It afforded me a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about my place in society. It also gave me the best insight into his problem solving skills. Jeremiah Wright was the problem, the Philadelphia speech was the solution.

I’m convinced McCain made the same mistake Hillary made. He didn’t take Obama seriously until it was almost too late. If you’ve watched McCain on the stump over the past few days, he’s clearly taking him seriously now.

When he rolled out the Paris Hilton ad several months ago, I told friends at the time it was a mistake. My reasoning was simple. He was going to have to face Obama during the debates and people would see for themselves that Obama isn’t an empty suit. What was he going to do then?

Then he spent a week assaulting Obama about “Lipstick on a pig.” I watched in horror as the press justified its coverage of this nonstory. But more to the point, it went to my objection to the entire approach. It lacked seriousness.

One might argue that the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was the penultimate example of the McCain’s refusal to take this election seriously. But it may have simply been a mistake. It’s interesting to consider that the only two women ever to make it on the ticket of a major party, were unable to convince the public they were up to the job. In 1984 it was Geraldine Ferraro, in 2008, Sarah Palin.

Obama seems to have an uncanny ability to get his opponents to underestimate him. That’s at least one “Obama effect” but there are others. I mentioned above the effect he’s had on me.

One of my readers sent me a photo array of a group of supporters called “Rednecks for Obama.” In my previous post, I mentioned another group known as “Racists for Obama.” Obama supporters have reported encounters with “Racists for Obama” while canvassing. They even have their own acronym – C.H.A.N.G.E. (Come Help a N*gger Get Elected). They throw around the N word with abandon when talking to canvassers, but insist they fully intend to vote for Obama on Election Day.

Professional pollsters have taken an acute interest in “Racists for Obama.” They estimate that some 23% of voters with “negative views of African Americans” will pull the lever for Obama. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it. But considering that McCain’s chief pollster, Bill McInturff, all but declared that he’s counting on these voters on Election Day, I’d just as soon they voted for Obama.

We mustn’t confuse “Rednecks for Obama” with “Racists for Obama.” The photos I have show Rednecks for Obama wearing T-Shirts, wielding banners and shaking Obama’s hand at rallies, smiling all the while. Obviously, a redneck ain’t necessarily a racist.

There’s been much discussion of something called “the reverse Bradley effect.” Tom Bradley was the African American former Mayor of Los Angeles who was 7 points up in the polls in California, only to lose a tight race to his white opponent, George Deukmejian. This led to speculation that many whites simply lied to pollsters.

Conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker cites a number of “mostly white-collar men and women who speak republican in public” but who tell her privately that they will vote for Obama. But as we’ve seen, there are lots of blue collar workers poised to do exactly the same thing; some privately, others not so privately. I call it the Obama Effect. It means different things in different circumstances, but it all seems to be adding up to the same thing. Change.

Former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton may also have a hand in that sentiment.

Some 40% of women over 50 years old, a core Clinton constituency in the primary, said they were more proud of their country — the highest level of any sub-group of voters, according to the poll.”

Put aside the mud-slinging for a moment. More than one-third of voters said the 2008 presidential election has made them “more proud” to be an American, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

With the first African American candidate on the Democratic ticket, and the first woman on the Republican ticket, 34% of voters said this historic election has improved their view of the country.

Former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton may also have a hand in that sentiment. Some 40% of women over 50 years old, a core Clinton constituency in the primary, said they were more proud of their country — the highest level of any sub-group of voters, according to the poll.

Just 12% said it has made them “less proud,” with voters over 65 years old registering the lowest dip in pride at 19%. The majority of voters, 45%, said the election season has made no difference in how they view America.

The policy differences between Barack Obama and John McCain are clear and stark. It seems to me that, at this point, if a voter is choosing based on issues, it’s a no-brainer which of the two is closer to his/her values.

And for voters choosing based on personality (that is, who they want to have a beer with, or who has a certain skin color), not much can be done to change their minds.

But there is one valid factor that has not been discussed much, and that goes beyond issues of policy or philosophy. We have watched Obama and McCain run their campaigns for nearly two years.

These are sprawling organizations with huge budgets and vast staffs. And they have had to act as almost shadow administrations, taking positions as issues arose in the world.

To me, watching how Obama and McCain ran their campaign operations provided the best insight into how competent each man would be in running a presidential administration. In a post-Katrina world, the American people certainly should be holding competency high on the list of criteria necessary to be president.

I think a question every voter needs to ask himself/herself before voting is: Which candidate has run the kind of campaign operation I would like to see the federal government emulate? I think the answer to this query has a clear and simple answer: Barack Obama.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion (any discussion, really) in any quarters (the campaigns and the media) of this simple fact. Obama’s campaign has been run like a well-oiled machine (often to the frustration of his opponents), while McCain’s campaign has been a circus. Consider these areas:

Continuity
The two leading figures in Obama’s campaign, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, have been with Obama since his 2004 run for the U.S. Senate. Obama and his team settled on a message and a plan that they have stayed on for two years.

You’ve heard it so many times, you can probably recite it along with me: change (ending the financial and foreign policy strategies of the last eight years and adopting new ones that work better for all Americans), inclusion (no red states or blue states, only the United States), and hope (inspiring rather than tearing down).

Obama identified a goal, came up with an effective plan to attain that goal, and followed it. Not a bad thing for an administration to do, no?

And what of McCain’s campaign? The only continuity was the consistent lack of it. There were two staff shake-ups. The message veered from point to point with no overriding theme. As easy as it was to predict the three things I would write to describe Obama’s vision, what can you say McCain has stuck with for his two years on the campaign trail? McCain started with the experience argument. When that didn’t work, he shifted to national security.

When the economic woes prevented that from getting traction, he belatedly moved to the economy, careening around for a couple of weeks before finally embracing a tax argument in time for the last debate (and the appearance of the overexposed Joe the Plumber).

In the end, McCain has relied on telling us what Obama is not, rather than what he is. When he scolded Obama in the third debate that he was not George W. Bush, the reason the argument didn’t resonate with voters was not just because he voted with Bush 89 percent of the time since he has been in the Senate, but because he spent the whole primary season telling Republicans how much he agreed with the president.

During one of the debates, McCain argued he should be elected president because he would be a “steady hand” at “the tiller.” But from watching two years of running their campaigns, Obama has proven to be the steadier hand.

Organization
If Obama wins, the big story will be the historic act of America electing an African American president. And it should be. But what may be lost is the impressive feat that Obama pulled off, namely that as a first-time candidate for the White House, he was able to put together and oversee a vastly better operation than either of his two well-connected insider rivals, Hillary Clinton and McCain.

Starting from scratch, Obama and his campaign built a large, powerful, active, engaged and effective organization that worked harder and better than anyone else’s. It allowed him to dominate the Democratic caucuses and get out the vote for the Democratic primaries, and it looks like it will allow him to win in the general election in states in which nobody thought a Democrat could be successful.

After eight years of a government that is broken, it would be great to have an administration that works as well as the Obama campaign has.

And for those who say, “Well, he had so much money,” I have two replies: First, how do you think he got all that money? Sure, people had to be excited about the message, but without a well-organized campaign, Obama would not have been able to turn that enthusiasm into millions of small donations.

Second, even with a money advantage, Obama’s campaign was leaner and meaner than McCain’s. Of the 10 highest-paid campaign employees, seven of the 10 work for McCain, including the three highest earners. At a time of economic crisis, the ability to work efficiently is essential, and Obama has proven he can do it.

Sean Quinn at fivethirtyeight.com did an excellent job of discussing the strength of the Obama “ground game.”

Big Decisions
As John Kerry pointed out on Meet the Press on Sunday, the candidates have had two major decisions to make during the general election campaign: Who should be their running mates, and how they should handle the financial crisis. On both, the candidates showed how they operate.

Regarding the vice presidential selections, Obama’s vetting process was so thorough, Tim Kaine joked on The Daily Show about how in-depth it was (including his “high school girlfriend’s middle name”). The result was the selection of Joe Biden, an experienced Senator with impeccable foreign policy credentials, the one area that was perceived to be a weakness for Obama.

And what did McCain do? When the right-wing elements of his party would not let him choose Joseph Lieberman, he responded by impetuously going with Sarah Palin. He reportedly made the decision after having had only one meeting and one phone conversation with her, and with no formal vetting process. And how did that work out for McCain?

Palin has been roundly criticized, by individuals with a range of political orientations, for being unfit to be vice president. And while her selection energized the base and gave McCain a much-needed jolt of excitement in the campaign, the long-term results were far less positive.

Her shocking lack of knowledge and depth of thought, as exposed in her disastrous interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric and her talking-points spewing performance in the debate, ultimately caused her to become a drag on the ticket, preventing many independents from supporting McCain.

And she seemed to have an endless stream of skeletons in her Nieman-Marcus-stuffed closet, from ethics violations to the secessionist party her husband belonged to.

Palin’s fall from grace was not outside the realm of prediction. A careful vetting process would have revealed the very problems that caused her to be a net negative on the ticket. McCain’s impetuousness, along with his shocking lack of judgment, don’t bode well for his ability to make decisions as president.

To be clear, I’m not talking about my judgment of Palin (if you want that, you can read this). I am saying that, objectively speaking, Palin’s selection was impulsive and reckless, and, in the end, was damaging to McCain’s campaign (judged by the polls, including a recent one by CBS News/The New York Times that Found that 59 percent of respondents found her not qualified to be vice president).

On the running mate issue, Obama conducted himself more as you would want a president to act. Just as he did when the economic crisis hit last month.

McCain, days after declaring that the “fundamentals of the economy” were “strong” (watch him say it here), was forced to change his tune as the crisis deepened. He responded by “suspending” his campaign to rush to Washington to “help” get a deal for a bailout package. (This was after he did a 180-degree turn on the bailout of AIG). He also tried to get the first debate postponed.

McCain’s poll numbers took a nosedive after Americans watched his unsteady handling of the crisis. McCain’s conduct was in stark contrast to the way Obama handled things. He took counsel from economic experts, stayed in touch with Congressional leaders, made his feelings known, and, most importantly, didn’t try and disrupt the legislative process by thrusting himself into the middle of it.

And most of all, he remained calm, steady and collected. As John Kerry pointed out on Meet the Press on Sunday, the four principals Obama laid out as being essential to any bailout legislation were contained in the final bill.

Tone
As you look back on the 2008 election, whose campaign would make you prouder to be an American? Obama certainly ran some tough ads challenging McCain’s policies and voting record, but McCain took the campaign into the gutter, allowing McCarthy-esque attacks on Obama as a socialist, calling out Obama on his patriotism, and running the same kind of smear-filled robocalls that McCain himself was a victim of in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

McCain ominously asked in television ads, “Who is Barack Obama?”, as if there were deep mysteries that had to be uncovered, instead of Obama being one of the most heavily vetted candidates in the history of elections. (You know that if Obama had tripped over an American flag as a third-grader, some right-wing investigator would have uncovered it by now.)

But keep in mind that Obama never asked, “Who is John McCain?”, even though Obama really would have had more to say. The best McCain could do was talk about Obama sitting on the same charity boards as Bill Ayers or a meeting with a Palestinian Columbia professor (to whom McCain’s organization had given half-a-million dollars). But Obama never struck back, allowing McCain to portray himself as he saw fit, unchallenged.

Anyone who has read Tim Dickinson’s well-researched, scathing piece in Rolling Stone on McCain knows that he is not the man he portrays himself to be. Had Obama done many of the things that McCain did, McCain would have them plastered in ads in every swing state. But Obama never raised anything from McCain’s past, even though I have no doubt that many undecided voters would be greatly affected if they read Dickinson’s article.

In six months, you have never heard Obama utter the name “Keating,” and even when given a chance to say something bad about Palin during the third debate, he declined to do so (and McCain followed by eviscerating Biden).

At a time when the standing of the United States in the world has been battered by eight years of damaging conduct by the Bush administration, it is important for America to re-establish its international credibility. That is why looking at the way Obama and McCain conducted themselves during the campaign is so important. Obama offered an approach we can all be proud of, while McCain’s descent into the gutter is all too reminiscent of Bush’s behavior.

Top Staff
Compare Obama’s inner circle to McCain’s closest advisers. McCain has relied on a team of lobbyists. Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, accepted $2 million in fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with payments reportedly made to his company as recently as August, and the nation of Georgia paid the firm of McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randall Scheunemann, nearly $900,000. As the Washington Post pointed out, nearly every one of McCain’s top advisers is a lobbyist, including Steve Schmidt, Mark McKinnon and Charles Black Jr. CNN confirmed that seven of the top officials in the McCain campaign were lobbyists.

Which might explain why the McCain campaign was run so poorly that it drew angry criticism from conservatives.

McCain’s biggest misstep of all might have been allowing Phil Gramm, the former Texas Senator, to be the chief architect of his economic plan. Gramm was primarily responsible for knocking down the 65-year-old protections of the Glass-Steagall Act, which many analysts agree was at the heart of the recent credit crisis.

As a voter, is this how you want your White House run?

Obama has rejected money from lobbyists and surrounded himself with advisers who have distinguished themselves in their fields (people like former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former National Security Advisor Tony Lake).

You may not agree with the politics of Obama’s advisers, but they are unquestionably less tainted than the lobbyists with whom McCain surrounded himself.

And again, in a post-Katrina world, isn’t competency important?

Vision
Obama took a 21st Century, post-partisan approach to the campaign, saying early on he would compete in traditional red states, a position that was roundly dismissed as wishful thinking by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

But Obama was proven correct. He is ahead in the polls in the Bush-won states of Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa; he is essentially tied in the formerly red states of North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri and Florida; and he is close in the formerly bright red states of Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona.

Meanwhile, McCain is trying to piece together an electoral college victory while defending states that were once thought to be safe for him, and through a quixotic, Hail Mary effort in Pennsylvania. As Nate Silver wrote on fivethirtyeight.com about McCain’s hopes of competing in Pennsylvania (having a bit of fun with Hillary Clinton’s old jibe at Obama), “hope is not a strategy.”

If you put aside the issues and personalities and judge Obama and McCain based on their campaigns, there is a clear choice as to what kind of America you want for the next four years. And if you’re looking for competence, organization, steadiness, vision, good judgment and behavior we can be proud of, the choice is obvious: Vote for Barack Obama.

2. The Iraq war

3. The economic implosion this fall.

4. Without the national security card McCain couldn’t win.

5. Hillary Clinton made Barack Obama a better candidate than he ever would have been on his own.

6. McCain picked Sarah Palin without vetting her, and believed she was interchangeable with Hillary Clinton.

7. McCain and his team bought the notion of the mythical anti Obama Hillary block and doubted that Hillary Clinton, along with Bill Clinton, would bring her supporters home (in droves).

8. McCain and his team botched the roll out of Sarah Palin, throwing her into the deep end of the media pool, instead of letting her wade with the wingnuts and radio barkers who would have protected her.

9. McCain turned into a candidate no one recognized, sacrificing his core “maverick” message.

10. McCain and his team misjudged, underestimated and disrespected the formidable talent of Barack Obama and the team he put together.

“We are one day away from change in America,” said Obama, a Democrat seeking to become the first black president _ a dream not nearly as distant on election eve as it once was.

McCain, too, promised to turn the page of the era of George W. Bush and said he sensed an upset in the making.

“This momentum, this enthusiasm convinces me we’re going to win tomorrow,” McCain told a raucous evening rally in Henderson, Nev., part of a seven-state campaign sprint that was to end in Arizona early Tuesday.

Republican running mate Sarah Palin was more pointed as she campaigned in Ohio. “Now is not the time to experiment with socialism,” she said. “Our opponent’s plan is just for bigger government.”

Late-season attacks aside, Obama led in virtually all the pre-election polls in a race where economic concerns dominated and the war in Iraq was pushed _ however temporarily _ into the background.

While the overall number of early votes was unknown, statistics showed more than 29 million ballots cast in 30 states and suggested an advantage for Obama. Democrats voted in larger numbers than Republicans in North Carolina, Colorado, Florida and Iowa, all of which went for President Bush in 2004.

Obama came out on top in the first Tuesday votes, recorded just after midnight in two small New Hampshire towns. Obama defeated McCain by a 15-6 vote in Dixville Notch, while Hart’s Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain and two for write-in Ron Paul.

Democrats also anticipated gains in the House and in the Senate, although Republicans battled to hold their losses to a minimum and a significant number of races were rated as tossups in the campaign’s final hours.

By their near-non-stop attention to states that voted Republican in 2004, both Obama and McCain acknowledged the Democrats’ advantage in the presidential race.

The two rivals both began their days in Florida, a traditionally Republican state with 27 electoral votes where polls make it close.

Obama drew 9,000 or so at a rally in Jacksonville, while across the state, a crowd estimated at roughly 1,000 turned out for McCain.

The front-runner also choked up on the campaign’s final day as he told a crowd in North Carolina of the death of his grandmother from cancer. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

“She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side,” he said of the woman who had played a large role in his upbringing. “And so there is great joy as well as tears. I’m not going to talk about it too long because it is hard for me to talk about.”

McCain and his wife issued a statement of condolence.

One day before the election, no battleground state was left unattended.

But Virginia, where no Democrat has won in 40 years, and Ohio, where no Republican president has ever lost, seemed most coveted. Together, they account for 33 electoral votes that McCain can scarcely do without.

Democratic volunteers in Maryland, a state safe for Obama, called voters in next-door Virginia, where McCain trailed in the polls. The Democratic presidential candidate’s visit to Virginia during the day was his 11th since he clinched the nomination.

Unwilling to concede anything, McCain’s campaign filed a lawsuit in Richmond seeking to force election officials to count late-arriving ballots from members of the armed forces overseas. No hearing was immediately scheduled.

Several hundred miles away in Ohio _ the state that sealed Bush’s second term in 2004 _ voters waited as long as three hours in line to cast ballots in Columbus, part of heavily contested Franklin County. Poll workers handed out bottles of water to sustain them.

Lori Huffman, 38, a supervisor at UPS Inc., took the day off to vote early for her man, McCain. “It’s exciting isn’t it?” she asked, gesturing toward the long line of waiting voters.

“This is happening all over the state, from Cleveland to Dayton,” said Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat trying to deliver his state to Obama.

Obama hoped so, after more than a year building an elaborate get-out-the-vote operation, first for the primary campaign, now for the general election.

The Democrat flew from Florida to North Carolina to Virginia, all states that went Republican in 2004, before heading home to Chicago on Election Eve.

Twenty-one months after he launched his campaign, he allowed, “You know. I feel pretty peaceful … I gotta say.”

On a syndicated radio program, “The Russ Parr Morning Show,” he said, “The question is going to be who wants it more. And I hope that our supporters want it bad, because I think the country needs it.”

If wanting it were all that mattered, the race would be a toss-up.

McCain, behind in the polls, set out on a grueling run through several traditionally Republican states that he has failed to secure. Florida, Virginia, Indiana, New Mexico and Nevada were on his itinerary, as was Pennsylvania, the only state that voted Democratic in 2004 where he still nursed hopes. His last appearance of the long day, past midnight, was a home state rally in Prescott, Ariz. Obama has been running television commercials in Arizona in the campaign’s final days.

The surrogate campaigners included Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democrats and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republicans. Both lost races for their party’s presidential nomination earlier in the year, and both could be expected to try again if their ticket loses the White House.

Not so, President Bush.

Deeply unpopular, the man who won the White House twice was out of public view, an effort to help McCain.

Palin was racing through five Bush states Monday _ Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada _ in an effort to boost conservative turnout for McCain. The Alaska governor has been a popular draw for many GOP base voters, and already, there was speculation about a future national campaign should Republicans lose in 2008.

Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate, campaigned in Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania. “We are on the cusp of a new brand of leadership,” he assured supporters.

Biden didn’t say so, but he was as close to guaranteed a victory as any politician in America. Whatever the fate of the Democratic presidential ticket, he was heavily favored to win a new Senate term from Delaware on Tuesday.

___

Eds: Espo reported from Washington. AP writers Nedra Pickler in Jacksonville, Fla., Meghan Barr in Columbus, Ohio, Joe Milica from Lakewood, Ohio, Christopher Clark in Lee’s Summit, Mo., and Kristen Wyatt in Denver contributed to this report.

Even excluding his support in caucus states, Paul received a few more than a million votes in the Republican primary, finished second in five states including Pennsylvania and Oregon and continued to draw votes well after he’d effectively withdrawn from the race.

His campaign also tapped into the potent new vein of online fundraising, punctuated by the so-called “money bomb” day when his supporters, unaided by his campaign, managed to pump $5 million into his coffers in 24 hours.

It’s a support base that could make the difference in a close election, and while there’s no guarantee that his supporters will turn out at the polls for GOP standard-bearer John McCain, one thing seems clear: Despite their overlapping anti-Iraq war positions, Barack Obama will not make major inroads among them.

Paul’s campaign says he is unlikely to endorse anyone. Absent that endorsement, many of his campaign officials expect Paul’s votes will splinter — and the names of Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin come up at least as frequently as does Obama’s.

“I would be very surprised to see many people going for Barack Obama,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign spokesman. “Barr will pick up some, but the majority will go Republican or stay home.”

“Obama’s probably getting the least support from Ron Paul supporters,” said Marianne Stebbins, Paul’s state coordinator in Minnesota. “Fewer will vote for Obama than Bob Barr. There will be some because the war is such a big issue, but they can also vote for Barr.”

Paul’s unique mix of views, which included privatizing social security, allowing states to legalize medicinal marijuana, opposition to abortion rights, enhanced border security and opposition to environmental regulation attracted a rabid following of supporters to his campaign. Their activity online — one popular conservative blog banned pro-Paul comments after being inundated with them — and their campaign donations delivered Paul from obscurity to the top tier of Republican candidates. He raised $17.75 million in the last quarter of 2007 — the most money of any Republican.

The organizing success led to strong finishes in many primaries, particularly among younger voters. In Iowa, for instance, he attracted just 10 percent of the vote overall, but took 21 percent of the vote among caucusgoers younger than 30.

While it had little impact on his base of political support, Paul found himself the subject of widespread criticism when racist remarks published in the 1990s in the Ron Paul Political Report, a newsletter he’s distributed for decades, came to light in January. Unsigned articles — which Paul denies having written or even read and says he disagrees with, but some of which had personal details that corresponded to his — in the newsletter bearing his name attacked blacks, gays and pro-Israel groups. One article claimed that “order was only restored [after the 1992 Los Angeles riots] when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”

“I don’t see Ron Paul supporters voting for Obama,” said David Hart, Paul’s Montana state coordinator. “They recognize Obama’s positions are diametrically opposed to things we believe in.”

For some Paul supporters, the only way they can see supporting McCain is if the presumptive GOP nominee reverses his core positions on foreign and economic policy.

“Unless McCain does make changes in his platform,” including abandoning his support for the Iraq War and renouncing deficit spending, “I don’t think [Paul supporters] will be voting for him,” said Hart, who hopes to attend the Republican Convention as a delegate for the state. “They will more likely be voting for the Constitution Party or Bob Barr.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of the disaffected Republicans would cast their vote for Bob Barr because he’s much more conservative than John McCain,” said Jeff Greenspan, Paul’s Nevada state coordinator.

Although Paul is often called a libertarian, his supporters seem to be significantly more conservative than most libertarian-leaning voters, who were nearly split between Bush and Kerry in 2004.

Paul “tapped into anti-war, socially conservative voters,” explained Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the libertarian CATO Institute.

“A lot of [Paul supporters] are going to vote a straight Republican ticket,” said Jean McIver. “A number will vote Republican for everything but the president.”

Others, though, will vote for McCain as the lesser of the two evils with a chance of taking the White House. “A lot of [Paul supporters] are in a quandary over McCain,” said Jean McIver, Paul’s Texas coordinator. “Some will vote for McCain because they don’t want Obama to win.”

Paul’s campaign officials also complain that his supporters have felt shunned by the Republican Party, particularly at state party conventions where they have often come out in large numbers. In Nevada, the state party attempted a rule change that Paul supporters say was intended to tamp down the large number of them running for positions at party delegates. In states where the primary is non-binding, such as Montana, Paul’s grassroots activists who have been elected to attend the RNC still may cast their ballots for him.

And Paul is holding his own rally in Minneapolis during the convention.

“A lot depends on how Republicans treat people who come to support Ron Paul,” said Benton.

The McCain campaign says they will reach out to Paul’s voters on a personal level and that they will win them over. “Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain does not believe that government is the answer to every problem,” said McCain spokesman Joe Pounder. “At the end of the day, Ron Paul supporters will find that their positions align more often with John McCain.”

But the Obama camp also hopes to pull in some of Paul’s voters by appealing to the same discontent with mainstream Republicans that drew them to Paul. “We think disenchanted Republicans and independents will choose Barack Obama over John McCain for the same reason they chose Ron Paul over John McCain … a war that has made us less secure, a debt that will burden our children and grandchildren and degraded our Constitution, and instead of change, John McCain offers more of the same,” said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.

But some Paul supporters are concerned not only that Obama does not share their domestic positions, but also that he is not anti-war enough.

“Obama’s voted for continued funding of the war,” said Debbie Hopper, Paul’s Missouri coordinator. “His foreign policy isn’t noninterventionist, as we believe it should be.”

“He’s very much into supporting the war effort even though he says he’ll withdraw,” said Hart of Montana.

Left-leaning independent candidate Ralph Nader — whose views on activist government domestically are diametrically opposed to Paul’s — has attempted to get in on the potential Paul-supporters vote bonanza. Nader issued an appeal to Paul’s voters immediately after Paul dropped out, saying, “there is a clear choice for those who want to support a candidate who will stand up against the war and stand up for personal liberties and privacy.”

But Nader’s plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Not one of the Paul activists interviewed for this article mentioned Nader.

“I sure haven’t heard anybody talking about him,” said Hopper.

Source: POLITICO.com

Here’s the scenario: Obama racks up huge margins among the increasingly affluent, highly educated and liberal coastal states, while a significant increase in turnout among black voters allows him to compete — but not to win — in the South.

Meanwhile, McCain wins solidly Republican states such Texas and Georgia by significantly smaller margins than Bush’s in 2004 and ekes out narrow victories in places such as North Carolina, which Bush won by 12 points but Rasmussen presently shows as a tossup, and Indiana, which Bush won by 21 points but McCain presently leads by just 11.

One possible result: Even as the national mood moves left, the 2004 map largely holds. Obama’s 32 new electoral votes from Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia are offset by 21 new electoral votes for McCain in Michigan and New Hampshire — and despite a 2- or 3-point popular vote victory for Obama, America wakes up on Jan. 20 to a President McCain.

According to Tad Devine, who served as the chief political consultant for Al Gore in 2000 and as a senior adviser to John F. Kerry in 2004, “it certainly is a possibility. Not a likelihood, but it is a real possibility.”

Some observers, such as Joseph Mercurio, a political consultant and pollster who worked on Sen. Joe Biden’s Democratic primary bid, see this as unlikely given the dramatic increase in Democratic Party enrollment and President Bush’s near record-low approval rating.

Also skeptical is Nate Silver, a political cult-favorite blogger whose statistical model — which factors in population change since electoral votes were last allocated in the 2000 census — shows McCain as more likely than Obama to lose the Electoral College while winning the popular vote.

But others, pointing to the competitiveness of the last two elections, predict that this will be another such tight race. If they’re proven correct, this would be the fourth in the past five elections, making for the most closely contested run of presidential contests since those spanning the popular vote-Electoral College splits of 1876 and 1888.

Hank Sheinkopf, president of Sheinkopf Communications and an adviser to Bill Clinton in 1996, warns that such a split “is anything but impossible.” While he gives Obama a slight edge in the general election “because he doesn’t have George Bush riding with him,” he predicts that “Obama’s going to get big votes for a Democrat in the Southern states, but not enough to win any new electoral votes. So it’s a distinct possibility that he could lose the entire South, split the Midwest” and end up not as president but rather as the second coming of Al Gore. When asked the odds of this playing out, he offers “50-50.”

Devine points out that Bush’s strategy in 2004 “was predicated on massive base turnout” that pushed up margins in safe states. He doesn’t “expect the McCain campaign to be directed the same way — using issues like gay marriage on the ballot to get the base to the polls — so McCain won’t have the same forces at play to drive out the popular vote.”

Recalling the impact of Ralph Nader’s third-party run in 2000, Devine also wonders if Bob Barr’s Libertarian run might play out differently, costing McCain popular — but not electoral — votes, while producing another popular-electoral split.

Lloyd M. Green, who served as research counsel to George Bush in 1988, also rates Obama a slight favorite and predicts that, if the Democrat does win, he’ll do so with “even larger margins in New York and California than in the last several elections [in 2004, Kerry won the two states by a combined margin of a little more than 2.5 million votes], and yet with all that margin run-up in safe states, this will end up a tight general election.”

In a sentiment also expressed by Sheinkopf and Green, Devine sees little chance of this happening if Obama wins the popular vote by more than 4 points. “But if he gets it by two or three points, it is plausible,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Green, who sees “about a 20 percent chance” of Obama winning the popular voting while losing the Electoral College, doesn’t expect anything resembling a blowout: “Given that the only clear and clean majorities [since 1992] were in 1996 and 2004, … this election will have the ferocity of all recent elections.” It’s a tough trend to buck, he argued, noting that “Americans traditionally change their religious affiliations more often than their party affiliations.”

Source: POLITICO.com

We also have Hillary to thank for putting issues of gender and power back into American politics.

As an intelligent and formidable opponent to Obama, Hillary brought the debate to a higher level.

I’ve enjoyed every minute of the debates between Obama and Hillary—all the mud slinging aside.

But why didn’t the most qualified person for the job become our Democratic nominee? Sexism alone can’t explain it all.

Did She Just Say That?
Strategic blunders and hurtful, sometimes stupid remarks—did she have to invoke Bobby Kennedy’s assassination?—did nothing to make her likeable to voters.

And the misspeak about her helicopter landing in “sniper fire” in Bosnia? And why did Bill liken Obama to Jesse Jackson? In the last eighteen months, the Clinton campaign sometimes felt like nails on a chalkboard, even for the staunchest of Hillary supporters. Make them stop!

Bush Clinton Bush Clinton
History has not been on her side either. When Nixon resigned from office (Bush II’s popularity is not much better than Nixon’s right now), the country wanted change. When Bush leaves office, the country will again want a sense of change.

The proposition of Bush Clinton Bush Clinton is not something many Democratic voters can stomach. Hillary was fairly or unfairly dubbed part of the “Clinton machine”—which brought little comfort to Democratic voters, despite how similar her policies were to Obama’s.

The Power of the Web
Hillary failed to gather the viral power of the Internet like Obama did, and as a result, lost with a lot of younger, more Web-saavy voters. (Her frequent request at the end of speeches to log on to her Web site: “Go to www …” sounded hollow and might not have resonated with younger voters. It’s a minuscule point, but no one under the age of thirty-five says “www” aloud anymore.)

Media Bias
The media’s obvious dislike of her had a snowball effect, too. The bias against Hillary got bigger and bigger as the months wore on. A Gallup poll suggests that many voters felt the media was harder on Hillary than Barack or John. In the last two months, the media kept telling her it’s time to quit and resented her defiance. (If the tables were turned, I doubt the media would have pressured Obama to quit.)

The nation’s major newspapers, blogs, and mainstream television networks have little love for Hillary. Some voters bristle at a powerful woman, too—if you’re too soft, you’re considered weak and if you’re too hard or aggressive, you’re considered a bitch. Powerful women are always walking a tightrope, no matter how qualified and deserving of the job.

Moving On
But it’s time to move on. As Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, pundits are talking furiously about where Hillary’s eighteen million supporters will go as if we voters are disinterested little children who will wait and be told which line to get into. The pundits will tell us that feminists are angry that she did not win and that we women will then vote against Obama. Ouch!

Perhaps there is a small minority of Democratic women who are disinterested in the issues and will vote for McCain instead, but the majority of Hillary supporters are apt to vote for Obama now.

I can’t imagine that anyone seriously interested in Hillary would suddenly rally around an anti-choice Republican who does not seem concerned about the forty-seven million uninsured Americans or the rising numbers of American soldiers who are committing suicide.

The assumption that even a sizable segment of Hillary supporters are pissed off and will vote against Obama—or worse, will need the security of McCain in an age of terrorism—is patronizing at best, misguided at worst. We Hillary supporters are not so mercurial.

Hillary’s female supporters are practical. And although many of us—myself included—were invested in seeing the first qualified woman run this country, we’re not so stubborn to leave the Democratic party in the dust, are we? Barack Obama’s platform is very similar to Hillary Clinton’s. We’re excited about Obama—but more important, we’re hopeful of our nation’s future, too.

Source: divinecaroline.com