Election crux: New direction vs. experience

In the frantic, final days, the long and captivating 2008 presidential campaign has gone back to basics.

For Republican John McCain, that means reiterating that he is an experienced leader, tested in crisis, who advocates the low-tax economic approach best able to spur a recovery.

Democrat Barack Obama counters that his own agenda embodies the change sought by a worried nation and that his rival offers only a continuation of the failed policies of President Bush.

After all that has happened during the last year and more, after all the petty controversies, endless television commercials, and high-stakes debates, this is the choice facing the voters on Tuesday.

With two days left, all the available signs - including the public-opinion polls, the early-voting numbers, and the official statistics confirming that the economy is contracting - seem to be pointing to an Obama presidential victory, the first in American history by a person of color.

Obama's strategists are so confident of their position that they have started running commercials in such core GOP states as Georgia, North Dakota, and McCain's home of Arizona.

"The die is being cast as we speak," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters on Friday, referring to the early voting. "We have a lot of work to do, but we like where we are."

His counterpart in the McCain campaign, Rick Davis, predicted a stirring, come-from-behind victory for a candidate who has been counted out before.

"The one thing that's clear," Davis said, "is that we've established some momentum."

Perhaps the most telling sign about the race at this point is that the campaigns are focusing primarily on states won by President Bush in 2004. Among them are Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Virginia.

This means that Obama, safely ahead in nearly all the Democratic states, has the chance to win by a decisive margin - and that everything must break right for McCain if he is to piece together the necessary 270 electoral votes.

The only major blue state being contested is Pennsylvania, which the Democrats carried in the last four presidential elections. McCain was in Perkasie, Bucks County, yesterday, was to be in Wallingford and Scranton today, and plans a stop in Pittsburgh tomorrow. Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to be in South Philadelphia tomorrow night.

On Tuesday, much will depend on who turns out and in what numbers. Bill McInturff, McCain's pollster, said he expected as many as 135 million votes to be cast, which would be up 10 percent from 2004. Plouffe said turnout would be even higher.

One lingering concern for Obama supporters is that their candidate might fall victim to the so-called Bradley effect, named after Tom Bradley, a former mayor of Los Angeles.

In 1982, Bradley, an African American Democrat, lost the race for governor of California to a white Republican after leading in the final polls.

The explanation then was that some white voters who opposed Bradley for racial reasons had lied to pollsters rather than voice socially inappropriate views. And in other elections during the 1980s, including some Philadelphia mayoral races, black candidates fared worse on Election Day than in the polls.

But there has been no recent evidence of the Bradley phenomenon, which some analysts say might have been overblown in the first place.

There was no hidden vote against former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., a black Democrat, during his defeat by a white Republican in a racially charged 2006 Tennessee Senate race. The same was true for Obama in this year's Democratic primaries, except the one in New Hampshire.

Even if there is a hidden racial vote against him Tuesday, his campaign expects to be able to offset it through high black turnout and a field organization ready to turn out every Obama vote.

On Election Night, the nation won't have to wait long to find out whether the polls were right this time.

Among the states with an early, 7 p.m. closing time are Virginia and Indiana, two Republican states where Obama has made a huge effort. If he puts both in his column early in the night, the national outcome should no longer be in doubt.

In this campaign, the great imponderable is how different things might have been had the financial crisis not exploded when it did.

On Sept. 15, the morning that America woke up to the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co., McCain had a roughly 2-point lead in the polls.

That morning, McCain declared that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Hours later, he said that there was a crisis and that government was to blame.

At various times in the next 10 days, he called for creation of a blue-ribbon commission, asked for the resignation of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said he would suspend his campaign until Congress came up with a rescue plan, then unsuspended it with no rescue plan in place.

By Sept. 26, the day of the first debate, Obama, whose responses to the economy had been more measured, was up 4 points. Three weeks later, after the last debate, he was ahead by 7. The numbers haven't moved much since.

In these closing days, the final arguments from the candidates have had a strong negative component.

Said McCain: "The question is whether [Obama] is a man who has what it takes to protect America from Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and other grave threats in the world. And he has given you no reason to answer in the affirmative." A McCain commercial called Obama "dangerously unprepared."

Said Obama: "If you want to know where Sen. McCain will drive this economy, just look in the rearview mirror." He talked about lost jobs and about falling incomes and home values during the closing months of the Bush administration. "You've got to ask yourself: . . . Why would we keep on driving down this dead-end street?"

The direction that voters wish to take will be known after the polls close Tuesday night.

And the man chosen to be the 44th president of the United States will have to start figuring out how to deal with the problems he has been talking about the last two years.

Indiana and Virginia.

Polls there close early, at 7 p.m. Those states will give an early indication of what's happening. Both have gone Republican since 1964 but are in play this year. If Barack Obama wins either one, he's in very good shape.

Ohio.

Closing time is 7:30 p.m. Ohio has voted with the winner in the last 11 elections, and no Republican ever has won the White House without it.

Pennsylvania.

Polls close at 8 p.m. John McCain has worked this state as hard as any in the country, viewing it as the key to his electoral strategy.

Exit polls.

The television networks might be a little cautious in using them in states with early voting. Exit polls reflect only the sentiments of individuals voting on Election Day; in some states, 40 percent of the vote will have been cast earlier.

West Coast.

Unless the race

is a blowout for Obama, the Democratic candidate won't be able to get to the needed 270 electoral votes without California, where the polls close at 11 p.m.

A long night.

A McCain victory, if it happens, figures to be narrow. It won't happen by network projections. It will take counting all of the votes, into the wee hours.

- Larry Eichel