-night rally on Thursday in Columbia, Mo., suddenly scheduled a second stop in Missouri on Saturday evening. The state's economic condition, as well as information gathered from polls and door-to-door canvassing, gave Mr. Obama's advisers reason to think a weekend visit could pay dividends.

"It's one more red state where we are playing offense," said Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign. "We don't think this race is over, but I'd rather be us than them."

The path of his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, is considerably more constricted. As Mr. Obama hit three states on Thursday, Mr. McCain encamped in Ohio, where he is also scheduled to spend Friday. He is set to campaign in Virginia on Saturday and New Hampshire over the weekend. On Monday, a six-state barnstorming tour is on deck.

As Mr. Obama worked to keep alive a wide array of electoral options, advisers in a war room at the campaign's Chicago headquarters kept a careful watch on polling, early voting statistics and intensity in a variety of states. Democratic-leaning states were also being monitored for any late developments that would warrant a visit by Mr. Obama or his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Among the biggest focal points in the final lap of the race is Florida, where Mr. Obama began the day on Thursday with a rally at a baseball field in Sarasota, an area dominated by Republicans. But Mr. Obama ventured into the territory, as he intends to do in other regions all weekend, to encourage Democrats to increase their margins even if they do not carry the area.

Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, were heading to Florida on Friday. Mr. Biden was heading back on Sunday, while Mr. Obama was scheduled to return for a rally on Monday morning in Jacksonville, Fla.

Some Democrats advised Mr. Obama to make a quick detour to Arizona, the home state of Mr. McCain, where some party officials believe the presidential race has narrowed. Strategists to Mr. Obama have not agreed to such a move, saying they are intent on winning the states where they have spent millions on television advertisements and building ground organizations.

But the campaign schedule, aides noted, is written in pencil through Election Day.





By Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times, October 30, 2008

HENDERSON, Nev. - At grocery stores across Las Vegas, voters are casting their ballots, and then shopping for bananas or hitting the slot machines a few feet away.

About 100 people have voted from the windows of their cars, A.T.M. style, in Orange County, Calif. Several busloads of voters pulled up to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland on Sunday, did what they came to do, and then repaired to a church across the street for some fried chicken.

In all its forms, early voting has been an election year hit. Enormous lines in Florida led Gov. Charlie Crist to issue an executive order extending early voting hours statewide from eight hours a day to 12, while in Georgia an elderly woman in Cobb County stood in the sun so long to vote that she collapsed.

For many, an early vote has been a stab at ending, at least in their own homes and hearts, the seemingly endless loop of campaign rhetoric, cascading polls and tension, according to interviews over the past several days with dozens of early voters in six states.

"I thought I might as well do this," said Rhonda Woolcox, 83, who came to a community center here on Monday to cast her presidential vote for Senator John McCain of Arizona. "I wasn't about to change my mind."

Others seemed to view early voting as a leap of faith.

"I was afraid that if I voted early our votes wouldn't be counted," said Glynetter Prather, 44, who nonetheless cast her ballot in Florida for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. "I mean, there's enough time to lose these ballots. And I hate to say that, but that's Florida's signature."

Among some of the 32 states that allow their residents to vote early without an excuse, either by mail or in person, the verdict is already in from a full quarter of registered voters - well into the millions. In some counties across the nation, the percentages are far higher. The early voting will continue for several days in most of the states, but in Louisiana it is already closed, and it will end on Friday or Saturday elsewhere to give time to update the books to prevent people from voting twice.

In 2004, 22 percent of voters cast an early presidential ballot, and the number is expected to climb to 30 percent to 35 percent this year. "We have predicted a third of the electorate; I expect that we will meet that," said James Hicks, research director at the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Although some states turn on their early voting tabulators before Election Day, none reveal the results until the polls close on Election Day itself and most do not begin counting a vote until then, said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center in Houston, an association of elections officials.

No matter, one result is already known: Voters are drawn to the ballot boxes early.

In some places, like the three polling stations visited in the Las Vegas area on Monday, voters were rewarded with short waits and well-oiled systems designed to make them so. Several grocery stores offered electronic voting.

"We are the only state in the nation where you'll hear, 'Wet mop at Voting Booth 4,' " said Bob Walsh, a spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state.

In other states, lines snaked for hours and tested tempers. In New Orleans, for example, voters clocked six-hour waits this week.

In Jupiter, Fla., security guards have been hired to direct traffic and oversee the mild mayhem at a county library, where the parking lot has been jammed with the over-70 crowd competing for spots so they could cast a vote.

Early voting stations in Clayton County, Ga., which includes suburbs of Atlanta, stayed open until 1 a.m. one day last week to accommodate voters who had been delayed - some by as many as nine hours - by snags with the software that confirms voter registration.

Even with the problems and delays, voters in many states said they viewed the chance to vote early - without the constraint of the past of having to provide an excuse for not voting on Election Day - as a boon.

"In New Hampshire where we came from," said Arthur Schuetz, 62, who voted Monday at the community center here in Henderson, "it is not socially acceptable to do anything but go to the polls on Election Day and stand in the snow talking with all your neighbors. But here you can vote in five minutes and go home. It's super."

Mr. Schuetz said he voted for Mr. McCain, a Republican, with enthusiasm. His wife, Linda, called the choice the "lesser of two evils."

For those who work long hours and occasionally miss the chance to vote, early casting is helpful.

"Voting is always a problem for us nurses," said Donna J. Simmons, 59, who cast a vote in Cleveland, anticipating a 12-hour shift on Election Day. "We're always trying to work out ways to cover for each other so one of us can go and vote. I think this event is the most wonderful thing because voting is always such a challenge for people like me."

So far, the early voting has attracted more Democrats than Republicans. For example, in North Carolina, according to state election officials, 58 percent of early voters have been registered Democrats compared with 25 percent registered Republicans. Democrats have also turned out in higher numbers in Florida, Iowa and New Mexico.

For the last few months, volunteers for Mr. Obama, a Democrat, in California, a state sure to go Democratic, have been making telephone calls to voters in neighboring Nevada, helping to perfect the lists of likely early vote-casters for get-out-the-vote canvassers. In Nevada, a Republican stronghold in past presidential elections, 52 percent of early electors in the population centers have been Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 16 percent unaffiliated voters.

Some of them have cast their ballots at the Galleria at Sunset Mall in Henderson, where voters lined up to use three rows of machines sandwiched between two jewelry stores, a Mervyn's department store and a stand selling face cream.

Volunteers waved citizens, some carrying shopping bags, to the open machines with little American flags festooned to sticks. Leah Darrington, 30, came with four couples to vote, and the adults took turns entertaining the five children who were brought along.

Dee Welch gave her son DeLano an admonishing tug as he tried to drag her from the rows of voting machines to a toy store. "I'm getting in line to vote for president," Ms. Welch said firmly. "So you behave!"

There were elderly couples who shuffled carefully along the slick mall floor, scores of parents pushing strollers, couples holding hands as they affixed the "I voted" stickers to their shirts, and several first-time voters.

"It was fun," said Christie Kaminska, 20, who picked Mr. Obama for her first presidential vote. "I have class on Tuesday, and I heard from someone at school I could vote here. Plus, I have some things I needed to return."

In Pittsboro, N.C., Zaw Min Thu, 36, a refugee from Myanmar who came to the United States eight years ago, cast his first vote, for Mr. Obama, this week.

"I wanted to check it out because of my work schedule," said Mr. Thu, who works as a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. "Our government is a military government, and the government is not good," he said. "That's why I vote today."

The Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, one of the largest black churches in Cleveland, has pulled nearly 200 churchgoers over the past few weeks to early voting polls.

"I look at this as a form of cholesterol removal from the clogged circulatory system of this nation's election process," said Larry Harris, the pastor there. "We know we're looking at record-breaking turnout for this election. It's going to be difficult to count all the votes that day. And if the weather is bad, some of these people will just stay home. So we need to get people out early, and make sure that every vote counts."

By Jennifer Steinhauer, The New York Times, October 29, 2008

COLOMBIA, Mo. (AP) - "Here I am, signed, sealed, delivered." That's what the giddy crowds at Barack Obama's campaign rallies hear when he walks off the stage, the booming sound of Stevie Wonder singing about the promise of a sure thing.

The curious part is that Obama keeps saying just the opposite: Not one thing is sealed.

"We can't afford to slow down, or sit back, or let up, for one day, for one minute, for one second in this last week," the Democratic presidential nominee told supporters Thursday.

"Not now. Not now," Obama said in the Florida sunshine. "We've got to work hard."

For a range of reasons - the slippery nature of polls, the Democrats' history of heartbreak, the still-to-be-determined effect of race, the desire not to jinx himself - Obama is, in fact, working the vote hard.

In his race against Republican John McCain, Obama has gone big, drawing hundreds of thousands of people to rallies in the last few days alone. He used his fundraising muscle to buy a prime-time TV slot for his infomercial, viewed by 33.6 million, and touted his new unity with former President Clinton.

But Obama also is careful to look engaged individually, too. Twice this week, in campaign offices outside Denver and in Pittsburgh, he got on the phone directly with voters.

One woman grilled him at length about his environmental record. One said she wanted tickets to his inauguration. One made him smile by saying she was 100 percent Obama.

"I won't let you down," he told her.

It is standard election politics not to look cocky. Voters hate being taken for granted. Yet the tone of Obama's argument suggests he is going beyond playing it safe.

Despite all the polling pointing in his favor, there remains a feeling in his campaign that anything can happen at the end. Obama appears easy and unworried - he even took time Thursday to visit a pumpkin patch - but signs and words of overconfidence are shunned.

"Complacency kills campaigns," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist and John Kerry's pollster during the 2004 presidential race. "Winners always run like they are behind."

That helps explain why Obama barreled on with an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania this week despite the foul weather. The thousands of people who showed up endured sideways rain, cold chills and mud. McCain canceled a similar rally 50 miles away.

Obama told them: "If we see this kind of dedication on Election Day, there is no way that we're not going to bring change to America."

Late come-from-behind wins are rare in presidential races.

In Gallup polling, only twice in the past 14 elections did a candidate lose the popular vote after being ahead about a week before the election. They were Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 and President Bush in 2000, although he won the electoral vote.

As the election closes in, Obama leads McCain in most national polls, and most state surveys show him running strong in traditional Democratic states and leading in some that Bush won in 2004, including Ohio, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia. That makes a path for a McCain victory difficult to discern.

Mellman said all those polls assume that every Obama supporter will turn out to vote, and that every volunteer will do what it takes to turn out the vote.

"Don't believe for one second in these polls," Obama told a crowd of 35,000 people outside Orlando, Fla., late Wednesday night. "Power concedes nothing. We are going to work over the next five days like our lives depended on it. We're going to have to struggle."

When Obama talks of that election struggle, others have a hard time believing. His consistent lead in the polls has even become part of the late-night TV comedy conversation.

Craig Ferguson of CBS' "Late Late Show" put it this way: "Obama is so far ahead now, seems the only way he can lose is if his supporters screw it up. But aha! Obama's supporters have a secret weakness: They are Democrats."

One way to look at Obama's approach is that he's not just running to win. He's trying to sweep every single state in play, giving him and his party a crushing win and big leverage.

A more sober reading is that Obama has already learned one humbling lesson this year.

He scored a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses and then, while riding high, promptly lost the New Hampshire primary to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"The great thing about having run for 21 months is we know from hard experience that you shouldn't take anything for granted," Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an interview.

"We've been ahead and we've been behind," he said. "Sometimes we've assumed that when we're ahead - New Hampshire is a big example - that that guarantees anything. It doesn't."

By BEN FELLER, The Associated Press, October 31, 2008

Obama isn't much ahead of where Kerry was in 2004, but McCain lags far behind the support Bush received.

Democrats smell victory.

The average of seven surveys taken between October 20 and 24 shows Barack Obama with an 8-point lead over John McCain. In 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by less than 3 points.

What has happened? The Republican vote has collapsed. It's 9 points lower than four years ago (51 percent for Bush in 2004; 42 percent for McCain). But Obama is doing only 2 points better than Kerry (50 percent for Obama; 48 percent for Kerry). Where did the other voters go? Answer: to the "unsure" category (7 percent). They don't want to vote Republican this year, but they're not certain whether they will vote for Obama.

The same thing is happening in battleground states.

Florida: Obama's support averages 48 percent, only 1 point higher than Kerry's. McCain's averages 45 percent, 7 points lower than Bush's.

Ohio: Obama's 49 percent is the same as Kerry's vote in 2004. McCain's support, averaging 44 percent, is 7 points lower than Bush's vote in Ohio.

Pennsylvania: Obama is leading with 51 percent, the same as Kerry's vote. McCain is trailing at 41 percent, 7 points lower than Bush.

All of this suggests that the driving dynamic in this election is party. This is a "throw-the-bums-out" election. And the Republicans are the "bums."

The evidence? In the mid-October CNN/Opinion Research poll, only 36 percent of voters endorsed the view that most Republican members of Congress deserve to be re-elected. A substantially higher number (50 percent) wanted to see most Democratic members re-elected.

Asked how they intend to vote for Congress this year, voters gave the Democrats a 12-point lead nationwide (48 percent to 36 percent). That's bigger than Obama's lead, and it suggests a Democratic tide that could sweep in Obama as well as larger Democratic majorities in Congress. Or, more precisely, it suggests a tide that could sweep Republicans out to sea.

Democrats argue that big congressional majorities would help get things done. "We're going to bring change," said Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "It's going to be mainstream change.... It's certainly going to avoid the gridlock that every single thing you want to do is filibustered."

Schumer's New York colleague, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, went out on the campaign trail for fellow Democrats. "With your help," she told supporters of EMILY's List, "we will add to the majority of Democrats in the House, and, yes, we will get a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in the Senate."

If Obama wins, he is likely to be the Democratic standard-bearer until 2016. If Obama loses, Clinton becomes the instant front-runner for the party's 2012 presidential nomination. Is it really in Clinton's interest for Obama to get elected? "I can't shake the feeling that some people here are pulling for me," McCain said at the Al Smith dinner in New York City last month. "I am delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary," he joked.

Clinton might be making a different calculation -- that Obama is likely to win and the Democrats are likely to enjoy a big congressional victory. She wants it to be her victory -- and her husband's -- too. Last week, former President Clinton campaigned alongside Obama for the first time.

But do voters really want one party to have that much power? In the CNN poll, slightly more people said they would rather see the White House and Congress controlled by different parties (41 percent) than by the same party (36 percent). The last time one party controlled everything, the outcome was not good. Republicans paid in 2006 for one-party control, just as Democrats did in 1994.

Republicans are warning voters not to give Democrats a "blank check." The National Republican Senatorial Committee ran an ad in North Carolina advising voters against supporting Democratic Senate nominee Kay Hagan. "No checks and balances," the ad warns. "If she wins, they get a blank check." The NRSC also sent out an e-mail signed by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that said, "If we don't act now -- to defend our Senate firewall -- conservatives will be powerless to stop Barack Obama's rule by fiat." Both the Republican ad and the Republican e-mail appear to assume that Obama will be the next president.

By William Schneider, National Journal Magazine, November 1, 2008

SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. -- Emily Daywalt decided to go to the first political rally of her life because she wanted to cheer Sarah Palin, who was here a few days ago to inspire the faithful. Daywalt said she likes that Palin "hunts and that she believes in God and that she is a strong, independent woman."

But ask the 19-year-old from South Mountain, Pa., why she is voting against Barack Obama, and she homes right in on John McCain's closing argument. Obama, Daywalt said, "wants to spread the wealth," which she interprets as meaning that he'd "give it to people who don't do anything."

For all of the McCain campaign's relentless use of guilt-by-association techniques, the 2008 campaign is concluding on a remarkably substantive argument. It is a debate about what constitutes social fairness and whether a top-down or a bottom-up approach to economic growth will define the country's future.

Obama is often described as cautious, but he has been bold and unrelenting in his criticism of trickle-down economics and tax cuts concentrated on the wealthy. He used yesterday's negative numbers on economic growth to press his case against theories that conservatives have been touting for decades.

"The decline in our GDP didn't happen by accident," Obama said. "It is a direct result of the Bush administration's trickle-down, Wall Street-first, Main Street-last policies that John McCain has embraced for the last eight years."

Yes, economic populism is thriving right now, and if Obama wins, his election would not simply be a non-ideological verdict against the status quo. It would be a clear repudiation of conservative economic ideas and McCain's claim that a more egalitarian approach to growth constitutes "socialism." McCain's attacks on Obama's thinking have been so forceful and direct that they require this election to be seen as a referendum that will settle a long-running philosophical argument.

Obama has presented McCain with a problem. By endorsing tax cuts for Americans earning less than $200,000 a year -- i.e., the vast majority of taxpayers -- Obama has complicated the typical Republican claim that Democrats always support raising taxes.

Obama is candid in saying that he thinks the wealthy should pay more so that most Americans can pay less. He also thinks government can help vulnerable members of the middle class and the poor secure health care and go to college.

This has complicated McCain's effort to root his argument on taxes in middle-class self-interest, since Obama already has that covered. So McCain has actually had to defend giving large tax benefits to the wealthy and to business, and engage in a wholesale argument against any sort of redistribution.

McCain regularly charges that Obama wants to be the "redistributor in chief." Speaking at the rally here at Shippensburg University, Palin was forced to say this about Obama's support for a variety of tax credits aimed at helping the poor and middle class: "He says that he is for a tax credit, which is when government takes your money in order to give it away to someone else."

That is, of course, a mighty peculiar definition of tax credits. It is also an odd argument from a ticket that itself is committed to a research-and-development tax credit for corporations.

It's true that Obama favors "refundable" tax credits to help low-income workers, including some who may pay no income taxes but do pay many other taxes. McCain has argued that Obama's refundable tax credits amount to "welfare." That, too, is a strange claim, since McCain favors refundable credits as part of his health plan. But the whole idea is to convince voters such as Emily Daywalt that Obama really is just out to help those "who don't do anything."

And that is why Obama's 30-minute advertisement on Wednesday night was targeted directly to voters such as Daywalt, or at least to those like her who are still persuadable. It was Obama's tribute to the country's working people who seek nothing more than decent incomes, health care and a chance to see their children succeed. It was less a political ad than a documentary about the value of work and the responsibilities of family life.

For years, Republicans have argued that the way to help struggling working people is to give more money to the wealthy. Obama is saying that we should cut out the middleman and help working people directly. My hunch is that Obama's argument will prevail, and that conservatives will then work overtime to try to deny the judgment that the people have rendered.

By E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post, October 31, 2008

It is hard to imagine that "undecideds," like restless phantoms with unfinished business, still haunt these final hours.

What can they be waiting for? An epiphany? Some final bit of information to tip the scale? A hidden corpse, an illegitimate child, a beloved aunt living in public housing?

Aha! As October surprises go, the very late-breaking (alleged) discovery that Barack Obama's aunt lives in public housing in South Boston is weak tea. According to the Times of London, one Zeituni Onyango -- a woman whose walls are plastered with Obama photos -- is "Auntie Zeituni" in Obama's book "Dreams From My Father."

Whether the story is true is still unknown, but it didn't take long for the right-wing blogosphere to embrace it. How delicious for them, if true, that her accommodations are not up to the standards to which her nephew has become accustomed. There's also an errant "Uncle Omar" around some place, though details are murky.

What tangled webs entwine America's family tree.

Companion to this news is a "red diaper baby" story in American Thinker about Obama's early training as a communist at his mother's knee.

Both are being circulated as post-narratives to Obama's chosen one, but neither is likely to change many minds. Too many Woodstock boomers grew up to become conservatives for the diaper story to gain traction. And few can profess to having bought condos for their less-well-off extended family members.

Moving on. What else don't we know, and how much does it matter to the undecideds, who represent about 8 percent of the voting public? If they tuned in to Obama's Wednesday night infomercial, they were greeted by a man more Reaganesque than Reagan. Calm, soothing and reassuring, he presented real-people stories and real-people solutions with the voice and demeanor of Mr. Rogers. One kept expecting him to trade his shoes and jacket for sneakers and a dye-free sweater.

It was Gee Whiz meets Cheez Whiz. But it was also probably effective. In the midst of Halloween season, there was nothing scary about That One.

So what are these zombies of the voting booth really waiting for? Something they won't find: the perfect choice. It doesn't exist. The clear path is dappled with doubt. The telling clue is buried in the hearts of Col. Mustard, who worries about Iraq and taxes under Obama, and Miss Scarlet, who can't get past McCain's age and the winking wonderwoman of Wasilla.

A friend's late-night call cast light on the undecided's milieu. She was filling out her ballot at home and had made every choice but one. The presidential ticket.

"I just can't quite bring myself to do it. I hate Sarah Palin. Help me out here."

I laughed. I refilled my glass. And why not? Life in these United States, as Reader's Digest used to say, isn't perfect, but neither is it Somalia.

Here's what I told her. Make two lists -- one of tangibles (war, taxes, health care) and one of intangibles (to be discussed) -- assign a value (1-5) to each, and take out your calculator. Discount race unless it really matters, in which case, shred your ballot.

If McCain gets the highest score, then pray he inherited his mother's longevity gene. If Obama is your man, then otherwise vote all Republican.

As even Democrats should do, lest one party control both Congress and the executive branch. That absolute power corrupts absolutely is a dictum that needs no defense. That both parties are equally corruptible is a monument to understatement. And gridlock, though we profess to hate it, is sometimes preferable to the alternatives.

Come Tuesday, the Democrats could strengthen their grip on Congress, even securing a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. Even many of those enamored of the intangibles (hope, change, the end of race in identity politics, Jesse Jackson's permanent retirement) don't want to see a world designed exclusively by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Reaching across the aisle -- the persistent promise of this election season -- has no meaning if there's no one on the other side.

Four years ago, Obama famously described his vision of America as neither liberal nor conservative, neither black, white, Latin nor Asian.

"There's the United States of America," he said. "We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

Should he win on Tuesday, let's hope he meant it.

By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post, October 31, 2008

In the 1943 movie Tender Comrade, Ginger Rogers utters the words "Share and share alike--that's democracy." Nobody objected at the time, but four years later, Rogers' mother complained to the House Un-American Activities Committee that her daughter had been forced to express a communist sentiment. The scriptwriter, Dalton Trumbo (who actually was a communist), went to jail for refusing to testify and then spent years on the Hollywood blacklist, unable to get work. But "share and share alike" has been rehabilitated and restored to its place of honor as one of America's finest bromides.

So what future awaits "spread the wealth," a similar bromide uttered by Barack Obama to Joe the Plumber at a rally in Ohio? The history of this expression can also be traced to a movie: Hello, Dolly, released in 1969 and never before now regarded as subversive. But perhaps it deserves a closer look. It starred Barbra Streisand, a notorious Hollywood lefty who also starred in The Way We Were, the 1973 weepie that glamorized frizzy-haired communists and left-wing agitators from New York City and derogated real Americans like handsome blond Robert Redford. In Hello, Dolly, Streisand plays a professional matchmaker who has her eye on Walter Matthau, playing a "well-known unmarried half-a-millionaire." At a key moment, she declares, "Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around." Where was Streisand's mother while this outrage was being perpetrated?

Wait. It gets worse. Hello, Dolly is one of many versions of The Matchmaker, a play by Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town and other treacly warhorses of the American theater. Over the years, millions of American children have had to sit through what once was viewed as sentimental propaganda and therefore good for them. Many impressionable young people have even been forced to say the line about spreading money around in student productions of The Matchmaker, taking innocent pleasure in the joke about manure while their little minds were being polluted with redistributionist propaganda. While I remember Wilder's plays as being flag-draped, I read in Wikipedia that his major theme was "the universality of the simple yet meaningful lives of all people in the world." Also, he was gay. So much for him.

John McCain thinks Obama's "spread the wealth" comment is a major gotcha. He has locked his chops around this remark like a terrier around Obama's ankle and keeps repeating it. He regards it as self-evidently self-damning. On Meet the Press, McCain ducked Tom Brokaw's invitation to agree or disagree with Sarah Palin that Obama is a "socialist." But a day later McCain brandished a radio interview from seven years ago in which Obama had used the term redistributive change.

Seven years ago, as Brokaw pointed out, McCain himself was sounding redistributionist, complaining about President Bush's tax cuts. Campaigning against Bush in 2000, he said that "when you ... reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more." Obama has said no more than this, except to set the "level of comfort" at $250,000, which is pretty comfortable. McCain is free to argue that Obama will raise taxes on people making less than $250,000. My bet is that whoever wins the election will be forced to. But his apparent belief that the very expression "spread the wealth" puts Obama beyond the pale is so out of touch that it's almost touching. It belongs on the golf courses of Arizona, not on the campaign trail.

We may disagree on how much to spread around and how to go about it. We all tend to think that it's someone else's wealth that needs to be spread around and that it ought to be spread in our direction. But the principle that the unequal distribution of wealth is a legitimate concern and government policies should mitigate it has been part of American democracy since at least the New Deal. In fact, it is a commonplace that the moderate wealth-spreading of the New Deal saved American democracy. Today collecting checks from people and issuing checks to other people--or the same people--is the government's main domestic activity.

Although it was an off-the-cuff remark and one that Obama probably regrets, he actually put it well, avoiding the suggestion of envy or class war, which are the usual accusations about such talk. Spreading it around is "good for everybody," he says. And who disagrees? Or would you like to live behind locked gates and hire guards to protect your family from kidnapping, as in places where they spread it around even less than here?

By Michael Kinsley, Time, October 31, 2008

The Liberal Ideologue Could Be A Well-Meaning Failure; The Pragmatic Reformer Could Be A Great Leader.

When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist.

I don't believe that. But I do think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience -- albeit as willing to deploy deception as the next politician. But while the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president.

An ultraliberal in moderate garb? The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called "redistribution of wealth" in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system's all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits.

This redistributionist Obama has stayed in the background since he set his sights on the presidency years ago, except when he told Joe the Plumber that his tax plan would help "spread the wealth." This Obama seems largely invisible to many supporters. But he may retain some attachment to the radical-leftist sensibility in which -- as his impressive 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, explains with reflective detachment -- he was marinated as a youth and young man.

Obama spent much of his teenage years searching for his black identity. He was mentored for a time by the poet Frank Marshall Davis, a black-power activist who had once been a member of the Communist Party, and who was (according to Obama's book) "living in the same Sixties time warp" as Obama's mother, a decidedly liberal free spirit.

In college, lest he be "mistaken for a sellout," Obama "chose my friends carefully," according to his book: "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." After college, his social conscience steered him to become a community organizer and "organize black folks" in Chicago, from 1985 to 1988.

It was then that Obama met the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who as head of Trinity United Church of Christ did many good things but had a now-famous penchant for America-hating, white-bashing, conspiracy-theorizing, Farrakhan-honoring rants. A central theme of the first Wright sermon that Obama attended -- the one titled "the audacity of hope" -- was that "white folks' greed runs a world in need."

After graduating near the top of his Harvard Law School class in 1991, Obama could easily have landed a prestigious Supreme Court clerkship and gone on to a big law firm where partners make well over a $1 million a year. Instead, he followed his social conscience and political ambition back to Chicago, joining a small law firm.

Obama became more than casually acquainted with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground bomber with whom he served on the boards of two Chicago philanthropic groups. In 1995, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn -- the same Dohrn who in a blood-curdling 1969 speech had cited the Charles Manson gang of murderers as role models for the Weather Underground -- co-hosted a political fundraiser for Obama at their home. By then, the still-unrepentant Ayers had become a respected member of an academic establishment in which far-left views are fashionable.

I dwell on these much-debated associations not because I think that Obama sympathizes with what he has called Ayers's "detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8" or identifies with Wright's wild ravings. But I do think that Obama has understated (at best) his involvement with Wright and Ayers. And I wonder about the worldview of a man who was so comfortable with such far-left extremists and whose wife, Michelle, asserted earlier this year that America is "just downright mean" and "guided by fear" and that most Americans' lives have "gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl."

Obama's voting record as an Illinois and then U.S. senator is not extremist or radical. But it is not a bit bipartisan, either. He has hardly ever broken with his party, and he famously had the most liberal record of any senator in 2007 (although not in 2006 or 2005), according to National Journal's vote ratings.

This Obama has endorsed a long list of liberal restrictions on free enterprise that could end up hurting the people they are supposed to help, along with the rest of us: statist remedies for our broken educational system; encouraging unionization by substituting peer pressure and an undemocratic card-check process for secret ballots; raising the wages of women or lowering those of men who have dissimilar jobs that are declared by bureaucrats to be of comparable worth; renegotiating NAFTA; and more.

I wonder how far Obama wants to go down the road suggested by his lament in that 2001 radio interview that the civil-rights movement had failed to engineer "redistribution of wealth" and "economic justice." Would he be content with the moderately redistributive, Clintonesque increase in taxes on high-earning Americans that he proposes now? Or would he end up pushing for confiscatory taxes that could stifle entrepreneurship and job creation?

And would Obama's declared desire to appoint judges and justices driven mainly by "empathy" for "the powerless," rather than by fidelity to the law, lead to judicially invented constitutional rights to welfare, to ever-more-rigid preferences based on race and gender, and to other novel judicial overrides of democratic governance?

A pragmatic reformer? The pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign is a prodigious listener and learner. He can see all sides of every question. He seems suffused with good judgment. His social conscience has been tempered by recognition that well-intentioned liberal prescriptions can have perverse unintended consequences. His tax and health care proposals are much less radical than Republican critics suggest.

This Obama has surrounded himself not only with liberal advisers but also with mainstream moderates such as Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. He has won the support of moderate Republicans, including Colin Powell and Susan Eisenhower, and conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman and Charles Fried.

This is the Obama who said in his dazzling 2004 Democratic convention speech that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." This is the Obama who distanced himself not only from Jeremiah Wright but also -- more subtly -- from the rest of the racial-grievance crowd in a March 18 speech deploring as "profoundly distorted" the view that "sees white racism as endemic."

The pragmatic Obama is smart enough to know that reforms take root only if they enjoy broad public support and that self-identified conservatives vastly outnumber self-identified liberals in America. He also understands that while we need more-effective regulation, "America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress. It's created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It's led to a standard of living unmatched in history." He has said that "we don't want to return to marginal tax rates of 60 or 70 percent." He wants to expand the armed forces and to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The pragmatic Obama is not just a made-for-the-campaign creation. He was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 not only because he was one of the most brilliant students but also because the handful of conservatives whose votes helped tip the balance saw him as fair-minded and open to their point of view. And they were not disappointed.

Obama has dipped his toe in the water of questioning Democratic interest-group orthodoxies. He has supported charter schools (while opposing vouchers) and merit pay for teachers; he offended trial lawyers by voting in 2005 to curb unwarranted class-action lawsuits; and last year he questioned whether affluent black children such as his daughters should continue to get racial preferences over more needy whites and Asians.

To be sure, apart from these less-than-bold gestures, Obama's down-the-line liberal voting record does not give a centrist like me much basis for hope that he would resist pressure from Democratic interest groups, ideologues, and congressional leaders to steer hard to the left.

But I do hope that if Obama wins, the enormity of the economic and international crises facing him will accelerate his intellectual evolution and convince him that simply replacing dumb Bush policies with dumb Democratic policies will only drive the country deeper into the ditch. The best thing for the country would be to take on the interest groups and govern from the center. That would also be the best way for Obama to win re-election and have a truly historic presidency.

By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal Magazine, November 1, 2008

For millions of less-assured Americans, Election Day 2008 will be a giant leap of faith. And never was that more apparent than here, 10 days before the election, when Democratic pollster Peter Hart assembled a cross-section of suburban Cleveland voters.

Barack Obama supporters were more hopeful than convinced. John McCain supporters were still searching for rationales to vote for him. And the truly uncommitted were searching for something - anything - that would give them comfort they could make the right choice.

After nearly two years of nonstop campaigning, after more ups, downs and surprises than anyone could have expected in a lifetime of campaigns, the historical election of 2008 arrives with a gravity of uncertainty rarely seen at this point in a presidential election. The final days are cloaked in more mystery about the two candidates than a campaign this long should have produced.

Part of this condition is shock from the scale of events that overwhelmed the campaign in September and October: The meltdown of mortgage and credit markets, the collapse of the stock market, all of which have led to historic lows in consumer confidence.

In the midst of this, Americans' primary leadership choices are between a gifted but untested-in-office young senator, and a veteran man of service whose erratic response in the economic crisis's opening act undercut his tested and tough image.

If elected, would Obama govern from the ideological center, or from the left? Would he go along with an emboldened Democratic majority in Congress, or battle with it on spending priorities? Is he strong enough to withstand the foreign policy crisis his running mate, Joe Biden, has guaranteed is coming? Biden says Obama has "steel in his spine." What test in Obama's public life has demonstrated that?

If elected, would McCain and his temperament be suitable for the challenges facing the next president? Would he truly put "country first," as his ads imply, and push for compromises to address serious economic and foreign policy challenges? Or would he unleash his veto pen, as he has also promised, thereby ushering in a new era of partisan gridlock with a Democratic Congress that shares few of his ideas on war, spending and taxes?

Yes, it is a clear choice on Tuesday. The outcome of either choice, however, is not so clear.

For two hours, the veteran pollster Hart prodded, probed and cajoled the 12 carefully selected Lake County, Ohio, voters he had invited for a forum sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Lake County is a swing blue- and white-collar county, pivotal to both McCain and Obama on Tuesday.

It was a lively session, with everyday Americans offering opinions on everything from mixed-race marriages to the likelihood of a tax cut.

But there was more initial silence to open-ended questions about what a President McCain or President Obama would mean to them than on any other topic.

Gretchen Exford, 41, a retail manager, said she was "hopeful there will be change" if her choice, Obama, is elected.

Brandie Adams, 31, a student, part-time health biller, and mother of two young children, was leaning to Obama. What would she feel if he were elected? "Uncertainty."

And William Medcev, 20, who says he will cast his first vote for Obama, is "hoping it will change things."

Robin Quigney, 57, an accounting analyst, will pull the lever for McCain. She would feel "hopeful" if she woke up Wednesday morning with McCain as president-elect. But McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate made here "a little less certain" about the Republican ticket.

Hart said Obama voters seemed to have "more buoyancy, a greater sense of gusto and interest in their candidate." McCain voters, he said, "seemed to be supporting their man more on the basis of honor and respect for past service."

But, Hart added, "While the economy is the key and important issue, there really is little sense of exactly what must be done."

Tuesday will end one great uncertainty. We will know the next president, possibly in convincing terms. That itself could calm some of the anxious fears of a nation. But hard uncertainties are ahead, no matter which way the world turns.

By Chuck Raasch, USA Today, October 30, 2008

While Joe the Plumber is helping to get out the working-class vote for the GOP ticket in Ohio, another Joe is busy doing his part for John McCain--Joe the Senator.

Otherwise known as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Joe the Senator is wooing the small but possibly crucial Jewish voting bloc in Ohio that McCain campaign aides hope will help them capture the battleground state.

Lieberman's face is plastered all over an eight-page glossy mailer funded by the Ohio Republican Party, which began arriving in mailboxes in primarily Jewish neighborhoods Wednesday afternoon. The cover features a large photo of Lieberman with his pal Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, both wearing yarmulkes.

"A proven record, a friend of the Jewish community, 25 years of rock-solid support for strong U.S.-Israel relations, ready to lead on Day One," the cover blares.

(The flier itself is not negative in its tone, unlike the anti-Obama mailers being sent to Ohio voters by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Those have featured graphic images of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Ayatollah Khomeini, a burning Israeli flag and large-type words: "Concerned About Barack Obama? You Should Be." Nor does it mention the latest charge leveled by McCain, that Obama cavorts with "a PLO spokesman.")

Inside, there's a photo of McCain and Lieberman, accompanied by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, inspecting "terrorist rockets" fired from Gaza into the southern Israel town of Sderot. On the back, again, there's Joe, who is quoted saying:

"As a lifelong Democrat, people often ask me, why am I supporting John McCain? There are many important issues in this campaign, but there is a central issue that is far more important than all the others: The issue of national security and the war against Islamist extremism. And I know with absolute certainty, that the most qualified candidate to be commander in chief is John McCain."

Not surprisingly, the McCain campaign and its surrogates have shied away from highlighting running mate Sarah Palin, an evangelical Christian, to Jewish voters. She is not seen in the Ohio GOP flier.

Instead, another Republican governor of an outlying state is working Ohio this week: Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, who, like Joe, is Jewish. (Who knew?)

By Mary Ann Akers, The Washington Post, October 30, 2008

At Liberty University, Republican Students Campaign Hard, Fearing a New Era of Liberal Activism if Obama Prevails

LYNCHBURG, Va. Claire Ayendi is dealing with the fading kick of two double shots of espresso. It's the eve of homecoming weekend at Liberty University, and Ayendi, the president of the college Republican club, is trying to rig up a parade float in support of Sen. John McCain. She whips around Lynchburg in her Infiniti SUV, a pink iPod shuffling a mix of indie tunes as she mobilizes her fellow soldiers via cellphone: "If you happen to see a big 'Virginia is McCain Country' sign, could you, perchance, ask to, like, borrow it a few hours?"

Ayendi spots the perfect sign in front of an office building at a busy intersection half a mile from campus and turns into the parking lot. Wearing a faux-alligator headband and pouring on the charm, the pre-law senior talks her way past two secretaries and gains permission from a third to borrow the sign before calling a friend who has a pickup truck. Inside of 12 minutes, the job is done.

To be a college Republican in the face of Obama Nation takes a measure of fortitude. For Ayendi, it also requires tons of prayer and caffeine. McCain's poll numbers are sliding. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a bottomless pit of money and energy. Even the hay bales on the rolling hills of once solidly GOP Lynchburg are painted red, white and blue with the name "Obama." And at Liberty University, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1971, the first student Democratic club has sprung up.

For eight years, Liberty students have had one of their own in the White House with George W. Bush: a conservative Christian who has spoken about his conversion experience and funded abstinence-only sex education, appointed two antiabortion Supreme Court justices and supported a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. A pipeline of jobs stretched from evangelical colleges such as Liberty to the executive branch.

Now a new dawn threatens, and young activists such as Ayendi are fighting hard to the final hour, in part to prepare for the new phase of activism they foresee in the event of an Obama victory.

"It's the same impulse that Democrats have, the same passion," Ayendi says. "Aside from moral issues -- homosexuality and abortion -- I advocate small government."

Her friend Meghan Allen is more direct. "If Obama wins, I'm gonna want someone to get in there and reverse it ASAP," she says.

Obama has energized the youth vote, but he also has provoked a counter-movement. An astonishing 80 percent of Liberty's 11,400 residential students are registered, and most are Republicans. With polls showing Virginia on the verge of going Democratic, Liberty has canceled classes on Election Day and will provide buses to the polls. The school has also encouraged out-of-state students to switch their registration to Virginia.

Besides taking a full load of classes, Ayendi has been putting in 40-hour weeks on behalf of McCain. She makes phone calls, canvasses, operates a database of student volunteers, uses Facebook as her bully pulpit and will talk to anyone about how she thinks that Obama's promise to redistribute wealth is an affront to the Constitution. The campaign has galvanized her friends and served as an excellent primer on what lies ahead in their adult lives.

Ayendi and Allen playfully dog one of their Liberty friends for wanting to go into the seminary.

"If you want to get anything changed around here, you have to go through the courts," Ayendi says. "You gotta be a lawyer."

Totally, Allen agrees. "My goal is not to make laws Christian but to make government as small as possible so you can be as biblically Christian as you so choose," she says.

Both plan on spring internships abroad and then law school. But an Obama victory would not send these them into the wilderness. To the contrary, the fight would begin anew.

New Generation of Evangelicals

For now, the fight for McCain is still on.

On the cold and bleak Friday of homecoming weekend, Liberty holds a 10 a.m. church service for students in the 10,000-seat basketball arena. Convocation is mandatory three times a week, and this morning's service features a parade of sleepy students lugging laptops and coffee mugs. They wear skinny jeans and hipster high-tops and Ugg boots, but Liberty operates in a parallel universe from other colleges. Alcohol and sex are prohibited. Students caught watching R-rated movies are brought before a court of their peers. Bulletin boards around campus advertise "Pre-Marital Workshops" and the bookstore sells T-shirts that say "I [Heart] Christian Boys." An ad flashes on the screen at morning convocation for a workshop aimed at "Beginning the Process of Lust-Free Living."

Liberty's founder died last year, but a red basketball jersey with the name "Falwell" hangs front and center in the arena. The ghost of the fiery minister is everywhere, most prominently in his 46-year-old son, Jerry Jr., who now serves as the university's chancellor and carries out his father's vision of blending faith and politics. While the younger Falwell has not publicly endorsed a presidential candidate, he reminds students of the importance of their vote. "So much is at stake," he says from the stage. He announces that the Obama campaign has been in touch with Liberty about a possible appearance and he urges courtesy. "If they come, I hope you show them respect and don't shout them down like they do our folks," he says.

McCain was not the first choice for many at Liberty, owing in part to his strained history with the Christian right. While campaigning against Bush in the 2000 primaries, McCain accused the elder Falwell of being an "agent of intolerance" along with Pat Robertson and said both preachers were pulling the GOP toward extremism. But when McCain began gearing up in 2006 for another run, he accepted Falwell's invitation to deliver Liberty's graduation speech.

Claire Ayendi supported former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries but is now fully behind McCain. For the Nigerian who grew up in lefty Silver Spring, her spiritual journey began when she was 12 and went on a church mission trip. After graduating from James Hubert Blake High School in 2005 she decided on Liberty, and as a freshman in this politically conservative environment her ideals took shape. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, she is against social welfare programs and overtaxation by the government.

In any other campaign, Ayendi's views would be in synch with those of most Liberty students, but in a year when the nation has its first black presidential nominee -- a candidate with an African father -- Ayendi is taking enormous heat. Black students make up 9 percent of Liberty's population, and many are putting aside their convictions on abortion to vote for Obama. And there is Ayendi sitting behind the "Vote for McCain" table. She has been accused of racial betrayal.

In the fall, she attended an Obama rally to see what the Democrat was all about. "It's amazing and historical," she says of his candidacy. "I would be so excited if he were a conservative. But we're looking at the appointment of two, maybe three Supreme Court justices."

Rumors fly around campus that Ayendi is a plant for the Obama campaign. The pressure comes from all sides, and her face is showing the strain. Her friend Allen gives her daily pep talks and says the campaign is God's way of making her dig deep. "No one works harder for McCain than Claire," Allen says.

The two friends balance each other out: Ayendi is quiet, judicious and guarded, while Allen is a smoking pistol who says things like "God is sovereign, man is fallen, I'm not gonna be perfect, get over it!" As part of a new generation of young evangelicals, Allen rejects the impersonal mega-churches of her youth in favor of mission work and a connection with those she is helping. They both gulp chai tea, eat vegan and listen to Vampire Weekend like other college students, and their career agendas are just as sharply focused as those of their Democratic counterparts. Both are hesitant to criticize Bush but share disappointment that the size of government has swelled under his watch. Neither support Washington's $700 billion bailout of Wall Street and believe that churches, synagogues and mosques -- and not the federal government -- should provide help to the needy.

Ayendi in particular believes that welfare programs promoted by Democrats hold back African Americans. "You go out there in this country and you work hard and you can make it," says Ayendi, the daughter of a diplomat and a nurse. "You can have your white picket fence." At the same time, she often finds herself explaining the complications of race to her white Republican friends.

After convocation, Ayendi and Allen walk to their 11 a.m. government class and unpack their books. "Did anyone watch 'The Office' last night?" a student asks. "It was SO good."

"Has anyone watched the British version?" Allen asks. "It's way more ha-larious and way more out of bounds."

"Hey, Meghan?" a student says.

Ayendi signs up two students for the final weekend of McCain canvassing in Virginia Beach. "It will be amazing," she promises her new recruits.

'God Is More Important Than This'

Late Friday afternoon, Ayendi makes her final stop at Starbucks for a grande green tea. She takes a table by the window and works her cellphone. While the campaign is a full-time job, she has no desire for a political career. "I'd turn into a shrewd person," she says. "If you don't continually check yourself, it's easy to fall into. I've seen a pro-life candidate change. As they gain momentum, they lose values and answer to money interests."

Not all of Ayendi's friends at Liberty are in political lockstep, made evident by the arrival of Ray Woolson, a biology major who pulls up a chair. Woolson is ripe for ribbing: His Razor scooter is in the back seat of his Volvo, which bears an Obama bumper sticker. And not just any scooter.

"A scooter with a cup holder!" Ayendi teases. "When you want to come over to the real world, you can come over to my side. How can you be a liberal?"

Woolson is calm. "I think being a liberal is the most compassionate thing you can do," he says. "Jesus was a pacifist who chose to spend his time with the poor people. They weren't Big Oil, they were prostitutes."

Ayendi shakes her head in pity. Woolson gives it back. "There are a lot of kids at school who are blindly conservative," he says.

"Americans have gotten too soft and expect too much," Ayendi says.

"Like affordable health care?" Woolson asks. "The conservatives want to have tax cuts for Big Oil CEOs."

They could debate for hours, and they often do, but Woolson has to take off. When he leaves, Ayendi says: "Ray is so random. I'm not. I do as I'm told. I'm really proper. Liberals are very indie, very emo, just very fun. When we go out, we put on button-downs and Sperrys. I think ahead. I'd rather dress like this now, because when I'm in law school this is how I'll be dressing. Liberals are like, 'Live, take a load off!' My friends at home say I have to be perfect 24 hours a day. It's just who I am."

She pauses. "I should recycle more."

Ayendi's cellphone rings. It's one of the leaders of the newly formed Democratic club on campus. Ayendi tries to pry from him how big the Obama float will be in the homecoming parade. "We don't have all the money and the flashy cool things you guys have," she tells him.

Then she makes a proposal. "The Monday night before the election, we are gonna do a day of prayer at the Helms school," she says. "It's not a Republican or a Democrat thing. It's not an Obama or McCain or whatever thing. It's just, 'Let His will be done.' Ultimately what matters is that we are all Americans. I know, Monday night we are all supposed to be phone-banking, but God is more important than this."

Inside, Ayendi is trying to prepare herself for whatever happens. She acknowledges that evangelicals have had a long golden moment in the sun. What now?

"When things don't go your way, you get on your knees and pray to God," she says.

By Anne Hull, The Washington Post, October 31, 2008

In the days before the great election of 2008, your nation's capital was consumed by a single question: If Barack Obama wins, what's in it for me? A week before the balloting, I sat in the dining room of one of Washington's finest hotels and, eavesdropping madly, realized that my neighbors at every one of the adjoining tables were consumed by the vagaries of appointive politics - as I was, after my guest arrived. The game of turbocharged, Cabinet-level musical chairs is the autumnal version of the summer speculation about vice-presidential picks: lots of fun, but not very nourishing, and I'm not going to indulge in it here (O.K., maybe a little). There are bigger fish to fry, like what's the new President - Obama is universally, prematurely, assumed the victor - actually going to do?

It was possible, in this rotisserie of naked self-promotion, to discern some larger themes. For the first time since Franklin Roosevelt, the next President will face the prospect of neither peace nor prosperity - and there seems a consensus that, as much as Obama (or John McCain, for that matter) wants to play in the world, the financial crisis will demand most of his time and political capital. From that assumption flows another. For the sake of continuity and the absence of drama, it might not be a bad idea for Obama - if elected - to stick with the current national-security players in the battle against Islamic extremism.

When I interviewed him on Oct. 18, Obama said he was "happy" that General David Petraeus was at Central Command, supervising the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last June, Obama told me that he would want "people like" Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his Cabinet. Petraeus is studying the options in Afghanistan, with the goal of producing a detailed action plan for the next President by the end of December. It is likely the general will recommend the resumption of troop withdrawals from Iraq on something resembling the Obama timetable. Indeed, Iraq has slipped down the list of national-security priorities as it has stabilized (in a recent week, the U.S. military casualties there were ... four wounded). It is also likely that at least two brigades scheduled to deploy to Iraq in 2009 will be sent to Afghanistan instead. Already, Obama has indicated that he approves the general direction in which Petraeus is heading. Unlike President Bush, Obama strongly supports nation-building in both Afghanistan and Pakistan; and, like Petraeus, he favors negotiations with some of the pro-Taliban tribes (at least those who are not al-Qaeda). Unlike McCain, Obama will not be reluctant to continue the current cross-border strikes, via Predator drone, against selected terrorist targets in Pakistan.

Pakistan will have to be handled carefully. A senior U.S. official told me that the intelligence community now considers Pakistan the "central front" in the war on terrorism. "Al-Qaeda wants to go after the Pakistani leadership," the official said. With foreign fighters coagulating in Pakistan's border regions, forging a renewed U.S.-Pakistani alliance against al-Qaeda will be a top priority.

But it won't be the top priority. As Obama told me in our interview, a government-propelled transition to an alternative-energy economy will be his most important initiative. Translated into Washington terms, this means a massive infrastructure and stimulus package - in the neighborhood of $300 billion, according to the current speculation. There is a back-to-the-future quality to this: it's what used to be derided as big-spending liberalism. The Beltway consensus is that the economic crisis makes it necessary now. But public cynicism about government requires that the next President builds accountability into his spending programs. That's why the Infrastructure Bank that Obama proposed during the campaign may be crucial: it would create a bipartisan board of five governors who would judge and approve all major projects.

In normal times, getting an Infrastructure Bank through Congress would be impossible. "It is a direct threat to their way of life," says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "It changes the dynamic of how you deal with earmarks," by taking the decision-making, and to some extent the credit, away from politicians. "I know one huge ally Obama would have on this," Ornstein adds with a laugh. "John McCain."

This could be an early test for President Obama (it would be an impossible task for President McCain, given the Democratic enmity should he win). Will Obama be able to convince his party's leaders that the economic situation is so dire, and the public's opinion of Congress so low, that big new public-works projects will need the validation of an independent board? Will he be willing to spend his political capital on this relatively obscure notion? When Bill Clinton arrived in Washington, he found that his toughest challenge was herding the donkeys in his own party. The nation's capital awaits the new President, wondering not just who gets what, but also how tough - and skilled - the new guy will really be.

By Joe Klein, Time, October 31, 2008

The most basic explanation for why Barack Obama may win next Tuesday is that voters want economic deliverance. The standard fix for this in politics everywhere is to crowbar the old party out and patch in the other one. It is true as well that the historic nature of the nation's first African-American candidacy would play a big role.

Push past the historic candidacy, however, and one sees something even larger at stake in this vote. One sees what Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher saw. The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of "the past eight years" but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America's idea of itself.

I don't agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany and more U.S. newspaper articles than one can count have said that the crisis proves the need to permanently tame the American "free-market" model. P.O.W. Alan Greenspan is broadcasting confessions. The question is: Are the American people of a mind to throw in the towel on the system that got them here?

This would be a historic shift, one post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan's "Cowboy Capitalism."

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the United States made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Central States, pushed across a tough Western frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple -- the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth Cowboy Capitalism, are doing what we did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It's time to spread the wealth around."

What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced -- old Europe.

As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a final temptation.

In partial detail:

Obama's federalized medical insurance system starts the transition away from private medical care and toward Obama's endlessly promised "universal health care." This has always been the sine qua non of planting a true, managed-market economy in the U.S.

Obama's refundable tax credits are direct cash transfers from the federal government. This would place some 48% of Americans, nearly half, out of the income tax system. More than a tax proposal, this is a deep philosophical shift, an American version of being "on the dole."

His stated intent to renegotiate free-trade agreements such as Nafta is a philosophical shift. It abandons the tradition of a hyper-competitive America dating back to the Industrial Revolution, toward a protected, domestic workforce, as in Western Europe. The Democratic proposal to eliminate private union votes -- "card check" -- ensures the spread of a static, Euro-style workforce.

Eliminating the ceiling on payroll taxes changes Social Security from an insurance to a welfare program. Obama's tax credits requires performing government-identified activities, the essence of a "directed economy."

All this would transform the animating American idea -- away from creation and toward protection.

Many voters -- progressive Democrats, the asset-safe rich, academics and college students -- regard this as where America should go. They explicitly want America's great natural energies transferred away from unwieldy economic competition and toward social construction. They want the U.S. to reduce its "footprint" in the world. Monies saved by stepping down from superpower status can be reprogrammed into "investments" (a favorite Obama word) in a vast Euro-style hammock of social protection programs.

One wishes John McCain had been better able to make clear what the truly "historic" meaning of Tuesday's vote is. Once it's done, it's done.

By Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2008

Fears of Fraud and Blocked Votes

CLEVELAND -- With Ohio still up for grabs in next week's presidential election, the conversation here has expanded from who will carry the state to how -- the nitty-gritty of registration lists, voting machines, court challenges and whether it all will play out fairly.

Tim Tatarowicz, who runs a small supermarket on Cleveland's east side, said his worry has grown as he has watched the push to add new voters and get them to cast ballots early. When actor Forest Whitaker appeared at a registration drive outside the store, the parking lot was packed.

"It was all to drive up numbers for Obama; I understand that," said Tatarowicz, 44. "But it's pushing absentee ballots that bothers me," he said, because "that makes cheating too easy."

Cheating is not easy, countered Geraldine Tallie, 61, who lives in the housing project across the street. But she does believe that people can make it too hard to vote.

Political parties and elected officials for weeks have been trading sharp accusations and litigation over voting issues here, often for political advantage. But now, among the people whose ballots are at stake, the question of whether their votes will count has become deeply personal.

During the primary, Tallie was one of those caught in long lines at a recreation center, one of 21 East Cleveland precincts ordered by a federal judge to remain open an extra 90 minutes to replenish ballot supplies. But because the order came through late, only 10 polling places reopened -- and state officials say just five additional votes were cast.

That convinced Tallie to vote early this time, not just to avoid the lines but also to make sure her ballot was in. "I wanted my say," she said.

The vitriol over voting increased this week when the Ohio Republican Party released a statewide radio ad that opens with the ticking of a clock and asks, "Could Ohio's election be stolen?" The ad will run up to 20 times a day in some markets and accuses Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner of failing to fight voting fraud.

Brunner has accused the Republicans of positioning themselves to challenge the election results if Barack Obama wins, arguing that a series of GOP-backed lawsuits are meant to suppress votes, help John McCain, and "segregate and pick off ballots if it's a close race."

In recent years, elections in Ohio have not gone smoothly. Four years ago, the weeks before the vote were filled with partisan legal battles, and Election Day was marred by long lines, too few machines in some precincts, and reports of poorly trained poll workers. After the election, amid recriminations, some charged that thousands of frustrated voters had gone home without casting ballots.

Those memories are still fresh, brought to the surface in recent weeks with Republicans and Brunner in court over a range of disputes, including how to resolve mismatched registrations for 200,000 new voters. That case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against the Republicans.

All of the fighting gets attention in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County, which has 1.1 million of Ohio's 8.2 million voters. It also has had the biggest jump in new registrations -- 123,000 since January, an increase of nearly 13 percent.

"Did I register? Three times," joked a supervisor of a demolition crew tearing down an old public housing complex on the east side.

"I signed 73 times, got a cigarette every time I put down my name," said worker Randy Kinney, bringing up one of the much-publicized local voter-registration problems being investigated by the county elections board.

His co-worker Kevin Jackson shook his head. He said he isn't happy that some bad registrations cards were submitted, but his big worry was the lawsuit that challenged new voters whose personal information did not match other state records, sometimes because of slight clerical mistakes.

"I've been thinking I need to go down to the county and make sure it all is good," said Jackson, 40, who changed his registration when he recently moved to neighboring Parma. "I know we're joking about it, but this is serious stuff, and I want to be make sure I get to vote with no trouble."

"Okay, it is serious," Kinney said, relenting, "but here is the fix" -- and he raised his thumb. "Get some of that purple ink they have in Baghdad" to mark who voted.

"Please do not start up with that ink again," Jackson begged.

Kinney, 46, is a McCain supporter who lives about 40 miles southwest of Cleveland and has a disdain for what he sees as the loose ways of city politics. "They want change up here, and I'd rather go backwards."

Jackson is an Obama backer, and "loose" is not the word he uses. "I don't want voter fraud, but I think it seems to be going the other way, where people may be kept off the voter lists when they should have been kept on."

Both men said they will vote, and both said they believe their votes will count -- a triumph of faith over skepticism that was not uncommon among nearly three dozen voters interviewed last week in Ohio's most populous county.

Across town from the demolition site, Patty Ruccella, 44, whipped around her shoulder bag and pointed to a small pink "I [Heart] Sarah Palin" button to prove her interest in the election.

"People around me are talking about whether bad registrations got through by people hired to collect them, and it looks like some did," said Ruccella, who lives on Cleveland's west side. But she believes that any tainted names are being weeded out. "I have to have faith the system works."

This election cycle, Brunner has required counties to have a plan to distribute voting machines more equitably across neighborhoods and to have extra ballots on hand. But those improvements have not eliminated court disputes.

Lawsuits over election issues have become increasingly common, said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, adding that "Ohio is one of the worst . . . with more partisan wars."

Some lawsuits seek a concrete result -- Hasen cited Democratic efforts to knock Ralph Nader off the ballot in 2004 -- but the recent Ohio litigation, he said, along with "the talk about voter fraud and mismatching, is more for political consumption."

Daniel P. Tokaji, a law professor and associate director of Ohio State University's election law center, said Ohio voters "do tend to focus on election mechanics more than [voters] elsewhere." It has reached such a pitch, he said, that "you would have to have been under a rock" not to know about it.

In 2004, the bickering centered on then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who co-chaired the Bush campaign in Ohio. He decided that votes cast in the wrong precinct would not count, and he required a certain stock of paper for registration applications; both rules were viewed as disqualifying many urban voters. He relented on the paper stock, but not in time to avoid an outcry.

This year, it is the Democratic Brunner being criticized.

Republicans here and elsewhere around the country have also cited problems with fake registrations collected by the community-organizing group ACORN, including 80 cards signed by a 19-year-old in exchange for cigarettes. The man was already a legally registered voter but has never voted in Cleveland, according to elections board spokesman Mike West.

Kimberly Balas, 48, a yoga instructor, said she and her friends have talked about bogus voter registrations, but "I'm not worried it would become voter fraud, because how would that work? You would need someone to show up and commit a crime by posing as someone or lying about being eligible."

Balas, a registered Republican who "may not vote that way," said she does have concerns about mail-in ballots. "I would want to know those are accurate -- that the right ones count and no wrong ones get through."

Thomasine Clark, 42, a longtime voter, is hoping that all the attention on registration problems does not discourage new voters from showing up.

"That worries me," she said. "I just don't understand why it's always we Democrats made out to be doing something dishonest."

Republican Cites Tape of Rival Praising Palestinian, Alleges Ayers Was Present

MIAMI, Oct. 29 -- Sen. John McCain compared the director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute to a "neo-Nazi" and called on the Los Angeles Times to release a video of a 2003 banquet at which Sen. Barack Obama talked about the professor, Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American scholar and friend of Obama's from Chicago.

"What if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?" McCain asked in one of several interviews with Cuban American radio stations Wednesday morning. "I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different."

McCain also alleged that Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers had been at the banquet -- something that has not been reported by the Times -- adding to a growing flap over the release of the videotape, which the Times said had been provided by a source on the condition that the paper not air it.

"We should know about their relationship," the Republican presidential candidate said, referring to Ayers. "Including, apparently, information that is held by the Los Angeles Times concerning an event that Mr. Ayers attended with a PLO spokesman. The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public."

McCain's advisers said the tape would reveal his opponent's reactions to banquet speeches mentioned in a Times article about the event that was published in April. The article said that "a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism" and that another "likened 'Zionist settlers on the West Bank' to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been 'blinded by ideology.' " A spokeswoman for McCain said the senator based his allegation about Ayers on another newspaper article -- a New York Sun report in 2005. The Sun, however, reported only that Ayers had contributed to a commemorative testimonial book for Khalidi.

By raising questions about the banquet, McCain's advisers are hoping to hit a trifecta: linking Obama to a person who might worry Jewish voters in Florida and elsewhere about his commitment to Israel, reintroducing Ayers into the discussion with only a week left, and once again challenging Obama's honesty when it comes to his personal associations.

Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for Obama, called the issue "just another recycled, manufactured controversy" and rejected the implication that Obama should be tarnished by his association with Khalidi.

"Barack Obama has been clear and consistent on his support for Israel, and has been clear that Rashid Khalidi is not an adviser to him or his campaign and that he does not share Khalidi's views," Sevugan said. He noted that a nonprofit group that McCain chaired once helped fund a polling organization founded by Khalidi.

The International Republican Institute, which McCain has chaired since 1993, awarded a grant of $448,873 in 1998 to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, which was co-founded by Khalidi, according to IRI documents.

Reached by e-mail, Khalidi declined to comment.

In May, Obama acknowledged knowing Khalidi, with whom he taught at the University of Chicago. Obama called him a "respected scholar" but said that Khalidi does not reflect his views on Israel and that he is "not one of my advisers."

McCain has spent weeks trying to make Obama's relationship with Ayers an issue, saying that Obama has not been truthful with the American people about how close the two are. But in recent days, he and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, had stopped publicly questioning the Democrat's associations.

That changed Wednesday morning. In a second interview, McCain said: "Apparently, this is a tape with a dinner that Mr. Ayers, the former and now still unrepentant terrorist, was at and also one of the leading spokespersons for the PLO. Now, why that should not be made public is beyond me."

And campaigning in Ohio, Palin told a large crowd, "It seems that there's yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years."

Palin openly mocked the Los Angeles Times for what she said was pandering to Obama. "It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking out for their best interests like that," she said, as the audience cheered her on.

The Times wrote in April about the banquet as part of a broader story examining Obama's relationship with the Palestinian community in Chicago. The paper issued a statement yesterday saying that its source asked it not to release the video.

Jamie Gold, the newspaper's readers' representative, said in a statement: "More than six months ago the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of the events shown on the videotape. The Times is not suppressing anything. Just the opposite -- the L.A. Times brought the matter to light."

The original story reported that Obama praised Khalidi at the dinner, saying that his many talks with him had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

In their comments Wednesday, McCain and Palin called Khalidi a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, apparently an effort to portray Obama as anti-Israel. The New York-born Khalidi has denied being a spokesman for the PLO.

Since 1993, the PLO has been recognized by the United States and Israel as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meet regularly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

As an Oxford-educated Middle East scholar who holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia, Khalidi has been highly critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also of the dysfunction within the Palestinian national movement led for decades by Yasser Arafat.

Khalidi has questioned the plausibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the position favored by the Bush administration and McCain. But he has also described the more controversial bi-national solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the creation of one state where Arabs and Jews would live together and all have the right to vote -- as problematic.

By Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post, October 30, 2008

Republican Says Obama Policies Would Make U.S. Less Safe

Sen. John McCain yesterday sharpened his critique of Sen. Barack Obama's ability to serve as commander in chief, arguing that the Democratic nominee's economic policies would "undermine our national security."

The Arizona Republican had once planned to make defense issues the central theme of his presidential bid, but global economic turmoil has become a relentless focus of his campaign in recent weeks. McCain sought to link the two issues yesterday, arguing that, in a "Democratic-dominated Washington," national security and the economy would both suffer.

"Raising taxes and unilaterally renegotiating trade agreements as they have promised would make a bad economy even worse, and undermine our national security, even as they slash defense spending," McCain said in a speech in Tampa after meeting with his national security advisers. "At least when European nations chose the path of higher taxes and cutting defense, they knew that their security would still be guaranteed by America. But if America takes the same path, who will guarantee our security?"

The Illinois Democrat has not proposed cuts in defense spending and says he wants to continue President Bush's plan to expand the military by 92,000 soldiers and Marines. But McCain seized on a recent call for a 25 percent cut in Pentagon spending by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to stoke fears about what would happen if Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House.

"Even with our troops engaged in two wars, and with a force in need of rebuilding, we're getting a glimpse of what one-party rule would look like under Obama, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid," McCain said, according to prepared remarks.

The Obama campaign hit back. Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, one of Obama's military advisers, released a statement accusing McCain of wanting to continue Bush's foreign policy while distorting Obama's defense plans.

"John McCain's desperate and dishonest attack on defense spending only makes the point that Barack Obama has been willing to stand up to some in his own party from the first day of this campaign through his commitment to increase the size of our ground forces and our investments in 21st century capabilities," Gration said.

Like McCain, Obama in recent weeks has emphasized the connection between national security and the economy, using it to sow doubts about McCain's judgment on economic issues. "We can't afford another president who ignores the fundamentals of our economy while running up record deficits to fight a war without end in Iraq," Obama told reporters last week in Richmond.

Both candidates have also made it clear that economic issues loom large on the international agenda for the next four years. Both pledge to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. And although neither has sketched out a detailed plan for dealing with the international economic crisis, one of the early challenges facing a new administration will be how to restructure international economic institutions.

White House officials confirmed this week that neither McCain nor Obama plans to participate directly in a Nov. 15 global summit focused on the global financial crisis. But press secretary Dana Perino said yesterday that whoever wins will be "providing input" to the negotiations.

"None of this ties the next president's hand," Perino said. "But I think that what we are trying to do is do what the president asked us to do, which is do everything we can right now, in this downturn, in this cycle of our economy, to get it back to a period of growth so that the next president has the best possible starting point on January 20th."

David Rothkopf, a former trade official in the Clinton administration, said yesterday that restoring America's economic strength is critical to rebuilding U.S. influence in the world. Without such strength, the United States "doesn't have the ability to exercise soft power by writing checks for development," he said. "And it does not have the ability to underwrite hard power by funding the kind of military we're accustomed to."

Rothkopf said McCain was "disingenuous" in going after Obama for wanting to cut defense spending, saying the current level of growth at the Pentagon is unsustainable. But he also said Obama could run into trouble if he tries to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, as the Democrat has said he would consider, or if he does not cut taxes on business, as McCain has promised. "Its going to be very hard to compete for jobs if we keep high corporate tax rates," Rothkopf said.

By Michael Abramowitz, The Washington Post, October 30, 2008

WASHINGTON - After weeks of being out-advertised by Barack Obama, John McCain and the Republican Party are nearly matching the Democrat ad for ad in key battleground markets.

Ad spending and ad placement data obtained from Democratic and Republican operatives show that in the closing days of the campaign the Republican voice has grown louder in states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

For instance, Obama had been scheduled to buy about $2.5 million in Florida ads for the last week of the campaign. McCain is now set to spend about $1.6 million and the Republican National Committee added $1.5 million to their buy in the state this week. Obama appears to have added more weight to his ads since.

The ad war is especially noticeable in Florida's central corridor, which includes Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.

Those near-parity levels in crucial states come with a price. McCain has had to trim back his ads in Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, giving Obama even greater edges there.

A map of the states where McCain and the RNC are spending their money also illustrates the defensive nature of their 11th hour strategy. Except for Pennsylvania, the McCain-GOP focus was on trying to hold states that President Bush won in 2004.

And while the GOP may have turned up the volume in crucial states, Obama had outspent them for weeks with ads that promoted his cause and attacked McCain.

The last round of ads comes as national polls show Obama with a lead but with McCain closing in. State polls, however, are the more important barometer of how the election might turn out. And by that measure, Obama is in a much better spot, with clear holds of past Democratic states and competing in what have been reliably Republican states.

"They've got to pull the perfect straight here and they don't have any margin for errors," said Evan Tracey, a media consultant who tracks political advertising. McCain is "doing this at the expense of the Wisconsins and the Minnesotas. Clearly they're on their heels now."

Obama also retains a financial advantage over McCain, permitting him to air ads on national broadcast and cable networks that reach every state in the country. At no time was that financial superiority more evident than Wednesday night, when Obama aired a half-hour, prime-time infomercial on NBC, CBS and Fox as well as BET, MSNBC, Univision and TV One.

Obama gained his money edge by bypassing the public financing system for the general election - the first major party candidate to do so since the campaign reforms of the Watergate era. He had initially pledged to accept the limits of public funds if McCain did, but later changed his mind. McCain, by deciding to accept public financing, was left to spend only $84 million in September and October.

"If Sen. Obama had kept his word and abided by the legal FEC financing system, the two campaigns would have been at advertising parity all along," said Brad Todd, whose firm, OnMessage Inc., is running the GOP's independent expenditure operation.

Still, Todd added, "The most important five days of any presidential campaign are the last five days."

Indeed, the RNC has stepped in with significant aid. The party's independent expenditure arm, which cannot coordinate spending with McCain, has spent about $21 million in ads against Obama since Monday, according to party filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Party ads have been both broad and targeted.

The RNC had been targeting Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Just this week it added West Virginia and Montana, previously strong Republican states that Obama has managed to move toward him. It launched a new ad Thursday in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and Florida markets that seeks to raise doubts about Obama's lack of executive experience. "Can you hand your nation to a man who has never been in charge of anything?" the ad says.

The RNC also planned to air a Virginia-specific ad aimed at the state's veterans and the workers who rely on its military presence. The ad, airing only in Norfolk, warned that Obama would slice military spending, endangering jobs in the state. "America's safety depends on Virginia," the ad states. "And Virginia's economy depends on our military."

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press, October 30, 2008

SUNRISE, Florida (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday he would include Republicans in his Cabinet if he wins the election.

Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, also said he had "some pretty good ideas" about people he might tap for senior government jobs, though he emphasized he is focused for now on the final days of the campaign and takes nothing for granted.

"There is a transition process -- that I'm not paying attention to on a day-to-day basis -- but that has been set up," Obama told ABC News in an interview.

Obama said he "absolutely" considered it important to have Republicans in the Cabinet but he sidestepped a question on whether he would ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his job. There has been speculation that either Obama or his Republican rival, John McCain, might ask Gates to stay on.

"I'm not going to get into details," Obama said, but he added that national security policy, in particular, should be nonpartisan.

Other people mentioned as possible defense secretary picks in an Obama administration include former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska.

Some analysts have speculated that during the transition period between November 4 and January 20, when a successor to President George W. Bush will take office, the new president-elect would move quickly to fill key jobs such as Treasury Secretary, Defense Secretary and Secretary of State.

Some public policy experts see a need for early announcements on such appointments in light of the global financial crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"I am not going to jump the gun on this," Obama said but he gave credit to the Bush administration for its offer to make government resources available to both candidates to begin the vetting process early.

By Caren Bohan, Reuters, October 30, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chief financial officers of U.S. companies still prefer Republican presidential nominee John McCain over Democrat Barack Obama by a wide margin, but support for McCain is down from the previous quarter, according to a new survey.

CFOs are much less optimistic about the U.S. economy and about their own businesses, and expect it will be much harder for their companies to access credit over the next six months, the survey by Financial Executives International and Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business found.

Sixty-two percent said they hoped McCain would win next week's presidential election, compared with 15 percent who prefer Obama. Three months ago, support for McCain was higher, at 71 percent, while Obama's was lower, at 13 percent.

Twice as many said McCain was best able to handle the economic crisis than said so about Obama, the survey found. The survey, conducted electronically between October 2 and October 17, included responses from 290 corporate CFOs.

It also found 67 percent of respondents expected tougher access to credit over the next six months. On average, the CFOs predicted a 1 percent cut in spending over the next 12 months. Surveys over the past two years had consistently shown expectations of higher spending.

Separately, majorities said they favored increased regulation of the financial sector, were in favor of this month's government bailout plan, and gave a "B" or higher grade to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for his handling of the economic crisis.

By Nick Zieminski, Reuters, October 30, 2008

WASHINGTON - Presidential candidate Barack Obama is using his popularity to help give down-ballot Democrats a boost, with plans to back House and Senate candidates in radio commercials during the campaign's final days.

Obama's campaign is working with those charged with building Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to carefully pick which races and which audiences are best to target for additional help.

"In different states, we ask for different things, and they have been great," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Obama has a particular interest in helping Senate candidates, since it's a longshot possibility that they could reach 60 seats - enough to prevent Republicans from blocking Democratic legislation.

Some Democrats have suggested that Obama should start donating from his record fundraising haul to help down-ballot candidates and spend the final days traveling to states with contested Senate races. But those are not steps campaign officials say he is going to take when he's still in a close race for the White House against Republican John McCain.

"I spoke to Barack Obama yesterday," Schumer said Wednesday, "and I said to him, 'You have been great and you have helped us in all the ways we have asked.'"

At Schumer's request, Obama cut an ad encouraging voters to back Senate candidate Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a state Obama is expected to easily win and where Merkley is looking to unseat Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. That's the only television ad Obama's done for another candidate in the general election, but his campaign said Obama is recording radio ads for a handful of congressional candidates.

A personal show of support from Obama may not be helpful to Democratic candidates in conservative districts. In Alabama, Republican House candidate Jay Love is running an ad suggesting that Democratic opponent Bobby Bright supports Obama.

"Teams matter," an announcer says over an image of the Obama-Biden campaign sign altered to say "Obama-Bright." "Bobby Bright is on a tax-and-spend team we can't afford."

Obama's biggest boost for down-ballot candidates could come from his robust organizing machine. The higher Obama's organization can turn out blacks and other Democratic voters, the more likely challengers like Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi and Jim Martin in Georgia will be able to take over seats held by Republicans.

Obama has sent e-mail to millions of supporters across the country, encouraging them to volunteer and vote for local candidates. He and running mate Joe Biden have also sent fundraising appeals for the congressional campaign committees, and Obama has signed off on the Democratic National Committee taking a $10 million line of credit to split between the House and Senate efforts.

Since the Democratic National Convention, Obama has contributed more than $21 million to state party committees, including nearly $4 million to the Florida Democratic Party. The roster of recipients of his biggest donations reads like a map of the presidential election battlegrounds, but he has also contributed smaller amounts to states in the periphery of the contest.

Another way that Obama has been helping some candidates is by inviting those running in the battleground states where he is campaigning to address his events before he arrives. Obama draws crowds that the candidates could never generate on their own, like the 90,000 who came out to see the presidential contender in Colorado on Sunday and heard from Rep. Mark Udall, running for the Senate.

Obama rarely appears on stage with down-ballot candidates, but he often gives them a shout-out and encourages his supporters to vote for them as well. There are exceptions, though. Last week in Florida he appeared on stage with three Democrats running for Congress in South Florida against entrenched Republicans.

He also appeared twice last week on stage with former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, now running for the Senate - but Warner is comfortably ahead and may be there more to help Obama than vice versa. Warner is running a radio ad encouraging Virginians to support Obama.

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press, October 30, 2008

KISSIMMEE, Fla. - Their sense of urgency growing as the clock runs down, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are spending their time - and their money - trying to win over the same voters in those few states still too close to call.

"When the polls close on Tuesday, you don't want to say to yourself, 'Here's something I didn't do, here's an argument I didn't make, here's a hand I didn't shake,'" Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview broadcast Thursday.

Obama was targeting Florida, Virginia and Missouri on Thursday while McCain was taking the fight to Defiance, Ohio, in a quest to tilt that swing state his way.

Obama jumped on new data showing that the economy went backward in the third quarter of the year, as consumers cut back on their spending by the biggest amount in 28 years. It was the strongest signal yet the country has hurtled into recession. The gross domestic product shrank at a 0.3 percent annual rate in last quarter, the Commerce Department reported.

"It is a direct result of the Bush administration's trickle down, Wall Street first, Main Street last policies that John McCain has embraced for the last eight years and plans to continue for the next four," Obama said in a statement.

A senior McCain policy adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin, said in a statement that Obama would only accelerate the economy's decline with "ideologically-driven plans to redistribute income."

"Barack Obama is change Americans cannot afford," Holtz-Eakin said, and he promised that a McCain presidency would get federal spending under control and "clean up Wall Street."

The Illinois senator holds leads in polls nationally and in most of the states still in competition. McCain, an Arizona senator, has tried to erode Obama's advantage by raising doubts about his tax plan and his ability to protect the nation.

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, says there is nothing wrong with calling out Obama on his past associations or other controversial elements of his record. Besides Obama's association with '60s-era radical Bill Ayers - Palin has accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" - both McCain and Palin have now brought up Obama's friendship with a Palestinian-American professor, Rashid Khalidi, who has been critical of Israel.

Asked by ABC if she was suggesting in any of her criticism that Obama is un-American, Palin said: "No, not at all. Not calling him un-American." She added, "I am sure that Sen. Obama cares as much for this country as McCain does."

Campaigns are famous for tightening and getting even more unpredictable at the end. McCain and Palin say they will surprise election predictors with a win.

Obama tried to lock up undecideds Wednesday with a prime-time informercial that seamlessly cut to some live comments he was making in Florida. The air time cost $4 million.

For a capper, Obama got a big boost late in the evening from Bill Clinton. Pushing aside hard feelings over Obama's winning primary campaign against his wife, the former president got on stage with Obama for the first time and called him the future of the country.

McCain, in Florida, argued that Obama lacks "what it takes to protect America from terrorists" as he sought to shift attention away from the economy.

Associated Press-GfK polls taken within the past several days showed Obama ahead in four states that supported Bush in 2004, and essentially even with McCain in two others. A separate survey suggested even McCain's home state of Arizona was not safely in his column.

The campaigns will make a mad dash until Tuesday.

But in a telling comment in describing his 30-minute television ad, Obama said Wednesday: "At this stage, everything that needs to be said has probably been heard by a lot of voters. And what you want to do is just remind them one more time, 'Here's what I'm going to do.'"

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press, October 30, 2008

Lawsuits have already been filed over efforts to purge rolls and challenging voter identification laws. 'This one is the meltdown scenario,' one activist says.

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles -- Counting down to an election day expected to draw a record-shattering turnout, voting-rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states.

Lawsuits are already flying in many of these states.

Voting rights advocates in Colorado, to take just one example, told a federal judge Wednesday that the names of nearly 30,000 voters were recently purged from the state registry in violation of federal law and ought to be restored by election day. In a compromise, those voters will be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

Across the battleground states, where Democrats had a 2-1 advantage in new registrations, voting-rights groups contend the eleventh-hour verifications demanded by Republican officials are attempts to disenfranchise the new voters.

The flood of millions of first-time voters could lead to crowded and contentious polling places across the country, triggering last-minute identity checks that could deny ballots to those whose names or addresses don't match other government records.

"This one is the meltdown scenario," said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Ad vancement Project founded by civil rights lawyers to pursue racial justice.

Common Cause, the American Bar Assn., the League of Women Voters and a phalanx of other public interest groups are urging states to ensure that the polls are adequately staffed to handle an onslaught bolstered by millions of newly registered voters.

Voting advocates are worried about its effect in states like Virginia, which has one of the lowest ratios of voting machines to registered voters.

"Voters will simply walk away if the lines are too long," warned Susannah Goodman, who directs the election reform program at Common Cause, a campaign reform group based in Washington. "They don't want to, but they may have a job they have to get to, and they have to go."

Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act in 2002 in response to the Florida debacle two years earlier. The law provided $3 billion for new equipment and statewide registries, but the sheer volume of new voters has overwhelmed efforts to verify their eligibility.

Litigation brought in recent weeks in Ohio, Georgia, Florida and Colorado may serve to alert voters that they may be challenged. But in many states, the verification methods have created more obstacles than they have removed.

In Florida, an aggressive "no match, no vote" standard has been applied to question whether more than 10,000 of those who have registered since Jan. 1 should be given ballots despite discrepancies between their registration information and other government records, said Tova Wang, vice president for research at Common Cause.

Voting rights groups, both nonpartisan and Democrat-aligned, have compiled lists of vulnerable voters and tried to track them down.

"We're engaged in protecting voters from being disenfranchised by virtue of typos and clerical errors," said Adam Skaggs, an attorney with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

He said that the likelihood of fraud has been "vastly inflated" and that discrepancies are overwhelmingly the result of innocent mistakes or outdated voter registries.

In Montana, authorities recently sought to drop 6,000 voters from the rolls because of address changes, including soldiers deployed to Iraq, Skaggs noted.

A Brennan Center study of ballot designs found problems in North Carolina, where voters who choose a one-touch straight-party option on voting machines may not notice that the presidential race isn't included and requires a separate vote. In Ohio, the candidates for the top office are split between two pages, which could lead some voters to invalidate their ballots by choosing one on each.

In Georgia, the voter registry has been scrutinized for potential noncitizen entries, and thousands of people -- most with Latino names -- have been flagged for identity checks if they seek to cast a ballot.

Lawsuits challenging election officials' plans to deny ballots in cases of mismatches in at least six states have been shot down by the courts. But appeals are in the works, and concerns over access persist in most of the states analysts consider a toss-up.

"I think we're still going to see a lot of problems, in part because some voters aren't going to find out until election day that they've been dropped from the rolls," said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at Loyola Law School. "I expect this to happen in Florida, where they had a very aggressive no match, no vote policy."

Citing news reports from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Florida, the community activist group ACORN warned last week that Republican officials in those states had hinted at intentions to scan foreclosure filings to identify voters who are no longer living at the address on their registration.

"This shameless challenge adds insult to injury to those who have been hit hardest by the economic crisis," said ACORN, which itself has been accused of fraudulent registrations.

In response to the flood of early voting problems, the Obama campaign, Cable News Network and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have set up hotlines, with CNN fielding more than 15,000 calls since opening its phone bank on Oct. 15.

While legal challenges loom over denied ballots and voting machine breakdowns, legal experts said they doubted the electoral vote count would hinge on a single state this time, as occurred in Florida in 2000, when 537 votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore.

"The good news story is that it's very unlikely in any given year that you're going to have such a close outcome," said Edward B. Foley, an Ohio State University law professor. Just in case, he has developed a proposal for a nonpartisan arbitration tribunal that could be an alternative to ceding that role to the Supreme Court.

The two presidential campaigns are also preparing to deal with lawsuits over the outcome by joining nonprofit and pro bono attorneys who are fanning out by the thousands to monitor the polls.

The Obama campaign has been urging supporters to vote early as a way to avoid problems. "We think for the most part local election officials have done a good job," said Jenny Backus, a campaign spokeswoman.

The McCain campaign has focused in recent weeks on attacking ACORN's voter registration efforts. But spokesman Ben Porritt said the campaign had confidence in most local election officials. "For the most part, these things are handled properly," he said.

While attention has zeroed in on perceived attempts to deny ballots to certain voters, seasoned election monitors point out that such infringement is rare and usually the result of unintentional human error in a system reliant on lay volunteers.

More pleased than apprehensive over predictions of historic turnout, League of Women Voters President Mary Wilson said the nonprofit was concentrating in the final days on ensuring polls have enough workers and equipment, and was seeking to downplay the obstacles so as not to discourage voters.

"It does no good to be talking about barriers to voting when we're this close to the election," she said.

Wilson hailed the improvements in voter registration procedures mandated by the Help America Vote Act but lamented the unanticipated complications imposed by the verification regime.

"A person can leave off a digit from his driver's license, or a woman who gets married and uses her maiden name as a middle initial -- they're not going to match," she said. "Couple that with the fact that the Social Security Administration itself says 28% of the time there's not going to be a match with its data entry and you can see that some of the things HAVA brought to us turn out to be barriers in their implementation."

One benefit of the voting reform law, she added, has been the provisional ballot for voters who show up at the polls only to learn their eligibility is in question. These ballots will be counted if voters confirm their identity within 48 hours, whereas many of those challenged in previous elections were turned away.

Courts including the U.S. Supreme Court have so far ruled against screening efforts that could deny access, allaying activists' worst fears.

"I was really scared," said Wendy Weiser, who heads the Brennan Center's voting rights project. "Now, I am cautiously optimistic, or maybe just mildly apprehensive."




By Carol J. Williams and Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2008

Democratic nominee Barack Obama talks economic issues as Bill Clinton for the first time joins him on the trail. So does Republican nominee John McCain, who also talks up foreign affairs.

Reporting from Tampa, Fla., and Kissimmee, Fla. -- With the presidential election just six days away, John McCain tried to raise new doubts Wednesday about his rival's ability to protect America from threats overseas, as Barack Obama stayed focused on the nation's economic strife.

The tug of war to set the agenda for the campaign's closing days came as the pair of White House hopefuls crisscrossed Florida, one of the most fiercely contested presidential battlegrounds.

For the first time, the Democratic nominee campaigned side-by-side with former President Bill Clinton, who was deployed to the swing region of central Florida for the occasion.

At a late-night rally of 35,000 people in Kissimmee, Clinton contrasted Obama's reaction to the financial meltdown with McCain's. Obama sought a wide range of advice, Clinton said, because "he knew it was complicated, and before he said anything, he wanted to understand. "Folks, if we have not learned anything, we have learned that we need a president who wants to understand -- and who can understand," he said.

Clinton did not mention McCain by name but assailed Republicans for accusing Obama of pushing a "redistribution of wealth."

"They just presided over the biggest redistribution of wealth since the 1920s, and we all know how that ended," Clinton said.

Earlier, on the Gulf Coast, McCain urged Floridians to consider the dangers of handing the presidency to an Illinois senator less seasoned than himself in foreign affairs.

Obama, he said, hopes the "cloud of crisis" on Wall Street will lead Americans to "forget the stakes in Iraq -- the disaster and tragedy that would follow if American forces leave in retreat."

"The question is whether this is a man who has what it takes to protect America from Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and other grave threats in the world," McCain said after meeting with foreign policy advisors at the University of Tampa. "And he has given you no reason to answer in the affirmative."

The Republican nominee echoed that message with a new TV ad mocking Obama's "fancy speeches" and "grand promises."

"With crises at home and abroad, Barack Obama lacks the experience America needs. And it shows," an announcer says in the ad.

As McCain traveled across Florida, the Arizona senator, in a nod to Jewish voters, accused Obama of playing down his associations with Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar whom he characterized as extremist.

Playing for Cuban American support, McCain condemned Fidel Castro. He told Radio Mambi that the former Cuban president had made his "preferences known in the campaign and had some very unkind things to say about me."

McCain did not ignore the economy. At a sign factory in Riviera Beach, he pounded Obama for supporting higher income taxes for those who make more than $250,000 a year.

"His tax increases are exactly the wrong approach in an economic downturn," McCain said.

In another Miami radio interview, McCain pressed his case that Obama's fiscal agenda resembles socialism.

"His economic policies are clearly those that have been used by other countries that you could describe as socialist," he said. "I mean redistribution of wealth, take money from one group, give it to others, is a fundamental principal of some of these, quote, 'socialist' countries."

Obama ridiculed McCain's statements at a lunchtime rally in North Carolina.

"By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten," Obama told 28,000 supporters who filled an outdoor plaza in downtown Raleigh. "I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Obama summed up his argument against McCain's economic plans. Mainly, he faulted his Republican rival for favoring an expansion of Bush's tax cuts. The nation would be better off, Obama said, if the middle class paid less tax and the wealthy chipped in more.

"Whether you are Suzy the student or Nancy the nurse or Tina the teacher or Carl the construction worker -- if my opponent is elected, you will be worse off four years from now than you are today," Obama said, playing off McCain's vow to champion Joe the Plumber, an Ohio man who has questioned the Democrat's tax proposals.

At an evening rally in Sunrise, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, Obama renewed his pledge not to raise taxes "one single dime" on Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year.

"Let me just see a show of hands," he told 20,000 supporters packed into a Florida Panthers hockey arena. "How many people here make less than a quarter million dollars a year?" Nearly everyone raised their hands. "The last thing we should do in this economy is raise taxes on the middle-class," Obama said.

Obama launched Wednesday his first advertising attack on McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The ad quotes McCain saying in a debate last year that he "might have to rely on a vice president" for expertise on the economy. A question flashes on screen: "His choice?" The spot then cuts to video of Palin winking.

Obama has shied from attacking Palin. But recent polls have found she has become a drag on McCain's candidacy, with many voters seeing her as unqualified to step in as president should the need arise.

Obama's visits to North Carolina and Florida in the campaign's final stretch reflected the bleak election map that McCain faces: President Bush won nearly every state where the candidates and their running mates are campaigning this week.

To defeat Obama, McCain must carry almost every one of them. In addition to North Carolina and Florida, the battleground states include Missouri, Indiana, Virginia and Ohio.

Offering comic relief from the contentious campaign, Obama appeared Wednesday on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Stewart suggested to the biracial candidate that his white half might suddenly decide in the voting booth that he could not vote for a black man.

"It's a problem," Obama joked. "I've been going through therapy to make sure I vote properly on the 4th."

Stewart also told Obama that he might want to hold his Florida rallies earlier than his 11 p.m. event with Clinton.

"They don't like to miss their shows at night or the early-bird special at the diner," he said referring to the state's huge block of senior citizen voters.

"No comment on that, Jon," Obama replied. "I'm trying to win Florida."




By Michael Finnegan and Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2008

Voters see the economy as the chief issue and Obama as the best man to handle it, according to a Times/Bloomberg poll. Obama leads in Ohio, 49% to 40%; in Florida, 50% to 43%.

Reporting from Washington -- Barack Obama is leading Republican presidential rival John McCain in two battleground states, Florida and Ohio, where voters have more confidence in his ability to handle the troubled economy, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

In Ohio, a state that has been battered for years by unemployment and plant closings, the Democrat is leading McCain, 49% to 40%, among people likely to vote.

In Florida, a state that was considered a likely win for Republicans not long ago, McCain is trailing, 50% to 43%.

In both states, Obama has opened commanding leads over McCain among women, young people, first-time voters, and blacks and other minorities.

McCain still is widely viewed as far better equipped than Obama to deal with terrorism and the war in Iraq. But voters in Ohio and Florida do not see those issues as paramount in light of the turmoil in the economy and on Wall Street.

The poll results undercut McCain's closing argument that Obama is no friend of working people such as Joe the Plumber -- the Ohio man who said he feared his taxes would rise if Obama were elected.

Among registered voters in Ohio, the survey found, Obama won support from 52% of white, working-class voters, compared with 38% for McCain. The poll defined "working class" as people with no college degree and a household income of less than $50,000.

"Barack Obama understands Joe the Plumber better than John McCain," said Theresa Riddle, a 48-year-old Republican in Springfield, Ohio, who participated in the survey and spoke in a follow-up interview. "When John McCain talks about the economy, he says nothing."

Others worry that Obama has too little experience to manage the far-reaching economic and financial crisis gripping the world.

"McCain's been in politics" for a long time, said Jerry Mills, a 40-year-old welder in Edgerton, Ohio, whose wife was just laid off. "Obama has been on one side of the city of Chicago. Going from Chicago to the entire U.S. is a big jump."

Still, Obama has apparently impressed more voters as having the temperament and personality to be president: Nearly 6 in 10 respondents in each state said the Democratic nominee was temperamentally better suited than McCain.

Both candidates have begun locking down some of their supporters in early voting in these two battlegrounds. Among poll respondents who already have voted in Ohio, Obama has a big lead: 57% to 35%. But McCain is slightly ahead in Florida among early-voting respondents, 49% to 45%.

The Times poll focused on Ohio and Florida because they are vote-rich states that have been closely contested and could decide the outcome of the presidential race. The two were pivotal to the outcome of the last two presidential contests: Florida, with its dramatic recount in 2000, was key to President Bush's election; in his 2004 reelection, Ohio put him over the top with a slim 51%-49% victory.

Unlike in the 2000 election, when Ralph Nader siphoned votes from Democrat Al Gore, third-party candidates are not likely to change the 2008 outcome in Florida and Ohio, the poll indicates.

When voters were asked how they would vote when presented with a five-candidate field -- including independent Nader, Libertarian Bob Barr and Green Party candidate Cynthia A. McKinney -- Obama still came out ahead of McCain, with his margin growing among Florida voters and shrinking in Ohio. McKinney and Barr are former members of Congress.

Gloom about the economy is pervasive in Ohio. Among registered voters polled, about 90% say the economy is doing badly, and that affects how they size up the candidates. Fully one-half of Ohio registered voters polled said that domestic issues such as the economy were most important in their choice of presidential candidate. Only 16% cited national security issues, which many see as McCain's strong suit. Ohio voters polled said they trusted Obama more than McCain to make the right decisions about the economy, 50% to 38%.

It is hard to measure the effect of Obama's race. In Florida, the poll indicates that he draws 43% of the white vote, about the same as Sen. John F. Kerry did in 2004. But in Ohio, the poll shows that Obama has a lower share of the white vote: 42% to Kerry's 47%.

Jerry Mills of Edgerton, in northwest Ohio, said that being African American hurts Obama in small towns. "There are no blacks in this part of the state," he said. "That's got to go against him."

What is more, Obama has been dogged by a rumor that he is Muslim. (Obama is Christian.) The poll indicated that 7% in each state believed he was Muslim. Nearly half of respondents in Ohio and 44% in Florida said they were not sure what his religion was.

Nonetheless, Obama is benefiting from the fact that voters say they are looking for a candidate who will bring change to Washington, even more than experience. Of those who gave priority to change, 8 in 10 respondents in both states were backing Obama.

McCain has tried to distance himself from Bush and portray himself as an agent of change. But the poll indicates he has had only limited success. Among crucial independent voters, 47% in Ohio and 52% in Florida said they believed McCain would continue Bush's policies.

Both Obama and McCain are proving to have appeal among independent voters -- but in different places. In Florida, Obama leads among independent respondents by 51% to 35%. In Ohio, McCain leads among them, 49% to 38%.

Obama is leading solidly among women in both states, as he has elsewhere. But he also is competitive among men: Florida men polled slightly favored him, 49% to 44%, and Ohio men gave McCain only a 44%-41% edge.

An age gap also is evident: Obama dominates the 18-34 age group by double-digit margins. McCain does better -- but more narrowly -- among the over-65 crowd. That is an especially important constituency in Florida.

But Obama's show of strength in Florida is particularly striking because Republicans long thought the state was in the bag for McCain. Obama has poured resources into the Republican-dominated state to register tens of thousands of new voters -- and it seems to be paying off.

"Some people weren't inclined to vote in the past because they thought it was a slam-dunk for Republicans," said Virginia Fitch, 68, in Alva, Fla. "People are very excited about Obama."

The survey was conducted Saturday through Monday under the supervision of Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus. In Florida, 809 registered voters were interviewed, including 639 deemed likely to vote. In Ohio, 816 registered voters were interviewed, including 644 likely voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points for registered voters, plus or minus 4 points for likely voters.




By Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008

No Democratic presidential candidate has won the state since 1964. But Virginia is a battleground once more -- and potentially the decisive one in a historic election.

Reporting from Springfield, Va. -- Bob Lawrence, a retired engineer, once counted on a majority of people in this state to vote just like him -- Republican. Presidential elections were rather uneventful affairs.

So it comes as something of a surprise that in recent weeks, volunteers canvassing for Democrat Barack Obama have knocked on the front door of Lawrence's red brick home at least six times. He hasn't seen anyone from the other side.

When an Obama ad comes on television -- which happens a lot -- Lawrence switches channels. He's fed up with the automatic phone calls touting John McCain, whom he already voted for at his local firehouse, so enough already.

"I'll be glad when this is over," Lawrence, 76, said one day last week as he and his wife were preparing to take a Caribbean cruise, which came just in time for them to escape the October chill, not to mention the most aggressive and sweeping fight for the White House that Virginians can remember.

This reliably conservative state -- which George W. Bush ignored both times around and still won handily -- is a battleground for the first time in 44 years. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to win here. But this year, strategists predict that if Obama takes Virginia with its 13 electoral votes, he takes the White House, possibly positioning the state at the epicenter of a historic election, the Florida or Ohio of 2008.

Foreign journalists are flying in from Australia, Japan and Venezuela, intrigued by the paradox that the onetime capital of the Confederacy could be key to electing the first African American president. A tour group from Finland chose to spend its time hunting for Obama supporters at a Civil War reenactment. (They found some.)

Modern Virginia has never seen this much action. Obama was here twice in four days; in between, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin popped in. Nearly half a million new voters have registered. (Voters are not asked to declare a party when registering, so no one is sure who has the edge.) Lawn signs battle it out on block after suburban block. The line at the firehouse where Lawrence went to vote early was 25 people long.

An average of recent polls suggest Obama leads by 7 percentage points, but many here believe it could be closer -- nearly a third of Virginia voters call themselves independent.

Still, local Republicans recognize that Obama holds an edge that seemed unthinkable a year ago, and many have complained McCain took the state for granted. The Illinois senator and his running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, were here six times before McCain held his first Virginia rally, and now his campaign is scrambling to win what it thought it owned.

Obama has 50 offices across the state to 21 for the Arizona senator. At one point, Obama was outspending his rival in television ads more than 8 to 1, in some cases knocking out car dealerships as local TV's biggest ad customer.

The contest seems to have permeated all levels of daily life. An omelet contest at the Silver Diner restaurants throughout Virginia pits the Obamalette against the McCainlette -- the former made with Chicago pizza ingredients and the latter Western-style barbecue.

For every Bob Lawrence who wishes it would all end, there is a Virginian soaking up the joys of political relevance in a state that has held a high opinion of itself ever since producing the vast majority of forefathers and early presidents.

"We supplied the founders, we have always considered ourselves important and have been stunned to discover in modern times that others did not. Suddenly, we're important again," said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who, flooded with foreign interview requests, drew the line at Slovenian television.

The bellwether of the South for 150 years, Virginia could break a regional voting bloc the GOP has relied upon for decades.

It already took its place in history as the first to elect an African American governor -- L. Douglas Wilder in 1989 -- setting it apart from its neighboring states.

The recent change in Virginia's thinking was no doubt spurred by the financial meltdown, but the wheels were in motion long before Wall Street collapsed. What turned Virginia from red to purple was a population explosion in recent years of young families and college-educated professionals. Their more liberal leanings helped produce a string of Democratic victories: two straight governor races, a U.S. Senate seat and one house of the Legislature.

Beckoned by a technology corridor and a manageable commute to Washington, the newcomers mostly settled in the suburbs of northern Virginia, particularly Fairfax County, where Lawrence lives. The southern end, long sustained by coal mines and farms, remained mostly rural.

Today you can't go a mile without hitting traffic in the north, and in the south there are few good roads to bring in industry. Healthcare in the north is expensive; in the south it is scarce. The north is gaining population; the south is losing it. Democrats dominate one end; Republicans the other.

"Everywhere one looks in Virginia there is a yin and a yang, which in this election has set up a battleground," said Robert Denton, professor of communications studies at Virginia Tech.

Tensions have flared. McCain's brother, Joe, set off a to-do when he jokingly referred to Democratic-leaning Alexandria and Arlington as "communist country." (The Republican candidate has his campaign headquarters and a condo in Arlington, which is also home to the Pentagon, the Iwo Jima memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, critics were quick to note.)

When a high-level McCain advisor referred to the southern part of the state as "the real Virginia," people in the north took offense, a characterization Obama exploited.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the battle for votes more intense than in Loudoun County, about an hour outside Washington, the wealthiest and fastest-growing county in the nation.

In historic Leesburg, the county seat on the edge of a Civil War battlefield, an Obama rally drew about 35,000 supporters last week. The Republicans dispatched Palin to the region Monday.

"There is no doubt Republicans in many parts of the country are swimming against the tide right now . . . but those who predict the demise of the GOP in Loudoun County, I think, are writing the obituary prematurely," said Glen Caroline, chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee.

He was driving his pickup with a load of 1,000 signs to a precinct captains' meeting; demand is so high, he knew it would not be enough.

That was the yin. This was the yang: The night before, in a Leesburg storefront that serves as an Obama campaign office and calling bank, the signs were long gone, and there were more volunteers than phones.




By Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008

Obama says the comment proves the McCain healthcare plan is fatally flawed. Douglas Holtz-Eakin accuses the Democrat's campaign of distorting his words.

Reporting from Harrisonburg, Va., and -- Barack Obama on Tuesday seized on comments made by a top aide to rival John McCain about the Republican's healthcare plan, saying they amounted to a different kind of "October surprise."

"This morning, we were offered a stunning bit of straight talk . . . from his top economic advisor, who actually said that the health insurance people currently get from their employer is, and I quote, 'way better' than the healthcare they'd be getting if John McCain were president," Obama told 8,000 supporters crammed into an arena at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., and 12,000 standing outside.

The Democratic candidate was referring to comments made by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was asked on CNNMoney .com about an element of McCain's healthcare plan. McCain calls for eliminating tax breaks on employer-sponsored healthcare benefits but wants to give taxpayers healthcare tax credits -- $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families -- to buy insurance.

McCain argues that his plan would reduce what Americans spend on healthcare by creating more competition for insurance plans.

But independent analysts have concluded that McCain's plan would prompt younger workers to abandon employer-sponsored plans to find less expensive coverage -- leaving employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers, potentially prompting them to drop coverage completely.

Holtz-Eakin, a senior McCain advisor, was asked about young workers fleeing employer plans. "Why would they leave?" he said. "What they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the credit."

Obama said the remarks proved that the Republican's plan was fatally flawed.

"This is the point I've been making since Sen. McCain unveiled his plan. It took until the last seven days of this election for his campaign to finally admit the truth, but better late than never," Obama said.

Holtz-Eakin accused the Obama campaign of distorting his words.

"My response was that, obviously, if they had better coverage, they would not change," Holtz-Eakin said. "The Obama campaign deliberately took the quote out of context. This continues their disgraceful campaign."

Both candidates began their day in Pennsylvania. In Hershey, McCain continued to portray the Democrat as presumptuous, invoking the 30-minute commercial the Obama campaign will run on several networks tonight, which a campaign source said would have a live component.

"I guess I'm old-fashioned about these things: I prefer to let the voters weigh in before presuming the outcome," McCain told a raucous crowd of about 9,000. "What America needs now is someone who will finish the race before starting the victory lap . . . someone who will fight to the end, not for himself but for his country."

McCain and running mate Sarah Palin renewed their criticisms of Obama's plan to phase out President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. Palin referred to Obama as "Barack the wealth-spreader," while McCain dubbed him "redistributionist in chief."

McCain and Obama campaigned about 80 miles apart on a cold, wet morning. Polls show Obama with double-digit leads in Pennsylvania, which has 21 electoral votes, but both parties say they think the race is much tighter.

Obama rallied supporters in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester, telling 9,000 people gathered in a muddy college quad that although McCain was trying to distance himself from Bush, he would expand his economic policies.

"John McCain has ridden shotgun as George Bush has driven our economy toward a cliff, and now he wants to take the wheel and step on the gas," he said. "When it comes to the issue of taxes, saying that John McCain is running for a third Bush term isn't being fair to George Bush."

Both candidates later headed to states Bush won.

After visiting Harrisonburg, Obama held a nighttime rally at a ballpark in Norfolk, where he continued to paint McCain as a Bush clone.

"The last thing we need is four more years of the tired, old, worn-out theory of John McCain and George Bush, a theory that says we should give more and more to billionaires and big corporations and CEOs, and hope that prosperity trickles down on everyone else," he told a crowd of 22,000.

McCain headed to Fayetteville, N.C., near Pope Air Force Base and Ft. Bragg, where Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge broadened the rhetoric beyond economic issues to national security, perhaps previewing McCain's national security roundtable today in Tampa, Fla.

"You cannot be secure unless you're prosperous, and you cannot prosper unless you're secure," Ridge told a crowd of 8,600. "There should be no doubt in anybody's mind if you believe that there's only one real choice for commander in chief of the United States."

Although the candidates and campaigns stuck to their official talking points, two McCain surrogates went off message.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, in a fundraising e-mail for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), nearly predicted an Obama victory. And Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told a radio station there that it would be tough for McCain to win the state.

Political director Mike DuHaime told reporters that the campaign's internal polls showed the race tightening, with Republicans consolidating behind McCain and "independents moving nicely."

"It's going to be close down to the wire," he said.




By Seema Mehta and Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008

Tom Bradley's narrow loss in 1982 stemmed from a convergence of political difficulties, and only one of them was his race.

It has entered political lore as the "Bradley effect" -- the supposed tendency of some white voters to lie when asked if they support a black candidate, producing a bubble of support that isn't really there.

Named for the precipitous defeat in the 1982 California governor's race of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley -- after polls suggested his victory -- the effect has led to churning concern among backers of Barack Obama's presidential campaign that the lead he holds will vanish come election day.

But the anxiety masks reality: Bradley's narrow loss stemmed from a convergence of political difficulties for the mayor, who was then seeking to become the nation's first African American governor, and only one of them was his race. Twenty-six years later, those engaged in that contest still differ on whether there was a Bradley effect.

More to the point for Obama, there is no evidence that one still exists. A recent study by a Harvard political scientist showed no sign since 1996 of an otherwise unexplained election day drop-off in support for African American candidates for governor or U.S. Senate.

That is not to say that race is not an issue, particularly as Obama seeks to become the first black president. Exit polls in primary states demonstrated that for many voters, Obama's race was a stumbling block. But those voters were open about their views, suggesting that polls may be roughly accurate.

Joe Trippi, the deputy campaign manager for Bradley in 1982, thinks voter discomfort with the Democratic mayor's race was key to his defeat but that those concerns have eased with time.

"Whatever doubts race caused 26 years ago, it doesn't create the same level of doubt today," Trippi said.

"Anyone who thinks it's zero is kidding themselves," he cautioned. "But it's a hell of a lot closer to zero than it was. . . . I just don't see this election as being close enough [for it] to matter."

More than this campaign, the 1982 governor's contest was fraught with the issue of race. It was less than a generation removed from the late-1960s riots in America's cities, including Los Angeles, that sent fearful white voters scrambling for the suburbs. Bradley, the reserved, patrician mayor, a former police officer and city councilman, was running against George Deukmejian, the state's Republican tough-on-crime attorney general and a former state legislator from Long Beach.

On the same ballot was a U.S. Senate race between Pete Wilson, then the GOP mayor of San Diego, and Jerry Brown, then the Democratic governor. Also on the ballot -- and this would matter more -- was Proposition 15, a measure that would have imposed statewide handgun registration and a freeze on new handgun sales. The candidates for governor lined up on opposite sides -- Bradley supported it, Deukmejian opposed it.

Intent on brushing back gun controls, opponents of the measure mounted a massive voter registration drive to draw gun enthusiasts to the polls. At the same time, Republicans took advantage of a change in state law that allowed any Californian to vote by absentee ballot. In previous governor's races, only those with medical needs or travel plans could vote absentee.

The combination of more conservative gun-backing voters and more ways to get them to vote would help seal Bradley's fate. In some rural, mostly white counties, turnout was up substantially, by 5% to 10%, recalled Bob Mulholland, a senior Democratic Party advisor. Two-thirds more absentee ballots were cast than in the previous governor's race, and they were cast mostly by the older white voters who favored Deukmejian.

According to statistics collected at the time, Deukmejian beat Bradley among absentees by more than 113,000 votes. Bradley won among votes cast on election day by almost 20,000 ballots, but that left a 93,000-vote margin of victory for Deukmejian.

"Clearly the Democrats and the Bradley campaign did not take vote-by-mail as seriously as the Republicans did," Mulholland said.

The gun vote was key, according to Los Angeles Times exit polls. Those voting against the gun measure, roughly two-thirds of the voters, voted strongly for Deukmejian. Those supporting gun control sided strongly with Bradley, but they accounted for only a third of the voters.

But that was not all the bad news for Bradley. Black voters, expected to demonstrate overwhelming support, instead cast a below-average number of ballots. That gave more electoral heft to whites, a Times exit poll showed.

Still, it was not the result, but the seeming surprise, that led to suggestions of a Bradley effect. Times preelection polls showed Bradley's 14-percentage-point lead in September had been cut in half by October, suggesting Deukmejian was gaining ground. The Times did not survey after that point, about three weeks before the election. Internal polls by Deukmejian's campaign showed that trajectory continuing until election day, when their polls showed the race tied.

But a Field Poll published three days before the election gave Bradley a 7-percentage-point lead, and surveys of voters leaving the polls showed a strong Bradley edge. Pollster Mervin Field publicly projected a Bradley victory as the polls closed. Times exit polls showed a single-digit Bradley victory -- as well as an erroneous lead for Brown in the Senate race.

Some campaign staffers on both sides suggest that polling errors created the impression that voters lied to cover discomfort with Bradley's race.

"It's a myth," said Steve Merksamer, Deukmejian's campaign director and, later, chief of staff. But, he added, "it's a lot more compelling media narrative to say that there was latent racism."

But the notion that voters had lied gained ground when similar slumps occurred in high-profile races by two other black candidates -- David N. Dinkins, running for New York mayor, and L. Douglas Wilder, running for governor of Virginia.

Dan Hopkins, a Harvard political scientist, studied every race involving a black candidate for governor or U.S. Senate from the Wilder year, 1989, until 2006. He concluded that the Bradley effect cost African American candidates 2 or 3 percentage points until the mid-1990s.

Since then, "we've really found no evidence for a systematic Bradley effect," he said. He pointed particularly to the U.S. Senate race in Tennessee in 2006, where African American Democrat Harold Ford Jr. was defeated after a heated contest that ended with a racially inflected ad portraying him as a womanizer.

"If you were going to see a Bradley effect, it would have been there," he said. "But there was no such effect."

Hopkins said the shift occurred at the same time that crime ebbed as a voter concern, and as the nation enacted welfare reform -- taking off the table two issues that had been used to press voter buttons about African American candidates.

Charles Henry, a UC Berkeley professor of African American studies, looked at the 1982 election and declared that race was "the major factor" in Bradley's loss. Henry notes that more liberal Democrats running on the same statewide ballot won -- but they were white.

Henry said that the passage of time raised some questions: Do people no longer lie to pollsters? And if the absence of issues like crime and welfare has helped African American candidates, will they be hurt if the issues reemerge? And then there is the impact of voters who, unlike the Bradley effect balloters, are openly reluctant to vote for an African American.

"You can certainly predict that people will vote against Obama because he is black," Henry said. "I think there will be an anti-Bradley effect; some will vote for Obama because he is black. But there's no precedent in history for that overcoming the vote against him."

In Pennsylvania and Ohio, exit polls this spring showed 1 in 5 Democratic voters felt that the race of the candidate was important in deciding whom to back.

Those who thought race was important went overwhelmingly for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Frank Gilliam, the dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs who has studied voting patterns, said one of the frustrating things about the Bradley effect was the difficulty in figuring it out.

"This is like proving a conspiracy theory: You can't because it's secret," said Gilliam, who thinks Obama could lose 2 percentage points to a hidden anti-black vote. But he also believes that worry about the Bradley effect may overshadow a groundbreaking aspect of this presidential race.

"There's going to be millions of white people who are going to vote for Obama," he said, "and that's no small potatoes."





By Cathleen Decker, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008

Mystery man gives more than $120,000 to McCain and the GOP.

The story of Hao -- whose varied roster of business associates appears to include a Taiwanese government investment arm as well as the mastermind of a decade-old Democratic fundraising scandal -- is an eyebrow-raiser in the current election climate.

Ethnic Chinese donors became an issue in the battle for the Democratic nomination last year because some didn't seem to live where they claimed on contribution records. Now, Republicans are raising questions about the authenticity of many small donations Democrat Barack Obama has received from abroad.

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, said the timing of the Hao-related contributions appeared troubling, though there could be a plausible explanation.

"Large contributions from people who have never given previously do generally provoke questions about who they are and what they're up to and, most importantly, what they're looking for," said Krumholz, whose nonpartisan group closely tracks political donations. " . . . The public needs to be concerned because there are fraudulent donations and persons use them to gain influence and access in Washington."

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said Hao was not a "major donor" and "not a part of this campaign in terms of fundraising," but declined to discuss him further or to address the campaign's procedures for vetting donors. RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said he would not respond to questions from the Tribune, contending the newspaper was biased against McCain.

So who is Shi Sheng Hao and what are his means and motives for becoming a megadonor? No one answered a telephone listed in his name in the 630 area code and there was no answering machine. Messages left for him by phone and e-mail with several relatives went unanswered.

But this much can be gleaned from public records:

Donation disclosures list his occupation as a businessman with entities identified only by slightly different acronyms: ADECC, AAEC, A.A.E.C.C. On some he is also listed as president of American Chinese Entertainment Ltd.

Hao and his wife, Hsin-Ning, declared bankruptcy in 1995, at the time using the Roselle home as an address and listing as a business a firm called Asian American Environmental Control.

Hao holds an Illinois driver's license that lists his address as the Roselle home, but property records show the four-bedroom house has been owned since 1992 by Robert and Jen Chi, whose their last name is on the mailbox.

Contacted at the Des Plaines marketing firm where she works, Jen Chi said she didn't want to discuss Hao, though she said she knew how to get in touch with him and would have him call the Tribune. He never did.

"I don't know anything about his business," said Chi, who herself gave $15,000 to the RNC the week after Hao's first donation. "I don't want to be stuck in the middle."

Hao's wife, Hsin-Ning, also used the Roselle address when she made a $25,000 contribution to the RNC last year. In September, however, she listed a Taipei address on a $2,300 contribution to the campaign fund of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There is no record in business databases of American Chinese Entertainment Ltd., the firm listed in some Hao donation records. However, an Asian American Entertainment Corp. was incorporated early this year in California with a Shi Sheng Hao as president.

Government records show that firm and at least two other Hao companies have connections to the family of Gene and Nora Lum, onetime prominent Democratic fundraisers in the Asian-American community who were convicted in 1997 of making political donations through illegal straw donors.

A Taiwanese firm with a nearly identical name as Hao's new California company, Asian American Entertainment Ltd., is also headed by a Shi Sheng Hao. That firm has been embroiled in a lengthy legal battle in Las Vegas over a soured partnership in an application for a casino license in Macau, the former Portuguese colony now part of the People's Republic of China.

A court filing in that case described Hao's firm as a business affiliate of the China Industrial Development Bank, a finance arm of the Taiwanese government. Hao is listed as a resident of Taiwan in corporate papers filed in the case.

It's unclear whether the Shi Sheng Hao in the lawsuit and the California ventures is the same Shi Sheng Hao using the Roselle address. But public records point to numerous coincidences, including corporations with similar names and an overlap of investors. Some political donations from the Roselle address also refer to Hao by a nickname, Marshall, the same nickname given for Hao in the Las Vegas court action.

Federal records indicate a pattern of large and coordinated donations from Hao, relatives and associates. Collectively, eight of them gave a total of $130,000 to the RNC in late September and early October of 2007.




By Andrew Zajac, Ray Gibson and Bob Secter, Chicago Tribune, October 29, 2008

But the law has a loophole exploited by Democrats and Republicans alike. Barack Obama and John McCain each control what are called joint fundraising committees, which are allowed to put the arm on individual donors for tens of thousands of dollars. Between them, Obama and McCain have raised $300 million that way.

The joint committees act as funnels, distributing money they raise to other political committees which, by law, aren't allowed to coordinate with each other on how the funds are spent. That's a feeble restriction since experienced political operatives know how to promote a candidate without comparing notes with colleagues, said Massie Ritsch, of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.




ByBob Secter, Chicago Tribune, October 29, 2008

FAYETTEVILLE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Republican presidential nominee John McCain said on Tuesday he sensed momentum behind him despite a daunting electoral picture in which Democrat Barack Obama holds a steady lead a week before Election Day.

Hoping to dent Obama's armor, McCain and his No. 2 Sarah Palin ramped up criticism of Obama's tax plan and the McCain campaign released a television ad that tried to raise voter doubts about Obama by pointing out that he said last May he did not believe Iran posed a serious threat.

McCain told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity that he felt growing enthusiasm that reminds him of his comeback victory in the Republican primary, "where we were running behind and we sensed this momentum building."

"I am convinced that seven days from now we will win in North Carolina," McCain told a crowded rally in Fayetteville, where U.S. military families and veterans have a strong presence.

McCain is in a neck-and-neck battle with Obama in the normally Republican state of North Carolina, emblematic of a gloomy outlook for Republicans in this year of financial turmoil.

Obama, feeling the heat from McCain's accusations that he wants to redistribute Americans' wealth, took the Arizona senator head on at an event in Chester, Pennsylvania.

OBAMA LEADING IN POLLS

He said McCain's proposals to extend tax cuts would worsen the country's budget picture, and again sought to tie McCain to the policies of unpopular President George W. Bush.

"John McCain has ridden shotgun as George Bush has driven our economy toward a cliff, and now he wants to take the wheel and step on the gas," Obama said.

Americans on November 4 will vote in what amounts to 50 state-by-state elections. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes based on the size of its population. Whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the White House.

If current polling is accurate and stands up on Election Day, Obama could well win by a large margin.

Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a three-day national tracking poll by Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby, a slight dip from his 5-point advantage on Monday.

McCain solidified his support among white and male voters but Obama retained double-digit leads among women and independent voters -- two key swing blocs.

Amid news reports of some strains between the McCain and Palin camps, McCain said he could not be more pleased with the enthusiasm his vice presidential running mate has generated.

"By the way, when two mavericks join up they don't always agree on everything, but that's a lot of fun," he told a jammed, noisy rally in rain-soaked Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Palin told CNBC in a joint interview with McCain that "the partnership is very good."

Various news reports over the past week quoting anonymous sources have said Palin insiders felt she was too heavily controlled by the McCain side while the McCain camp sometimes thought she was not a team player.

BATTLE FOR PENNSYLVANIA

McCain and Obama tangled earlier in Pennsylvania, a state where Obama holds a comfortable lead but where McCain hopes to score an upset by appealing to white middle-class voters who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton over Obama in their primary battle earlier this year.

"It's wonderful to fool the pundits, because we're going to win the state of Pennsylvania," McCain said.

In Chester, a city in the Philadelphia suburbs, about 9,000 people braved cold rain and mud to hear Obama speak at Widener University.

"The fact that all of you are here today shows how badly you want change, shows how committed you are," Obama said.

"We want change, we want change," the audience chanted.

"If all of you go out on Election Day, if all of you get your friends and your neighbors, your co-workers, if all of you are determined to bring about a better America, then I promise you this: we will not just win Pennsylvania, we will win this general election and you and I together, we're going to change this country and we're going to change the world," he said.

As they have for days, McCain and Palin hammered Obama for telling Ohio's Joe Wurzelbacher -- "Joe the Plumber" -- two weeks ago that he wanted to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 in order to "spread the wealth around."

Palin, who has generated energy among the Republican base but has been unable to extend her reach beyond that core group, drew roars when she hit Obama on the issue.

"It doesn't sound like too many of you are supporting Barack the Wealth Spreader," she said.

Obama is to launch an unprecedented television blitz on Wednesday to push his economic message on U.S. networks ranging from CBS and NBC to Comedy Central.

Obama's television campaign will also force a 15-minute delay in the FOX network's broadcast of the fifth game of the U.S. baseball World Series -- the fanatically followed championship of an iconic American sport.

By Steve Holland Steve Holland, Reuters, October 28, 2008

The New York City Board of Elections, bracing for heavy turnout in Tuesday's general election, is trying to avoid a repeat of the chaos that dogged the last presidential election here, when voters waited in line for hours, poll workers were inadequately trained, phone calls went unanswered and the agency's Web site crashed.

Yet there have already been complaints, most concerning the process of casting absentee ballots. And given that there are now more than 4.6 million voters on the city's rolls, an increase of nearly 125,000 from 2004, officials said that voters should try to be patient on Election Day.

"Will there be lines? Yes, there will be lines," Frederic M. Umane, one of the 10 Board of Elections members, said at a news conference on Tuesday. "We just hope people will be as patient to try to vote as they would be in waiting for a hamburger at one of the more fancy hamburger places." He urged people to try to vote at midday, when lines are shortest.

The board received nearly 204,000 voter registration forms from Oct. 1 to 15, bringing the total number of registrations received this year to 715,000, compared with 253,000 in all of 2007.

"This is unprecedented," Mr. Umane said. "Our agency has been working 24/7 to make sure all of those new registration forms have been processed and checked, and we have done that."

But not all of the new registrations could be processed in time to be included in the giant paper books that voters must sign before they enter the voting booth. Mr. Umane said that about 60,000 to 70,000 voters will have to sign supplemental books that were printed recently - a complication that could yield confusion on Election Day.

More than 34,000 workers have been hired and trained to staff the 1,351 polling places across the five boroughs. The phone equipment used to field Election Day calls has been upgraded, and about 100 operators - roughly double the number used in 2004 - have been hired to staff the phones. Ballot-marking devices designed for use by disabled voters will be available at every city polling place for the first time.

The election is projected to cost $18.5 million, up from $17.1 million in 2004. Despite the added expense and efforts, complaints about the voting process are already being made.

An unusually large number of applications for paper absentee ballots - somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 - have been received. "In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we have had large numbers of people physically come in to vote there by this procedure, and we've been dealing with them as quickly as we can," Mr. Umane said. "The process is not designed to have people do this."

On Monday, voters complained that they had to wait for nearly two hours to obtain absentee ballots at the board's Manhattan office, at 200 Varick Street. By 6:45 p.m. that day, about two dozen voters remained.

Lisa Villamil, 45, a television advertising producer from the East Village, said she had arrived at 4 p.m. to find the offices packed with more than 100 people after the board's computer system crashed.

"It does concern me that there's a little mayhem," she said. "It should be a smoother process, and it concerns me that the computer is down. With a big election coming, there should have been more maintenance."

Another voter, Holly Webber, 44, an editor from the Upper West Side who was sitting next to Ms. Villamil, quipped, "We've made friendships sitting here."

Ms. Webber added: "It's more a matter of incompetence than anything else. They're extremely disorganized. They don't even seem to know what information people need. We were sitting here two and a half hours, and we had the voter ID cards and nobody thought to ask for them until just now."

Marcus Cederqvist, who was named executive director of the elections board in January, acknowledged the problems, saying that there had been an unusual surge in absentee voting. He added that the computer system was back up and running.

"We're expecting a high turnout, and we're expecting some lines," Mr. Cederqvist said. "Our goal and mission remain to get people in and out as quickly and orderly as possible."

The elections board is financed by the city but operates independently of City Hall. Ten board members - a Democrat and a Republican from each borough, who are recommended by local party organizations - oversee the agency.

The confusion during the 2004 election prompted heavy criticism by the City Council and by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who named a task force to suggest ways to improve election efficiency.

As recently as January, Mr. Bloomberg used his State of the City address to denounce the Board of Elections, saying it "desperately needs modernization" and calling it "the only agency that still has the party bosses directly calling the shots."

Board officials have shot back, saying the city has starved it of resources. The board said its budget was already cut by $6.5 million in the current fiscal year and that it faces additional cuts of $2.2 million this year and $3.9 million next year, even as its "legal obligations" have expanded under the federal Help American Vote Act of 2002.

The city is giving the elections board some assistance this year. The Board of Elections Web site, www.vote.nyc.ny.us, was moved onto city-owned servers to provide extra capacity. Calls to the board's voting hot line (866-VOTE-NYC) will be forwarded to the city's 311 hot line if the operators are overwhelmed. And 311 operators will help answer the two most common questions from voters: polling hours (6 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and where to vote.




By Sewell Chan, The New York Times, October 28, 2008

Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are heading into the final week of the presidential campaign planning to spend nearly all their time in states that President Bush won last time, testimony to the increasingly dire position of Mr. McCain and his party as Election Day approaches.

With optimism brimming in Democratic circles, Mr. Obama will present on Monday what aides described as a summing-up speech for his campaign in Canton, Ohio, reprising the themes he first presented in February 2007, when he began his campaign for the presidency.

From here on out, Mr. Obama's aides said, attacks on Mr. McCain will be joined by an emphasis on broader and less partisan themes, like the need to unify the country after a difficult election.

Mr. McCain has settled on Pennsylvania as the one state that Democrats won in 2004 where he has a decent chance of winning, a view not shared by Mr. Obama's advisers.

But Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, are planning to spend most of their time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana, all states that Republicans had entered the campaign thinking they could bank on.

Mr. McCain will stick with the message he has embraced over the last week, presenting Mr. Obama as an advocate of big government and raising taxes. His advisers say they will limit the numbers of rallies where he and Ms. Palin appear together, to cover more ground in the final days.

While some Republicans said they still had hope that Mr. McCain could pull this out, there were signs of growing concern that Mr. McCain and the party were heading for a big defeat that could leave the party weakened for years.

"Any serious Republican has to ask, 'How did we get into this mess?' " Newt Gingrich, the former Republican house speaker, said in an interview. "It's not where we should be, and it's not where we had to be. This was not bad luck."

As Mr. Obama uses his money and political organization to try to expand the political map, Mr. McCain is being forced to shore up support in states like Indiana and North Carolina that have not been contested for decades. His decision to campaign on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Ms. Palin campaigned there, was questioned even by Republicans who noted polls that showed Mr. Obama pulling away there. But it reflected how few options the campaign really has, as poll after poll suggests that Mr. Obama is solidifying his position.

Mr. McCain has found relatively small crowds - particularly compared with those that are turning out for Mr. Obama - even as he has campaigned in battleground states.

His campaign has become embroiled by infighting, with signs of tension between Mr. McCain's advisers and Ms. Palin's staff, and subject to unusual public criticism from other Republicans for how his advisers have handled this race.

Republicans and Democrats said there were signs that two states that had once appeared overwhelmingly Republican, Georgia and South Carolina, were tightening, in part, because of surge of early-voting by African-Americans. An Obama win in the states seemed unlikely - and no plans were immediately on his itinerary to travel to them - but it is a sign of how volatile a year this is that more states would seem to be coming into play, rather than being settled, as the election approaches.

Mr. McCain's aides said they remained confident that they could win. They said their candidate did not plan to introduce any kind of formal closing speech, the way Mr. Obama is doing, but would instead hammer home the issues of taxes and spending they said appeared to be giving them some steam.

"We feel good that when people hear the message about spreading the wealth versus raising taxes , they respond," said Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser. "It's just a matter of whether, given Obama's saturation paid advertising, we can get the message out there."

The contours of these final days suggest a culmination of a strategy that Mr. Obama's advisers put in place at the beginning: to use his huge fund-raising edge to try to put as many states in play as possible and overwhelm Mr. McCain in the final days of the race.

"It's now a big map, so you have to be in a lot of states over the last eight days," said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama's campaign manager.

As of right now, Pennsylvania is the only Democratic-leaning state Mr. Obama is planning to visit, and that is only in response to what Mr. Obama's advisers argued was Mr. McCain's misplaced faith that he could win there. More strikingly, Mr. Obama also is making a vigorous push in Florida, after a campaign stop there last week convinced his advisers that he has a real shot of winning there.

Mr. Obama is to spend at least part of two days in the state, including a late-night rally with former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday in Orlando timed to make the 11 p.m. news.

Mr. Obama's aides said that his closing speech, written with his top speechwriter, Jon Favreau, would return to the theme that he offered when he announced his candidacy, calling for change. Mr. Obama's advisers said that after a long and often acerbic campaign, they believed voters were hungering for that kind of positive appeal to close out the race.

That said, they made clear that while attacks on Mr. McCain might diminish, they would not by any means disappear. "We're in a good place right now, but nine days is a long time, so we're just going step upon the gas," said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's chief strategist. "It's time to sum up the case in broader terms."

The closing argument will be amplified by Mr. Obama in a 30-minute prime time infomercial presented across the major television networks on Wednesday in a rare and expensive move by a presidential candidate.

His aides said they were going to great lengths to make certain that no one becomes lulled by polls showing Mr. Obama in a strong position. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. Obama's running mate, has forbidden any discussion of the election result or what happens after Election Day, said David Wade, his press secretary.

"This is someone who won his first Senate race by 3,162 votes, and he hasn't hesitated to remind his traveling staff that he expects this race to be no different," Mr. Wade said.

Mr. Obama began boiling down his pitch to voters on Sunday, raising a question to supporters in Denver: "Don't you think it's time that we want to try something new?"

At Civic Center Park, tens of thousands of people spilled from an outdoor plaza outside the golden-tipped Capitol as Mr. Obama returned to the city where he accepted the Democratic nomination two months ago.

"Just this morning, Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a common philosophy," Mr. Obama said. "I guess that was John McCain finally giving us a little straight talk, and owning up to the fact that he and George Bush actually have a whole lot in common."

The tensions between the McCain and Palin camps have been played out mainly in anonymous attacks from both sides over how Ms. Palin was first presented as a candidate and, most recently, over the dispute that arose following the disclosure that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing and accessories for Mrs. Palin and her family.

A McCain adviser came to the back of Mr. McCain's plane on Sunday to say, only on the condition of anonymity, that those reports were overblown.

Mr. Obama opens the last eight days of the race with an incursion into several Republican-leaning regions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina. With his Democratic supporters already highly motivated, aides said, Mr. Obama is purposefully focusing on voters who may need to take one final measure of him.

As he opens the week with a stop in Canton on Monday, Mr. Obama is working to offset Mr. McCain's margins in conservative stretches of both states. He also is taking what could be a final trip to Pennsylvania, staging a stop in Pittsburgh and to the Philadelphia suburbs to counter an intense push by Ms. Palin in the state this week.

Mr. McCain is in Ohio on Monday, before heading to Pennsylvania.




By Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times, October 26, 2008

ALIQUIPPA, Pa. - Voting for the black man does not come easy to Nick Piroli. He is the first to admit that.

To the sound of bowling balls smacking pins, as the bartender in the Fallout Shelter queues up more Buds, this retired steelworker wrestles with this election and his choice. A couple of friends, he says, will not vote for Senator Barack Obama.

"I'm no racist, but I'm not crazy about him either," said Mr. Piroli, 77. "I don't know, maybe 'cause he's black."

He winces at himself. "We was raised and worked with the black, the Serb," he said. "It was a regular league of nations. And the economy now, it's terrible."

"I've got to vote for him," he said finally.

Him? "The Democrat, Obama," Mr. Piroli replied. "I can't be stupid."

Mr. Obama's Republican rival in the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain, has placed a sizable electoral bet that he can sweep predominantly white, working-class Beaver County and a dozen more Pennsylvania counties like it. Last week, Mr. McCain spoke before thousands in Moon Township, and two days later his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, drew more than 2,000 fans to a rally in Beaver.

But to walk the back streets of the Beaver River mill cities - the biggest mills were long ago shuttered - and to visit rural hamlets like Economy and Hookstown is to hear more than a few Democrats saying they intend, however reluctantly, to support their party's standard-bearer, particularly as the world economy cracks and heaves. Many Democrats, and a few independents, wonder if Mr. McCain is too old and Ms. Palin too unsophisticated to take his place.

Such sentiments could bode ill for Mr. McCain, who hopes for a surprise victory in Pennsylvania to rescue his presidential bid. And they dovetail with poll findings that show a gravitation of white voters, female and male, toward Mr. Obama's camp. To try to stanch that flow and tap into doubts about Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain will return to the state on Monday for the second time in a week and then appear on Tuesday with Ms. Palin as they try to sway voters like Mr. Piroli.

Mr. McCain may have an opening: 35 interviews over three days offer up a conversation about race and presidential choices, and that is where the greatest uncertainty lies for Mr. Obama. Sometimes race talk runs like a subterranean river. Sometimes it floats right on the surface.

In Ambridge, an Ohio River factory town named after the company that gave it fame - American Bridge - Olga Permon, a 71-year-old steelworker's widow and a lifelong Democrat, climbs the stoop of her yellow-brick home. She considers the field: Mr. McCain? A grouchy old man. Ms. Palin? Please. No way. What about Mr. Obama?

Her pause goes on and on. "He scares me," Mrs. Permon said. "The coloreds are excited, but my friends and I plan to write in Hillary's name."

These are not gentle lands for Mr. Obama. A visit here in August found even deeper suspicions of him in Beaver County, where Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him by 40 percentage points in the Democratic primary. Democrats outnumber Republicans, but voters here tilt either way in presidential elections.

Still, a worsening economy has worked to the Democrats' advantage. Mr. Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., drew 8,000 to a rally in Beaver a month ago; John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, stumped on Saturday in Beaver; and many dozens of union members go door to door each weekend, rounding up votes. They remind their fellow workers that Mr. McCain had supported privatization of Social Security, a move they say could have left worker retirement accounts trapped in a plummeting stock market.

"This is McCain's Hail Mary; they looked at the huge margin here for Hillary Clinton in the primary and figured, 'Hmm, we have a shot,' " said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster. "But it's going to be very difficult here for him to get the margins needed to offset the cities and the eastern suburbs."

In Ambridge, Vince Pisano, 47, a union plumber, reflects that challenge. As he sits on his porch, he considers collapses - of the economy and his retirement account. He is firm for Mr. Obama, but he is in a small club.

"Close friends, real close, tell me they can't get past his race," said Mr. Pisano, flashing his give-me-a-break look. "If Obama were white, this would be a landslide around here."

Beaver was known as the cake-eater's town. Steel management lived here, and its elegant Edwardian and Victorian homes, with oak and mahogany beams, lend a grace to the streets.

Ms. Palin has taken a lead role in wooing culturally conservative counties like Beaver. She held a rally here and obtained the endorsement of the Beaver High School football coach, who paraded his players and cheerleaders onto the field for her, and the crowds cheered when she spoke of her opposition to abortion. This is a theologically conservative province - Catholic churches vie with conservative Protestant and evangelical churches.

"She's what we need, a live one," said Steve Matoic, a 6-foot-6 truck driver in a camouflage jacket and with a flag bandana on his head.

"The head of our ticket is good, but sometimes his energy - - " he said, his voice trailing off.

The Palin fires, however, show signs of banking. Over at Sheffield Lanes, mention of her name summons no glint from older bowlers, or from Jeremy and Joe Long, in their 20s, tipping Buds. They liked Mrs. Clinton but pass on Ms. Palin.

"She's always talking about the 'Average Joe,' " Jeremy Long said. "Average me! I don't want myself in the Oval Office. I want someone smarter."

The next day, just up the street on Linden Avenue, Grace Ruscitti, a retired schoolteacher, stood on her porch on a block of modest steel-worker bungalows. She was still upset about Mr. McCain's choice of Ms. Palin. "That was an insult to our intelligence," Ms. Ruscitti said. "This barracuda nonsense. Tell me, where'd they find her?"

None of which is to suggest that Mr. McCain does not have deep reservoirs of support. The Rev. Chris Noyes, a Presbyterian minister in Beaver Falls, a city with broad avenues and storefronts that are more vacant than not, estimates that two-thirds of his congregation supports the Republican ticket.

Talk to Derek Wood, 28, as his Dalmatian tugs at a leash, and he says he is voting for Mr. McCain. He likes the tax cuts.

People here have voted for Democrats since the 1930s, Mr. Wood said, and what is left? Ghosts hang from oaks and pumpkins sit on porches, but there are no children to demand trick or treat. If you are 28, you rent a U-Haul truck and leave.

"It's a great place to live from 45 and up," Mr. Wood said.

The Republicans have also poured money into advertising. Until early October, the McCain campaign had outspent the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania. And commercials and e-mail messages from unaffiliated groups have sown doubt: about Mr. Obama's ties to William Ayers, the former member of the 1960s-era Weather Underground radical group; about his connection to Acorn, an organizing group being accused of voter-registration fraud; about his religion. The rumors and charges form a subliminal closed loop.

The white-haired Judy Miller, "Miss Judy" to customers, slaps together a turkey hoagie in Hookstown, near the West Virginia border. Mention of Mr. Obama brings a frown. "Who is he? Who's behind him?" she said. "This radical at the university thing, the Muslim stuff."

A union distributes a leaflet here titled "The Truth About Barack Obama," which says: "Is he a Christian? Yes. Was he sworn in on a Bible? Yes. Was he born in America? Yes."

Still, doubts about Mr. Obama persist. Mrs. Permon, the steelworker's widow, plans to write in Mrs. Clinton's name. Rita Ratjer, another steel widow, plans to sit it out altogether.

But in between sits the housebound Peggy Doffin. Her knees are gone and she takes groceries, mail deliveries and interviews through her first-floor window. At 79, with her fat tabby cat in her arms, she has lived through the Great Depression and fears another coming. Once she was a confirmed "Hillary woman" and not a fan of Mr. Obama. Then she listened to his convention speech and, she said, "chills ran down my back."

"Race just don't matter to me any more," she said. "But a lot of Democrats out there" - she shrugged - "we'll find out on Election Day, won't we?"

By Michael Powell, The New York Times, October 26, 2008

Whether the Republican presidential ticket wins or loses on Tuesday, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day to discuss the way forward, and whatever the outcome, Gov. Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda.

Ms. Palin, of Alaska, has had a rocky time since being named as Senator John McCain's running mate, but to many conservatives her future remains bright. If Mr. McCain wins, she will give the social conservative movement a seat inside the White House. If he loses, she could emerge as a standard bearer for the movement and a potential presidential candidate in 2012, albeit one who will need to address her considerable political damage.

Her prospects, in or out of government, are the subject of intensive conversations among conservative leaders, including the group that will meet next Wednesday in rural Virginia to weigh social, foreign policy and economic issues, as well as the political landscape and the next presidential election.

Ms. Palin's aides insist that winning this time around is her sole objective. But there are signs that she, too, is making sure that she is well positioned for the future if she and Mr. McCain lose.

In a week that most candidates give over to big rallies and closing arguments, she is giving policy speeches, like one on Wednesday on energy security, a move aides say is intended to help her be seen as more substantive.

On Monday, she held a brief meeting with the Israeli ambassador, reflecting an interest that aides say she expresses in intense foreign policy tutorials. She has increasingly separated herself from Mr. McCain's positions, and this week tried to quarantine herself from the damage caused by news that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing and accessories for her and her family.

More and more, she has broken out of the cloister imposed early on by McCain aides, doing more interviews with local television stations and newspapers, and speaking off the cuff to reporters who travel with her.

Despite all the criticism, she has many supporters among Republicans who see her as bright, tough and a star in a party with relatively few on the horizon.

"She's dynamite," said Morton C. Blackwell, who was President Ronald Reagan's liaison to the conservative movement. Mr. Blackwell described vying to get close to Ms. Palin at a fund-raiser in Virginia, lamenting that he could get only within four feet.

"I made a major effort to position myself at this reception," he said, adding that he is eager to sit down with her after the election to discuss the future. Asked if the weeks of unflattering revelations and damaging interviews had tarnished her among conservatives, he replied, "Not a bit."

Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative group, called it a "top order of business" to determine Ms. Palin's future role. "Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years," Mr. Bozell said. "No matter what she decides to do, there will be a small mother lode of financial support behind her."

The presidential campaign has allowed Ms. Palin to develop as a candidate, and to make many useful connections as she travels the country. On the campaign, she has become close to people with extensive experience in Republican politics, including Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann, two foreign policy conservatives.

She has received extensive policy tutorials and been briefed on foreign policy almost daily. Aides say she has taken particular interest in Pakistan and Israel and in causes of Islamic extremism, which she has related to the economic despair that plagues parts of Alaska.

People loyal to her say Ms. Palin is well aware of the political job in front of her. One aide said she had "gotten on the offensive," pushing to include more policy in her speeches. "It's important for her personally, for how she's perceived, to ensure that she gets to show her depth."

In a development that could be telling whether or not she ends up as vice president, she has also been asserting her independence from the McCain campaign. She disagreed publicly with the decision to pull out of Michigan and questioned the use of automated calls and the decision not to bring up Senator Barack Obama's relationship with his controversial former pastor. She said she would release her medical records after the campaign declared she would not, and has in the past week even wandered over to talk to reporters who travel with her, sending staff members scurrying to cut off conversations.

Ms. Palin's rallies have drawn many times more supporters than Mr. McCain's, with people waving eager signs: "Palin Power," "Iowa is Palin Country," "Super Sarah," "You betcha!"

Matthew Dowd, a former Bush strategist, said Ms. Palin's challenge was to show substance.

"She's an attractive woman who can give a great speech, but the American public doesn't view her much beyond that," Mr. Dowd said. "She's vastly unpopular among moderate and independent voters, and while she could be in a position to be popular among an increasingly smaller Republican Party, she's got to figure out a way to extend that and figure out a way to strengthen her weaknesses."

And should she not become vice president, Ms. Palin will have to navigate a changed landscape in Alaska, a task Les Gara, a Democratic state representative, said could prove to be "a rocky road." Revelations that she charged the state an expense allowance (generally collected for travel away from home) while staying at her home and for her children to travel with her, and about the clothing, have dragged down her public image and her poll numbers.

And some Democrats who in the past saw Ms. Palin as someone willing to buck her own party say they have been put off by her partisan attacks as part of the national ticket.

At times, Ms. Palin's family and friends have seemed shaken by the attention. Her sister, Heather Bruce, described recent months as "the most stressful period of my life," and her father, Chuck Heath, said he felt pure outrage when he saw spoofs involving his grandchildren.

But some elements of the Republican base are already looking ahead to the day, whenever it comes, that Ms. Palin is at the top of the ticket.

"I would hope she would consider running for president," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which raises money for candidates who oppose abortion.

The group's donations increased threefold, she said, after Ms. Palin was named to the ticket, and a "Team Sarah" conference call last week among voters who oppose abortion attracted 40,000 women. The group is planning a similar event after the election whether or not the Republicans win the White House.

"We have to get concrete about where we take this energy from here," Ms. Dannenfelser said.

By Kate Zernike and Monica Davey, The New York Times, October 28, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama has a 4-point national lead over Republican John McCain as they head into the final week of the presidential campaign, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.

Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, a slight dip from his 5-point advantage on Monday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

McCain solidified his support among white and male voters but Obama retained double-digit leads among women and independent voters -- two key swing blocs in the November 4 election.

Obama had a strong single day of polling on Monday, pollster John Zogby said, and still holds a significant edge among Hispanics and Catholics, two groups who gave a boost to Republican President George W. Bush's re-election win in 2004.

"With seven days to go in this race, McCain is still not where he needs to be with some key groups and he is running out of time," Zogby said.

McCain, a veteran Arizona senator, has sliced Obama's 12-point advantage by more than half in the last five days but he has not been able to break through the 45 percent support mark.

When the national tracking poll debuted on October 6, Obama led by 3 points, 48 percent to 45 percent. In the ensuing three weeks, McCain's support has not been higher than 45 percent and Obama's support has not been lower than 48 percent.

MCCAIN TRIES TO GAIN

McCain has struggled in recent weeks to overcome Obama's lead in national polls and to beat back a strong challenge from the first-term Illinois senator in about a dozen states won by Bush in 2004.

The swirling economic crisis helped emphasize Obama's perceived strength on the issue, while a series of debates and Obama's huge advantage in paid advertising in battleground states have also paid dividends.

Obama leads among all age groups except those between 30 and 49. He also leads among self-described blue-collar workers and those who have a member of the military in their family.

Obama also has done a better job of reaching across the ideological divide, winning one of every five conservative voters while McCain captures just 8 percent of self-described liberals, the poll found.

Independent Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr both received support from 1 percent of those polled nationally. Three percent said they remain undecided in the race.

The rolling tracking poll, taken Saturday through Monday, surveyed 1,202 likely voters in the presidential election. In a tracking poll, the most recent day's results are added, while the oldest day's results are dropped to monitor changing momentum.

The U.S. president is determined by who wins the Electoral College, which has 538 members apportioned by population in each state and the District of Columbia. Electoral votes are allotted on a winner-take-all basis in all but two states, which divide them by congressional district.

By John Whitesides, Reuters, October 28, 2008

Probably, John McCain and Sarah Palin will lose this election. Certainly, they deserve to.

With a campaign designed more to play on insecurities than to promote ideas, McCain and Palin have practically framed Barack Obama's "closing argument" for him. "The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' " Obama told an audience yesterday in Canton, Ohio. "We know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' " The Republicans don't even try to formulate an answer, and with Obama's lead growing by the day, it's hard to imagine what might turn things around.

An "October surprise" international incident might end up working against McCain rather than for him, given his all-over-the-map reaction to the financial crisis. The vaunted Republican get-out-the-vote machine looks almost puny beside Obama's next-generation juggernaut.

There's always race, of course, and we can't say with certainty whether there's some huge, hidden racist vote out there just waiting to emerge next Tuesday. My hunch is that race is already factored into the poll numbers -- that it has already been "discounted by the market," to use financial jargon that's fashionable these days. I believe that race is a subtext of Republican attack words such as "dangerous" or "socialist," and that it's the real substance of the attempt to paint Obama as unknown, mysterious, exotic and somehow alien. My guess is that voters who are responsive to this kind of coded appeal have already responded.

So we're not likely to see some kind of deus ex machina salvation for McCain, Palin and their down-ticket allies, and that's as it should be. It's not just that they have run a weirdly erratic campaign, bitingly sarcastic one minute, earnestly serious the next, uncertain whether to present McCain as a serious, experienced statesman or as a hypercaffeinated, overeager publicist for Joe the Plumber. It's not just that Palin, and let's be honest, should never have been allowed anywhere near the ticket -- and certainly not anywhere near those frocks from Saks and Neiman Marcus.

More damning is that when it could hardly be more obvious that Americans desperately want to change direction -- more than 80 percent tell pollsters the country is on the wrong track -- the Republicans offer nothing new.

That's a shame. McCain's repeated references to "maverick" have drained all meaning from the word, but it's true that he's an iconoclast with little reverence for Republican orthodoxy. Why he chose, in an election that was always going to be decided by independents and Reagan Democrats, to campaign on a platform of slavish devotion to Republican orthodoxy is beyond me.

On the economy, McCain offers some relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, but only within a context of classic Republican trickle-down economics. He wants to lower taxes on business and rejects Obama's plan -- raise income taxes for the wealthy and lower them for the middle class -- as rampant socialism. If you set aside the incendiary rhetoric about class warfare that McCain and Palin have been tossing around, basically what they propose is staying the course that brought us to this point of global crisis.

McCain makes much of wanting to get rid of congressional earmarks; everybody wants to get rid of earmarks, except the one that benefits his community or his industry. He proposes an across-the-board spending freeze -- during a recession? -- and then, in the next breath, proposes new spending. He overestimates the voters' tolerance for incoherence.

On foreign policy, once the centerpiece of McCain's campaign but now mostly an afterthought, McCain promises "victory" in Iraq and Afghanistan without telling war-weary voters how much more time, money or blood he will spend.

In choosing a running mate, McCain made an absolute mockery of his "country first" slogan and instead put politics above all other considerations. It suffices to note that the Anchorage Daily News -- the biggest newspaper in Palin's state -- endorsed Obama, saying that Palin was being stretched "beyond her range" and that she clearly is not ready to be "one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world."

It's hard to imagine that a McCain presidency could possibly be as scattered, irresponsible, uninspiring and intellectually bankrupt as the McCain campaign. It's even harder to imagine that Americans, at this crucial juncture, will take that risk.

By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post, October 28, 2008

It seems to have taken forever (the seasons have changed, and changed and changed again), but this long presidential campaign is finally coming to an end. In January, with snow blanketing the trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, I wrote of the Barack Obama phenomenon: "Shake hands with tomorrow. It's here."

I didn't mean that Senator Obama would win the election. He still seemed like a long shot to me. But it was clear that the message, style and strategy of his campaign pointed to a new direction for American politics, and that a new generation of voters - younger, smarter, more diverse, more open-minded - was anxious to follow his lead.

I remember talking with a voter named Debra Gable, who had driven from central Vermont to attend an Obama rally in Derry, N.H. "I dislike politics," she told me, "because we focus on our differences even though we have so many more commonalities. That's what I think I'm hearing from Obama, so I want to see how he is in person."

Ms. Gable had not made up her mind, and the other candidate she was seriously considering - in a Republican field that was still wide open - was John McCain.

This election is hardly over, despite the impulse of the pundits to write the McCain campaign's obituary. But Senator McCain has diminished his chances of winning the presidency in many ways, the most important of which was his failure to grasp the most significant new trend in American politics.

With the country facing enormous problems (even before the meltdown of the credit and financial markets in recent months), the voters wanted more substance from their candidates. They wanted a greater sense of maturity and a more civil approach to campaigning. They were tired of the politics of personal destruction and the playbook that counseled "attack, attack, attack."

Senator Obama was perfectly suited to this new approach. He told the crowd that trekked through the cold and snow to hear his victory speech at the Iowa caucuses:

"You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that's consumed Washington. To end the political strategy that's been all about division, and instead make it about addition. To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states."

John McCain didn't get it. He seemed as baffled by the new politics as an Al Jolson aficionado trying to make sense of the Beatles.

He answered the desire for a higher tone in politics with ads that likened Senator Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and with attacks that questioned Mr. Obama's patriotism, blamed him for high gasoline prices and all-but-accused him of being a socialist.

Mr. Obama, said Mr. McCain, would convert the Internal Revenue Service into "a giant welfare agency."

Get it?

Whether this is admirable or honorable is not the question here. In the current political and economic atmosphere, it seems very much like a roadmap to defeat.

The heyday of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is over. Yet Senator McCain handed the reins of his campaign to Rove's worshipful acolytes. With the nation in a high state of anxiety over the conflagration in the credit and financial markets, Senator McCain traveled the country ranting Rovelike about Bill Ayers, trying to instill a bogus belief that the onetime '60s radical and Senator Obama were good buddies and perhaps involved in some nefarious doings together. Senator Obama was about 8 years old when Mr. Ayers was engaged in his nefarious doings.

It was the classic fear card that the Republicans have played to such brilliant effect for years. But times have changed. (Lately Senator McCain has been obsessively invoking the name of "Joe the Plumber" at his campaign appearances, as if that might be the phrase that finally sways the electorate in a way that the Bill Ayers mantra did not.)

Senator Hillary Clinton helped define the new political atmosphere with her own historic run for the White House. Senator McCain, demonstrating again his tone-deafness to the new reality, tried to capitalize on Mrs. Clinton's remarkable achievement by cynically selecting Sarah Palin, the anti-Hillary, as his running mate.

Mr. McCain must never have noticed that the public turned overwhelmingly against the Bush administration because of its repeatedly demonstrated incompetence. Now here is Senator McCain, in the midst of a national crisis, with a running mate who is demonstrably incompetent to serve the nation as its president.

Ms. Palin is a walking affront to the many Republican women (not to mention women in general) who are, in fact, qualified to hold the highest office in the land.

John McCain could have traveled a higher road. He chose not to. He bet instead on one last gasping triumph of the politics of the past.




By Bob Herbert, The New York Times, October 27, 2008

At a rally with a few thousand people outside of Dayton, Sen. John McCain slammed his Democratic rival for a 2001 radio interview in which Obama discussed the political science concept of "redistributive change."

"That is what change means for Obama administration -- the Redistributor," McCain said. "It means taking your money and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs."

In the Sept 6, 2001 radio interview with WBEZ, a Chicago public radio institution, Obama talked about the role of the U.S. Supreme Court and said: "And one of the I think the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that."

He also said during the interview that "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent -- as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court -- it wasn't that radical, it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton called McCain's criticism "a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months."

Burton said: "In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all. Americans know that the real choice in this election is between four more years of Bush-McCain policies that redistribute billions to billionaires and big corporations and Barack Obama's plan to help the middle class."

By Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post, October 27, 2008

Candidates Visit Same Battleground States

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 27 -- The presidential candidates pursued votes in the same battleground states on Monday but entered their final week of persuasion with messages that could scarcely be more different in tone and substance.

Sen. Barack Obama began offering voters here and in Canton, Ohio, a "closing argument" that sounded much like the opening argument he made when he began his campaign nearly two years ago. It was an expansive, lofty call that emphasized economic revival, played down partisan politics and conjured up an image of election results that could "change the world."

Sen. John McCain, campaigning in Ohio, made clear he would appeal to pocketbook concerns and depend on a tried-and-tested tactic of portraying his Democratic rival as a tax-and-spend liberal. He touted his experience and urged voters to look past Obama's speechmaking skills.

"I know it's pleasant to listen to Senator Obama's rhetoric, but look at the record," McCain said. "This is the fundamental difference between Senator Obama and me. We both disagree with President Bush on economic policy. The difference is that he thinks taxes have been too low, and I think that spending has been too high."

Later, appearing in Pottsville, Pa., McCain said Obama "is running to be redistributionist in chief. I'm running to be commander in chief. Senator Obama is running to spread the wealth. I'm running to create more wealth. Senator Obama is running to punish the successful. I'm running to make everyone successful."

McCain's remarks showed the steep climb he faces in a contest that has turned almost singularly on the nation's faltering economy. Americans overwhelmingly blame Bush and his administration for the crisis, and McCain has struggled to separate himself from his fellow Republican.

Obama made clear he was not about to help McCain make the case.

"After 21 months and three debates, Senator McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he'd do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy," Obama told a capacity crowd at the Canton Memorial Civic Center. "Not one thing."

The contrasting statements were essentially a summation of the messages that will dominate the end of the campaign. It is a battle that will be fought almost exclusively in states that powered Bush's reelection in 2004 and reinforces the notion that McCain must win almost all of them to claim the White House.

His campaign has identified Pennsylvania as the largest Democratic state it hopes to flip. But polls show the front-running Obama with a substantial lead here, and he is taking the fight to McCain -- just to begin the week, hitting Ohio, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, all states Republicans have counted on.

McCain's comments on the economy came in a speech before about 100 supporters, added to his schedule at the last minute and after a meeting with his economic advisers.

He pledged to do three things as president: protect investments, rescue the housing market and lower taxes to spur job creation.

"I have been through tough times like this before, and the American people can trust me -- based on my record and results -- to take strong action to end this crisis, restore jobs and bring security to Americans," McCain said. "I will never be the one who sits on the sidelines waiting for things to get better."

In the speech, he condemned talk by congressional Democrats of another economic stimulus package, calling it a "spending spree" by the "dangerous threesome" of Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). It is a theme Republicans plan to press hard in the closing days.

Obama's speech had been planned for days, and senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said it would serve as the basis for the Democrat's appeal until the end of the campaign.

Told that the themes sounded similar to Obama's campaign announcement 21 months ago, Axelrod replied: "I think consistency is a good thing."

Obama's message centered on change -- he mentioned the watchword of his candidacy 18 times in Canton and used "hope" half as many times -- and he told his partisans that their work will pay off soon.

"Pittsburgh, I've got two words for you: One week," he told supporters at a hockey arena that is home to the Pittsburgh Penguins. "We are one week away from bringing change to America."

Obama's speech amounted to a 30-minute compilation of the themes he has accentuated throughout the long campaign: reaching out to disaffected voters, a call for personal responsibility and an acknowledgment that government should not try to solve "all our problems."

Obama's remarks were studiously nonpartisan -- on the rare occasions when he mentioned Democrats and Republicans, it was only to dismiss the importance of those labels. He is loath to acknowledge McCain's point that Obama's election would give Democrats control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, a prospect not likely to appeal to independents.

Instead of partisan appeals, Obama returned to the themes that fueled his surprising campaign.

"Hope! That's what kept some of our parents and grandparents going when times were tough," Obama said to cheers and applause. "What led them to say, "Maybe I can't go to college, but if I save a little bit each week my child can go to college; maybe I can't have my own business, but if I work really hard my child can open one of her own."

Obama said one of the Bush administration's great failures was to squander the country's goodwill and sense of community.

"That's what's been lost these last eight years -- our sense of common purpose, our sense of higher purpose. And that's what we need to restore right now."

He added: "The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' We all know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' " Although the economy is the focus of his speeches, some of the greatest applause came for the issue that first propelled his candidacy.

"It is time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq while the Iraqi government sits on a huge surplus," Obama said. "As president, I will end this war by asking the Iraqi government to step up, and finally finish the fight against bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11."

Obama at times seemed to vacillate between preparing the crowd for his presidency -- "It's not going to be easy, it's not going to be quick" to turn things around, he said -- and worrying about overconfidence among his supporters.

"Don't believe for a second this election is over," Obama told the crowd in Pittsburgh. "Don't think for a minute that power will concede anything. We have to work like our future depends on it in this last week, because it does."

By Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post, October 28, 2008

John McCain used to joke about politicians - like George W. Bush - who claimed they never paid any attention to polls. "Oh, no, we never look at the polls!" he said aboard the Straight Talk Express in the days before the New Hampshire primary last January. Then he shot a glance over to his chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and asked with a grin, "Any new polls this morning, Sergeant Schmidt? Any new numbers?" Like most politicians and political professionals, McCain was obsessed with the polls. He knew how to read them. And he knew - whether they bore good news or bad - that they usually told the truth.

And so it required a slight suspension of disbelief to watch NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning as Tom Brokaw opened with, and kept coming back to, McCain's weakness in the polls in his contest for the White House against Barack Obama. "Listen, I don't have the most encouraging news for you today from the NBC News/Mason Dixon poll," Brokaw began, as he sat with McCain in Waterloo, IA. "Here in Iowa, it now shows that Obama has a lead of 11 points, 51 to 40 percent." McCain's reply - "those polls have consistently shown me much further behind than we actually are" - set up what became a kind of call and response routine between host and guest for the rest of the interview, with Brokaw pointing out all the signs of trouble, and McCain insisting things were not nearly so bad. "We're doing fine. We have closed in the last week," he said gamely. "We continue this close through next week - you're going to be up very, very late on election night."

McCain seemed tired, like he had been up too many late nights, and at times his answers meandered through a series of only tangentially connected sentences. But his central argument - that the race is not over, that he might still pull this thing out - is not completely unreasonable. It is not just that McCain has stared long odds in the face before and triumphed, as he did when his campaign collapsed in the summer of 2007, financially broke and in disarray. Back then, trusted friends advised him to withdraw rather than suffer a humiliating defeat. Even some of his closest associates were ready to give up, and it fell to McCain to tell them to quit feeling sorry for themselves, to lecture them about what it means to keep fighting for what you believe in. And, of course, he was right, and he emerged improbably from a field of contenders to win the Republican nomination. "McCain doesn't have a lot of time for quitters," says a senior McCain adviser. "He's not about to quit now."

The press has been awash in stories lately in which anonymous sources detail the infighting and blame-throwing going on within the campaign and the anger and fear felt by Republicans outside it; over the weekend, rising tension between aides to running mate Sarah Palin and McCain loyalists was on display, with one McCain adviser telling CNN Palin was a "diva" who didn't listen to anyone. Morale was already an issue two weeks ago, when Schmidt gave a pep talk to staffers and volunteers at the campaign's Arlington, VA, headquarters. "Being part of an effort that fails does not make you a loser; it makes you a competitor," said Schmidt, according to an article in Sunday's Washington Post. "What makes you a loser is curling up into the fetal position at a time of adversity. The only thing that would ever define anyone as a loser is to quit before it is over."

McCain, say people who know him, believes he still has a chance. There are enough stray signs of hope - like a one-day poll sample from John Zogby that placed Obama's national advantage over McCain at just three percentage points (though most other national tracking polls put Obama's lead more in the five-to-ten point range) - to keep the candidate and the the campaign going. Eschewing the attacks revolving around Bill Ayers and ACORN that appeared to backfire earlier this month, McCain is focusing most of his firepower on two primary targets: Obama's readiness to be a world leader ("I've been tested," McCain now says, referring to Obama running mate Joe Biden's own recent clumsy comments about the Democrat facing an international test once in office), and the threat of higher taxes and out of control government spending (where Joe the Plumber references keep coming up). Just in case neither of those are particularly persuasive, McCain is also making the argument that the country needs a Republican in the White House to check the ambitions of the almost sure-to-grow Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

When Bob Dole realized he wasn't going to win against President Bill Clinton in 1996, Dole started campaigning in states that were of little help to him but where he could assist Republicans trying to hold onto their majorities in Congress. That kind of pivot hasn't happened in this race, though over the weekend conservative writer David Frum openly called on McCain to do just that for the good of the party. Scott Reed, who ran Dole's '96 campaign, says he believes McCain could still pull off a victory. "I think Schmidt's strategy has brought [McCain] back and kept it from being a blowout," he says. "It can be done."

Reed's comments echo the words of Mark McKinnon, who was McCain's chief media strategist until June, when he dropped off the campaign because he decided he didn't want to participate in attacking Obama. Writing for the website the Daily Beast, McKinnon defended McCain's general election strategy. "I know that Steve Schmidt and his colleagues have run a very good campaign and have taken McCain further than he had any reasonable right to, given the political climate," said McKinnon. "And by the way, don't tell the press, but the election ain't over yet. The old fighter pilot may have a couple barrel rolls left in him."

That could also just be happy talk meant to buck up the weary and the dispirited who dedicated much of the last 24 months of their lives to this effort. McCain's strategy in these final eight days of the campaign hinges on winning a slew of Red states in which Obama currently holds leads of varying sizes in the polls - Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada - and then somehow producing an upset in Pennsylvania, a Blue state that went for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 and where Obama currently boasts a lead in the low double digits.

Both McCain and Palin have been spending much of the past couple of weeks in the Keystone State, hoping that Obama's support in western Pennsylvania, where Hillary Clinton far outdid the Illinois senator in the primary, is soft and that McCain's efforts to distance himself from the current Republican President are convincing. (In that regard, he did himself no favors over the weekend, admitting that he and Bush share a "common philosophy", which Obama quickly seized upon.) Heeding calls from the likes of Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell not to take the state for granted, Obama is returning for rallies both Monday and Tuesay of this week. Absent a seismic event that changes the entire election dynamic, such an outcome for McCain is unlikely at best. "It's a very long shot," says a Republican strategist who advises the campaign. "But it's not impossible. At least it's something to hold onto."

By JAMES CARNEY, Time, October 27, 2008

A boundary runs just west of Dulles International Airport in Virginia that you won't find on any map. It's a line that may mark the political divide that determines whether Barack Obama or John McCain wins the White House.

The airport straddles Loudoun and Fairfax counties, suburbs and exurbs of Washington where a surge of working professionals and Asian and Hispanic immigrants have transformed the area's once predictably Republican politics.

Suburban Washington is one of many areas in the U.S. -- the ring around Columbus and the outskirts of Denver are two others - - where changing demographics are shifting voting patterns, pushing the core Republican vote deeper into rural areas.

From Reno and Clark County, Nevada, through Jefferson County near St. Louis to Tampa, Florida, these suburban and exurban areas are growing rapidly, as the new voters displace a declining white working-class population.

The contest between Obama, a 47-year-old black man, and Arizona Senator McCain, a 72-year-old white man, is symbolic of the shift, says Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"In many ways, these two candidates are the bookends of the demographic, racial transformation that's going on in the United States,'' Frey said at a forum last week at Brookings.

The trend is on full display in the area around Dulles. In 2004, Republican George W. Bush won Loudoun by 12 percentage points while Democrat John Kerry won Fairfax, which hadn't gone Democratic in 40 years.

Democratic Leanings

In the four years since, Democratic leanings have continued to spread westward, and this year the Obama camp aims to run almost even with McCain in Loudoun. Virginia's 13 electoral votes are considered crucial for McCain's White House chances.

"They're turning it from the northern end of the old Confederacy to the southern end of the Northeast corridor,'' said Rhodes Cook, publisher of a non-partisan newsletter that tracks voting trends.

From 2000 to 2006, the population in Loudoun increased 59 percent, compared with 8 percent growth for all of Virginia. Hispanics increased by 13 percent and Asians by 12 percent, according to U.S. Census data. The percentage of those with at least a college degree increased 47 percent, compared with 30 percent statewide.

Metropolitan Vote

If Leesburg, the area west of Dulles airport, goes Democratic, "Barack Obama is likely to win the election, just based on that single piece of information,'' said Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, Virginia. "If you take up too much of the metropolitan vote there's not enough rural voters left,'' for Republicans to win, he said.

Much of Illinois Senator Obama's advantage in national polls is shaped by voter anxiety over the economy. Other factors may be at work as well. What Frey called demographic "mega trends'' -- or major changes in voting populations -- also are recasting the electorate.

While the economy looms large, "we need to keep an eye out on these mega trends and not be too blinded by the issue aspect,'' of the election, said Frey,

These trends were evident in recent statewide elections in Virginia. In 2006, Governor Tim Kaine and Senator James Webb, both Democrats, won Loudoun County in addition to Fairfax.

Abrupt Shift

It's an abrupt shift. In 2004, Bush's victory was largely attributed to his ability to win substantial margins in growing exurban and rural areas. He had won over a demographic group that New York Times columnist David Brooks labeled ``Patio Man,'' typically a married male who lives in the exurban areas and holds culturally conservative values.

New citizens also are shifting political allegiances. Bush received 44 percent of support from Hispanic voters in 2004, leading his party to predict that this growing segment could help sustain a Republican majority for decades.

Instead, recent data suggest these voters are now leaning Democratic. Hispanics voted 69 percent to 30 percent Democratic in the 2006 congressional elections. Given that minority voters account for 21 percent of the electorate today, up from 15 percent in 1990, that gulf is even more troubling for Republicans.

Pivotal Votes

Their votes could be pivotal in some Sun Belt states like Nevada, which has recorded 52,000 new immigrant and Latino registrations since February, according to the We Are America Alliance, a Washington-based immigrant and minority rights group. That's more than twice Bush's 2004 victory margin. Bush also won New Mexico by less than 6,000 votes in 2004, and there are 40,000 new registrations there.

The final "mega'' demographic trend is the rise of a new generation of voters -- the so-called millennials -- whose political leanings have been shaped by the last two presidencies.

History shows a strong relationship between the popularity of the presidents in power and the political leanings of the generations who came of age during their administrations, said Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center in Washington.

The millennials "have two presidents they can remember in their adulthood,'' Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, Keeter said at the Brookings forum. "This has been very good for the Democratic brand with this age group.''

Secular Voters

Another reason this group is moving toward the Democratic Party may be that the percentage of secular voters is expanding rapidly while the enthusiasm gap between white evangelicals and other groups has narrowed significantly, according to Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings. The percentage of secular voters more than doubled during the 1990s to 15 percent of the population, and it's even higher among young voters.

Still, some Republicans said analysts are overstating the political implications of these demographic shifts.

"As soon as these young people get away from communal living and get married with children they usually take a different view on life,'' said John Morgan, a Republican consultant and demographer.

By Heidi Przybyla, Bloomberg, October 28, 2008

HERSHEY, Pa. - Republican John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin are sweeping through battleground Pennsylvania as polls show them trailing the Democratic ticket, but McCain says it's wonderful to fool the pundits and is vowing to pull an upset.

McCain told supporters in Hershey, Pa., on Tuesday that, in his own words: "I'm not afraid of the fight. I'm ready for it."

The Arizona senator continued a sharp assault on Democratic rival Barack Obama during a noisy rally in Hershey.

Palin defended their campaign's harsh attacks on Obama.

The Alaska governor says Obama is not being candid about his tax plans, and she says that it's not mean-spirited or negative to call out someone on his record.

By MIKE GLOVER, Associated Press, October 28, 2008

Covering Obama 18 hours a day -- in and out of the limelight -- offers few glimpses of his true self. When in robo-candidate mode, he can be sort of dull, a Times reporter finds.

One of the things we in the press try to do is tell politicians how they've screwed up. So it was a rare instance when I told Barack Obama to his face that I was the one who'd made the mistake.

Let me explain. For the last year and a half I've covered the presidential race, focusing first on Hillary Clinton, then moving over to Obama.

After Clinton's defeat in the Iowa caucuses, she decided she needed an emergency reinvention. She began mixing with reporters, sipping a glass of wine late at night in the aisle of her campaign plane and unburdening herself about the state of the race. As her prospects dimmed, her accessibility grew. Sometimes she was off the record, but you can't say she wasn't fun.

Not so with Obama. One of the striking ironies is that a man who draws tens of thousands of people to his rallies, whose charisma is likened to that of John F. Kennedy, can be sort of a bore.

Discipline is essential for candidates who want to drive home a consistent message, or avoid the self-sabotage that comes with a careless answer. A steely perseverance helps explain why Obama at this point stands a better than even chance of becoming the 44th president. But when you're exposed to the guy 18 hours a day, it's a bit maddening. You want him to loosen up.

I've watched Obama demonstrate a soccer kick to his daughter in Chicago; devour a cheesesteak in Philly; navigate a roller rink in Indiana; drive a bumper car; and catapult 125 feet in the air on an amusement-park ride called "Big Ben." He's done it all with dogged professionalism, but with little show of spontaneity. After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is.

A couple of images from the long campaign stay with me.

One was watching Obama enter an apartment building near his Chicago home for a morning workout. He wore dark sweats, a gray T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. In those few seconds it took him to walk from the car to the building, with his head down, thin and solitary, he looked nothing like the adored politician presiding over rallies. It was a reminder that behind the hype and the TV ads is this one rather vulnerable-looking guy. And in that moment came the question: Is he really ready to take over the toughest job on the planet?

The other was a hot summer afternoon in Iowa. Obama was flipping burgers at a backyard barbecue, in what the campaign hoped would be an exquisite photo opportunity. A fly began circling his head. Then more flies. Pretty soon flies were swarming him, the burgers -- everything. It was awful to watch. But in rhythmic fashion he began waving them off with his hand. He scooped up the burgers and headed back to the picnic table, as if nothing had gone wrong. That small episode told me something about Obama's temperament. I would have wanted to fling the grill over the fence in frustration.

Both impressions came from a distance. A cordon of aides ensures nothing more intimate is available to the traveling press.

Once I stood a few feet from him as he fielded questions in the center aisle of his plane. Press aide Linda Douglass stood directly behind him, monitoring the Q&A. After a bit, Douglass discreetly put her hand on his lower back. He ignored it. She did it again, pressing harder. This time, Obama said he had to go.

Of course, at Obama's level, there's no such thing as harmless chatter. There's a pattern to these moments. Obama comes to the back of the plane. Light banter ensues, usually about Obama's favorite baseball team, the White Sox. Then a reporter slowly pulls out a tape recorder and turns it on. Obama notices. Now he's more cautious. More tape recorders pop up, and pretty soon we're back to a recitation of his stump speech.



The chances to gain insights into his character were like rare mutations in the evolution of his campaign.

One day in July, I was the pool reporter at an event in Zanesville, Ohio, meaning I was responsible for writing up for the rest of the press corps Obama's visit to a ministry that was tutoring young students. Again kept at a distance, I watched as Obama chatted with the kids. One boy approached him and held out his fist. Obama drew back. "If I start that . . ." he said. From where I stood, it looked like he was refusing a request for a fist bump -- a gesture that had gotten a lot of attention after Obama fist-bumped his wife at a campaign event the month before. A Fox News host had even suggested that it was a "terrorist fist jab." If Obama was rolling out a no-fist-bump policy, that seemed worth mentioning.

The pool report quickly got around.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times cited the episode in her column. Obama complained to an aide that it hadn't happened that way. He was right. A videotape of the conversation would later show the boy was merely asking Obama to autograph his hand.

We heard Obama was steamed. On the plane later, Obama was working his way up the aisle, past reporters. He got to me.

It was no one's fault but mine, so I told him: "Senator, I was the one who wrote the flawed pool report." I wanted him to know that, but I was also curious to see how he would react. He looked at me and said he appreciated that I had 'fessed up. Changing the subject, he asked me about my hat. I wear a big floppy hat on sunny days, and he had seen it at an outdoor news conference.

"I use it to block the sun," I said.

Does the brim cover your ears? Obama asked.

"Well, my ears," I said.

He drew back and laughed. You're making fun of my ears?! he said.

I told him our family has had medical issues with the sun. He quietly took that in. I wasn't expecting any empathy -- and didn't need any -- but I felt surprised nonetheless that he evinced little or no interest. It seemed like a chance to make a human connection, if he wanted one.

In any case, I held out my fist. He looked quizzically at it for a second, then realized what I was doing.

"That's what I'm talking about!" he said. We fist-bumped, and he moved on. The animation he showed in that instant surprised me; it doesn't seem that he lets himself laugh much.

There was another moment not long ago when I tried to wrest from Obama some display of personality.

Amy Chozick, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was wearing a new engagement ring. I told Obama's staff members they should send him back to take a look. A few minutes before takeoff my seatmate, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, nudged me: "He's coming back." I looked up and there he was, hovering over Chozick, clucking about her "rock."

He turned to our row. Just for fun and to see what he might say, I held out the $200 wedding ring I'd purchased four years ago at a chain jewelry store in a Sacramento mall.

What do you think of this ring, Senator? I asked.

He looked at it for a few beats. No reaction. He was back in robo-candidate mode.

Zeleny then asked him about a recent debate. Obama chided him for asking the question, then eased back to his seat at the front of the plane without answering. I later asked Douglass if Obama understood I was joking. She assured me he did.

First Clinton, then John McCain made the argument that Obama is someone we don't really know. Obama's supporters counter that we have his record in the U.S. and Illinois senates, two memoirs that reveal his inner thinking and a vast trove of public speaking. Ironically, those of us who were sent out to take his measure in person can't offer much help in answering who he is, or if he is ready. The barriers set in place between us and him were just too great.




By Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2008

Early on, McCain offered an openness that was rare, if not unprecedented. Now, as the campaign plunges into its final days, that intimacy -- real or imagined -- is gone.

It wasn't my intention, but I played a role in shutting down John McCain's Straight Talk Express.

It happened on a warm July afternoon as McCain traveled from a West Virginia airport to a rally in Ohio.

I had headed to the back of his bus with a small group of reporters, where as always McCain warmly motioned for us to squeeze in beside him on the couch.

The questions meandered across more than a dozen topics, but I asked if he agreed with his advisor Carly Fiorina's recent statement that it was unfair for some health insurance companies to cover Viagra but not birth control -- because McCain generally opposed those kinds of mandates.

Liberals and late-night comedians would later revel in McCain's on-camera discomfort -- the widening of his eyes, the awkward silence while he clutched his jaw and formulated an answer. But I had come to respect McCain's frankness and his willingness to admit he didn't always have an answer. Watching the question morph into an embarrassing "gotcha moment" for cable television, my stomach churned and my cheeks grew hot.

By July, I had covered McCain for almost seven months. I could recite many lines of his stump speech by heart, dreamed about his events at night and spent so much time scrolling through campaign e-mails on my BlackBerry that my fiance joked to our friends about the other man in my life.

Over those months, McCain had artfully created a sense of intimacy with the reporters who traveled with him. He barbecued for us at his Arizona cabin, and opened up about matters as personal as his faith and his son's girlfriends. On one of my first days covering McCain, another reporter protectively warned me that it was important to be judicious with the material I used from McCain's bus rides to keep the conversations in context.

Although the relationship was mutually beneficial, McCain offered accessibility and openness that was rare, if not unprecedented, in modern presidential politics. Now, as the presidential campaign plunges into its final days, that intimacy -- real or imagined -- has evaporated.

I joined McCain during the icy December days in New Hampshire when his confidence about a comeback seemed almost delusional. Inside the steamy windows of his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, McCain held court on a gray horseshoe-shaped couch at the rear, where we listened with rapt attention.

Back then, his staff often didn't bother to listen to his rap sessions, which became an education for reporters on his world view. Early on, we learned to detect his disdain for some of his opponents -- Mitt Romney and Barack Obama -- by the way he lavished praise on others -- Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee or Hillary Rodham Clinton -- in the same sentence.

He leavened policy discussions with funny stories from his school days when some knew him as "McNasty" or reliving his daredevil exploits as a young naval aviator. He was unguarded and charming, occasionally solicitous about our lives.

One winter afternoon when Cindy McCain joined him and he was stuck with three newly engaged reporters, he gave us a 10-minute treatise on honeymoon spots.

At the top of his list was Costa Rica, where he had done a zip-line canopy tour. Second was Montenegro and Dubrovnik, which he called "one of the really stunningly beautiful places in the world." Third was Fiji: "The people are extremely friendly; they used to be cannibals, but the British cured them of that bad habit," he joked. "We've gone to Fiji with our kids lots of times."

In an aside about the Galapagos Islands, he veered into his last encounter there with sea lions: "I'm not making this up -- I was swimming, and there was this group of female sea lions, and this one male sea lion, and the next thing I know this guy's face is right where my hand is. . . . So I swam away and he bit my flipper. I swear to God. . . . He thought I was some kind of competition."

"Where did you guys go on your honeymoon," I asked.

"Uhh," McCain said. "Hawaii," Cindy interjected.

"Canada?" McCain joked, pretending to fumble. "I get my marriages mixed up."

Cindy good-naturedly rolled her eyes. "We had a great time," he said, grinning, before telling us about their honeymoon spot.

For several months, he would often lean in and ask the same question: "Did you set a date yet?"

McCain's energy and sense of fun were most on display when he was surrounded by the regular characters in his entourage.

Before the primaries, there was Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor of Minnesota, who was so unassuming that McCain's bus driver once asked me what he did. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) loosened McCain up before debates or big events by subjecting himself to McCain's unmerciful teasing. McCain loved to tell the story of Graham's Ambien overdose on an international flight and how he had to be elbowed awake during a subsequent meeting with a head of state.

For the first half of the year, strategist Steve Schmidt and McCain speechwriter Mark Salter were regular fixtures in the press cabin. They offered honest observations about the direction of the campaign off the record, and lots of spin on the record.

We would persuade them to tell their own stories at the bar in the evenings. Salter had colorful tales of his days as a railroad worker in Davenport, Iowa, when he had hair past his shoulders and worked for a foreman known as "one-armed Ronnie."

Schmidt could do dead-on impressions of his former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, and had fascinating stories about managing the confirmation process of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- always off the record.

They would complain about campaign coverage one moment and have drinks with reporters hours later. During a stop in Selma, Ala., I fell while out running and ended up with bleeding palms and scraped knees but no Band-Aids. Schmidt and Salter showed up at the hotel's dining room with gauze and antiseptic.

At the time of that July bus ride with McCain, there was broad disagreement among his staff about whether the endless hours of questions were helping his quest for the White House.

In the driveway of the airport motel on the evening of the Viagra question, McCain's aides made an argument that would shape their attitude over the next four months: If reporters were going to ask about issues that they deemed irrelevant to voters, why should the campaign give them access to the candidate at all?

Salter told me I had made the case for those who thought McCain should curtail his exposure to the press.

McCain aide Brooke Buchanan sarcastically asked whether contraception was next on my agenda. And Steve Duprey, the candidate's usually jovial traveling companion who often visited the press cabin bearing Twizzlers and chocolate, twisted my question into what I interpreted as an accusation of bias: "Are you going to ask Obama if he uses Viagra?"

Later that summer, the frequency of McCain's news conferences dwindled to late-afternoon, end-of-the-week affairs where he began calling more often on reporters he didn't know.

We now watched from afar at most events -- listening for the few sentences that would change each day in his stump speech. We would catch glimpses of him through the window of his SUV from five cars back in the motorcade or watch him get off the plane.

At the height of vice presidential speculation, we rushed the staff cabin of the plane, frustrated that no one was around to address the rumors.

"What do you want, you little jerks?" McCain said, using his former term of affection, before turning away.

On a recent Sunday during a brief stop at a Virginia phone bank, I got unusually close to McCain in the line of people waiting to shake his hand.

Tape recorder out and within a foot of him, I asked if he could talk about his new economic plan, which he was to unveil that week. The man who once asked me about my wedding date returned my gaze with a stare, shook the hand of the strangers to the right and left of me and continued out the door.

I remembered Graham's explanation in January about why McCain spent so much time with reporters. He said that McCain felt too many politicians had become like a guy in a toothpaste commercial -- you knew what he was selling but not what was behind the smile.

What McCain didn't like about other campaigns and wanted to change, Graham continued, was that "nobody gets behind the curtain."

Whether it was McCain's fault or ours, the curtain had been drawn tight.




By Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2008

The candidates hold events in Pennsylvania and Ohio and focus on the financial crisis.

Reporting from Pottsville, Pa., and Canton, Ohio -- Addressing a boisterous crowd in eastern Pennsylvania, John McCain said Monday that Barack Obama wanted to be "Redistributionist in Chief," putting a new twist on his warning that the Democrat intends to "spread the wealth around," as he told Joe the Plumber.

McCain's new turn-of-phrase came after his campaign unearthed an obscure, 7-year-old radio interview in which Obama discussed the issue of wealth distribution as it related to the Supreme Court and its decisions under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

"He is more interested in controlling wealth than in creating it," McCain said. "Sen. Obama is running to spread the wealth; I'm running to create more wealth. Sen. Obama is running to punish the successful; I'm running to make everyone successful."

The candidates campaigned Monday in the same crucial states, Ohio and Pennsylvania, but not in the same cities. Obama has a clear lead in the polls in Pennsylvania but a narrow one in Ohio, which has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1964.

At the civic center in Canton, Ohio, Obama told about 5,000 people that the Arizona senator has spent the last weeks attacking him because his campaign had run dry.

"If you can't beat your opponent's ideas, you distort those ideas and maybe make some up. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run away from," Obama said. "Ohio, we are here to say, not this time, not this year, not when so much is at stake. Sen. McCain might be worried about losing an election, but I'm worried about Americans who are losing their homes, and their jobs and their life savings."

Obama's speech, billed as his "closing argument" to voters, contained no new ideas but seemed designed to portray the Illinois senator as a statesman who would rise above petty politics. It was characterized by lofty language delivered with a preacher's cadence.

"The American story has never been about things coming easy. It's been about rising to the moment when the moment was hard. It's about seeing the highest mountaintop from the deepest of valleys," he said. "That's how we've overcome war and depression. That's how we've won great struggles for civil rights and women's rights and worker's rights. That's how we'll emerge from this crisis stronger and more prosperous than we were before -- as one nation and as one people."

He harked back to the start of his campaign nearly two years ago, saying, "We weren't given much of a chance by the polls or the pundits, and we knew how steep our climb would be." His success, he said, reflected a desire for change.

"I believed," he said, "that Democrats and Republicans and Americans of every political stripe were hungry for new ideas, new leadership."

Obama appeared later in Pittsburgh, where he told a crowd of 16,000 that President Bush's policies had undermined the nation's common purpose, harmed its economy and diminished its standing in the world. "What we have lost in these last eight years cannot be measured by lost wages, it can't just be measured by a bigger trade deficit," he said.

McCain's latest salvo was drawn from a 2001 comment Obama, then a state senator and law-school lecturer, made in an interview.

Obama had said he thought one of the "tragedies" of the civil rights movement was that "there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change."

McCain linked the interview to Obama's plan to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year (which would also cut taxes on middle-class families).

Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed McCain's new offensive as an "11th-hour distraction" and as "a fake news controversy drummed up by the all-too-common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months."

Earlier Monday in Cleveland and Kettering, Ohio, McCain sought to reassure Americans of his grasp of economic issues, an area where he trails Obama in the polls.

"I have been through tough times like this before, and the American people can trust me based on my record and results -- to take strong action to end this crisis, restore jobs and bring security to Americans," McCain said, after a strategy session with some of his top economic advisors, including former EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Rep. Jack Kemp.

During his stops in Ohio and later in Pottsville, Pa., McCain pounded on Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the top income brackets.

Flanked by the advisors, he told a small group of supporters in Cleveland that Obama's plan would "destroy business growth, kill jobs, and lead to continued declines in the stock market and make a recession even deeper and more painful."

McCain drew his largest and most enthusiastic crowd in Pennsylvania -- one of the few blue states where his campaign is still on offense. At a gymnasium packed with several thousand people, he was greeted by red and blue disco lights and "Top Gun's" theme song "Danger Zone."





By Maeve Reston and Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2008

The right flank is positioning to change the GOP's leadership and direction -- even if John McCain wins the presidency. Some moderates fear such a shift would alienate more voters.

Bush, now widely unpopular, held his final fundraiser of the campaign season last week and has no additional campaign events for McCain or GOP candidates scheduled in the final days before the election.

A focal point of the GOP fight is the selection of the next chairman of the Republican National Committee -- the party's power center for fundraising and strategic thinking. With various factions already trying to build support for their favored candidates, some conservatives are warning that McCain cannot serve as the party's spiritual guide even if he becomes president. The Arizona senator, after all, has a history of breaking with the party's mainstream on such issues as immigration and campaign financing.

"Committee members want to see our party move forward and be part of a branding process, as opposed to just simply supporting and putting a rubber stamp on the policies of a sitting president," said Robin Smith, chairwoman of the Tennessee state GOP and a supporter of turning the party to the right.

Conservative champion Rush Limbaugh, who often provides the rallying cry to the party's most ardent supporters via his radio program, last week laid out a similar warning, suggesting that a McCain win would do little to deter conservatives from pushing for major changes.

"One step at a time," Limbaugh told his listeners. "We're going to drag McCain across the finish line -- then we start rebuilding the conservative movement. It's going to happen whether he wins or loses, but especially if he wins too."

Stripping a president of the ability to name the party's top leader would mark a dramatic break from tradition. Bush, for example, has handpicked the party chairman since his election in 2000.

One moderate contender for party chairman, Jim Greer, is pushing a theme of ethnic outreach. Greer is chief of the state party in Florida and is a close ally of the state's governor, Charlie Crist, who some in the party say is laying the groundwork to spread his brand of centrist Republicanism to the national stage.

The Florida GOP recently mailed a brochure to members of the party's national committee nationwide featuring photos of Greer and Crist courting Latinos. One page focused on a black Republican candidate for the state Legislature.

Greer and Crist have also moved to distance the Florida party from some of the more aggressive tactics of the McCain campaign. In recent weeks, the state party declined to pay for direct-mail pieces linking Obama to 1960s domestic terrorist-turned education professor William Ayers, a connection that the McCain campaign has tried to highlight.

Two other potential candidates for chairman, both considered more conservative than Greer, plan meetings shortly after the presidential election.

One gathering, in Myrtle Beach, S.C., will be hosted by South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson. In an interview, Dawson said that "moderating our party is what caused us to lose power" in the 2006 elections. He said the party must speak more forcefully against excessive government spending and illegal immigration.

Some party insiders are pushing for the party to name Michael Steele, the African American former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as its chairman to help the GOP broaden its appeal. They argue that Steele, who now heads the conservative group GOPAC, would be an especially strong pick to counter the sensation over what might be the country's first black president.

Steele's group will host a postelection gathering in Palm Beach, Fla. It is expected to draw members of the party's national committee, as well as state and local GOP elected officials who hope to have a role in shaping the party's future.

Both meetings are precursors to the Republican National Committee's winter meeting in January, when the new chairman will be elected by the committee's approximately 160 members.

Some of Bush's top political hands, including his former RNC political director, are now guiding McCain's campaign. The current chairman, Mike Duncan, has not ruled out running for reelection in January.

A party official cautioned Sunday that people plotting their own ascension at this stage were acting prematurely, when they should be fully devoted to electing McCain and other GOP candidates.

"These state chairmen would be wise to focus on the task at hand rather than focus on what their next move might be," said the official, who requested anonymity when discussing internal party tension. "This race is tightening. . . . It won't be looked upon favorably if they're putting their own interests ahead of the interests of the race."

It was frustration with the Bush-led Republican National Committee that prompted a number of conservatives this year to try to upend the system. Conservatives won seats representing California, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Michigan. One new member is a popular black preacher from Detroit, Keith Butler, who presides over a mega-church.

"There is a new blood in the party that is interested in communicating the message of the party -- the conservative message," said Kim Lehman, executive director of the antiabortion group Iowa Right to Life, who in July defeated a state legislator for one of the state's seats on the national committee.

Former California GOP Chairman Shawn Steel, a newly elected committeeman, described his colleagues as "mostly dynamic and frustrated conservatives that really want to see a dramatic change for the RNC in the way that it communicates to Americans."

Some conservatives argue privately that an Obama victory would clear out strategists and policy thinkers from the Bush era and the McCain campaign, leaving the party in a better position to rebuild itself as a contrast to the Democrats, who would have control of Congress as well as the White House.

They also note that, even in a year of Democratic strength, there are some positive signs for conservatives. Gay marriage bans, for example, stand a chance of being approved by the voters in two big states, California and Florida.




By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2008

McCain, insisting he can still win, warns against an unchecked Democratic Congress. His crowds are enthusiastic; Obama's are huge.

Reporting from Lancaster, Ohio, and Fort Collins, -- Barack Obama and John McCain began to ease back their slashing attacks on one another Sunday, a sign that both presidential candidates will seek to end the long, bitter race on a positive note.

Obama, the Democratic nominee, drew more than 100,000 people to a chilly outdoor rally in front of the gold-domed Statehouse in Denver, and an additional 45,000 in frigid late-day temperatures in Fort Collins.

"We have always been at our best when we're called to look past our differences and to come together as one nation, leadership that rallied this country to a common purpose, to a higher purpose," Obama told the crowd in Denver.

McCain, the Republican nominee, stumped for votes before far smaller but enthusiastic audiences at three stops in rural Iowa and Ohio, states he calls "must-win" for his underdog campaign.

"I'm going to create wealth f