“I have neglected my duties as a citizen,” he acknowledged a bit shamefacedly, “but none of the elections before made as big a difference as this year. This year I totally disagree with the person in office.”

New voters like Pratt and his wife may prove decisive in the presidential race in this key state with seven electoral votes. Iowa went for Al Gore in 2000 by 4,144 votes out of 1.3 million cast. (Bill Clinton won by a healthy margin four years earlier.) But the U.S. Senate is split between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat; the House delegation includes four Republicans and only one Democrat; and the state government is split between a Democratic governor and a Republican Legislature. The most recent polls show dead heats to small leads for either John Kerry or Bush, and partisans on both sides see the race as a tossup.

As a result, the airwaves are thick with ads. The pro-Kerry ads stress domestic issues like sending jobs offshore or bequeathing budget deficits to coming generations, and the pro-Bush ads attack Kerry “and his liberal allies in Congress” for being soft on defense or portray Bush as a compassionate, strong leader against terrorism, embracing a little girl. Both candidates and their running mates, as well as proxies, have been working Iowa with nearly the personalized intensity of the state’s famous caucuses. After both Bush and Kerry staged major events the week before last (with the Kerry campaign claiming a record turnout for an Iowa political event and reporting empty chairs at Bush’s rally), they again held major rallies last week on the same day, separated by only one hour and one county. John Edwards also spent two days campaigning in Iowa last week. Bush, who had already visited Iowa more than Kerry, was back in Davenport on Monday.

After four years of dramatic events and controversial policies — two wars, terror attacks, four major tax cuts, unusually weak post-recession job growth, rising inequality and disputes over protection of basic rights — many Iowans are approaching Election Day with strong emotions, often fear.

“John Kerry scares the hell out of me. You don’t know what he’s going to do or say,” said Larry Steward, 65, a retired corrections officer and self-described political independent, who has voted Republican since Reagan first ran for president, as he waited in line for tickets to a Bush event at Republican Party headquarters — where the walls are decorated with a Halloween-themed poster asking, “President Kerry? Now That’s Scary.” John Ortega, co-chairman of the local Republican Party, is afraid of what he thinks Kerry will do. “He’s for stem cell research, which I think is wrong,” Ortega said. “He’s for abortion. If he’s in office, I think he’ll repeal the ban on partial-birth abortions. He’s for gay marriage.”

But he says he’s against gay marriage, I observe. “If he’s elected, he’ll be for gay marriage,” Ortega insists. “It scares me, if he’s elected, what will happen.”

They’re not the only ones feeling scared. “President Bush is the first president who really scares me,” explained William Olsen, 51, vice president of a union representing workers at the Rock Island Arsenal, as he went door to door in Davenport talking to union members earlier this fall. “This guy is [for] big business all the way through. He’s taken too many rights from working-class people.” Olsen is also sharply critical of Bush’s Iraq policies. “War isn’t always the answer,” he said, reflecting on his own bitter experience as a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Polls show an Iowa divided nearly along the same lines as it was four years ago. In the end the race could come down to new voters and those who do not share the deep emotions of partisans. If so, Kerry could very well have the edge.

Iowa has “been a battleground state in every election,” Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack told Salon in an interview. “We have strong feelings, progressive and conservative, and each election is won by a fairly small margin.” The recent exception is senior Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican, who seems headed toward an easy victory this year with a campaign that is very personal and not closely linked to Bush’s campaign.

But Vilsack is optimistic about Kerry’s chances in his state. “It’s all in the numbers in the early voting and registration war,” he said. Iowa is divided into roughly three equal parts politically, but independents have the edge in registration. In 2000 there were about 25,000 fewer registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, but this year Republicans lead by only 8,000. Part of the reason is changing demographics — Iowa is now less rural and more Latino.

“We’ve become more competitive as Iowa has become more urbanized,” Iowa Democratic Party chairman Gordon Fischer said. “Now the 10 most populous counties — with cities like Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo and Iowa City — have more population than the … 89 [least populous] counties.”

Most of the voters registered by the party and partisan groups such as unions, the Iowa Citizen Action Network (an affiliate of USAction) and America Coming Together (the leading independent “527″ group) are likely to vote for Kerry. But the work of some nonpartisan groups may also indirectly benefit him. The New Voters Project, for example, has registered 36,000 18-to-24-year-olds in Iowa, including 12,000 around Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa and the third largest New Voters Project operation in the country. “We’ve been getting an amazing response from young people,” said organizer Aaron Saeugling. “A lot of people said, ‘I didn’t vote in the last election, but I am this year.’” Although 70 percent registered as independent, a study by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics suggests they will disproportionately vote for Kerry.

The Democratic forces in Iowa have pushed harder than the Republicans for early votes, in both absentee ballots and satellite early polling stations, and the balloting has gone strongly to Kerry. Late last week, Democrats figured that at least 108,000 out of 190,000 early votes went for Kerry, since they came from identified supporters, and 56,000 went for Bush, with the remainder probably split roughly in the same proportion. With a week to go, already 60,000 more absentee ballots have been cast than in 2000.

Republicans assert that Democrats are simply moving up the date of their votes, not adding voters. But Fischer argues, based on the party’s voter identification file, that “about one-third of the absentee ballots are [from] weak-voting or sporadic-voting Democrats.” When the party surveyed nonvoters in 2000, it found that about one-fourth didn’t vote because of some unexpected Election Day crisis. “We think it’s smart to bank these votes early,” he said. “Even if just getting out others who would vote, we can click them off the list and save a tremendous amount of time, effort and money to focus on other voters on Election Day.”

The gains in registration and early voting reflect not only persistent organizational work but also Iowans’ passions about the issues and candidates, with a curious contrast between Kerry and Bush voters. During two days of interviews with voters from both camps in Iowa, I was struck by the degree to which Republicans explained their votes as support for Bush, the man and president. Kerry supporters talked relatively little about the senator’s personal appeal. And despite their generally intense loathing of Bush, they were much more likely to talk about administration policies, not Bush’s personal qualities, such as the long-standing doubts about his intelligence.

Bush is “a man of integrity,” said Walgreens manager Gary Hentzel. “I like his frankness,” said Web designer James Schmedding. “He is not fake. What you see is what you get. He talks straight.” Accountant Erin Ricciuti thinks Bush is “impressive and sincere.” “President Bush is such a better moral person,” said Republican co-chairman Ortega, recently demoted — without complaint — from his supervisor job in a corporate downsizing after nearly 45 loyal years at an insurance company. “Kerry is supposed to be a practicing Catholic, but he’s for abortion and homosexuality, and that’s against his religion.”

Beyond their personal regard for Bush, his supporters most frequently cited their agreement with his policies on the war on terror, Iraq and tax cuts. Even those who benefited only modestly from Bush’s tax cuts embraced the idea that it is good to cut the taxes of the rich the most, with the expectation they will then create new jobs. Despite an occasional mention of fiscal responsibility, Iowa Republicans seem to have abandoned their old hatred of deficits and, like Walgreens’ Hentzel, simply have no answer about who ultimately should pay the costs of government. But there were occasional misgivings about Iraq and grumbles that the Bush administration had spent too much money. “I’m one of his bigger fans,” corrections retiree Steward said, “but I’m not sure he should have gone to Iraq. And he should have had plans for after the war was done.”

Their critique of Kerry often cheerfully embraced the contradictory attack of the Bush campaign. On the one hand, Kerry is consistently a wild-eyed liberal: “Kerry is so off the wall it’s ridiculous,” Ortega said. “He’s far off, off the wall.” On the other hand, they say, nobody knows what he stands for, and he changes positions all the time. “I don’t know what Kerry is for,” Steward said. “I’m not sure he knows.”

Also striking was how many of the Republicans in Davenport based their views on clearly mistaken information. Erin Ricciuti, for example, supports Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq because “I believe weapons of mass destruction are still there.” Indeed, although Bush’s own inspection team reported that it found no WMD or a significant program to create them, 73 percent of Bush supporters, compared with 26 percent of Kerry supporters, believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons or a serious program, according to a recent study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

The perceptions of Bush’s supporters in Iowa are at odds with the facts on other issues. For example, oblivious to the divisions even in his own state, Steward said, “Bush has brought the country together for the first time. It’s solidified.” And Schmedding, despite a rise in unemployment in Iowa that had just been reported, sunnily declared, “I think [Bush] has actually created jobs.”

But nobody requires voters of any party to have command of the facts or exhibit logical consistency. Joy Meyers, a teacher’s aide who was standing in line for tickets to hear Bush, at first sounded like a subversive plant, perhaps a rare Ralph Nader supporter or at least a Kerry backer. Since we have our own WMD, she argued, it’s understandable that other countries would want them as well, so why not get rid of all such weapons? And why not concentrate on finding Osama bin Laden rather than going after Saddam? But she was enthusiastically for Bush. “God has his plan,” she explained, presumably referring to Bush’s reelection. “He already knows what’s going on.”

Social issues — God, guns and gays, plus a heavy emphasis on abortion — both motivate and divide Bush supporters in Iowa. The balancing act is reflected in the party’s local leadership of Scott County, where Davenport is located. Republican co-chairwoman Susan Frazer, who has worked in public relations and whose husband owns an R.V. dealership, represents the traditional small-business base of the party. She was a bit evasive, but seemed moderate on abortion, clearly promoting the “big tent” of diverse views in the party. But co-chairman Ortega, a devout Catholic, views homosexuality as a sin and considers opposition to abortion and gay marriage to be the focal points of Republican politics. He reflects the new religious right in Iowa, with roots in many less affluent middle-class and working-class households.

Just north of Davenport along the Mississippi River, Republicans have made inroads in the heavily Roman Catholic, traditionally industrial city of Dubuque by supporting a strong anti-abortion movement. The city is still strongly Democratic, but most local Democratic officeholders are not pro-choice, and many Democratic voters in the area abandon national pro-choice Democrats, cutting into the margins needed there by candidates like Kerry to counterbalance disproportionately Republican western Iowa. Republican exploitation of the political potential of the anti-abortion movement in Dubuque began in the 1980s, according to local union leader and political operative Francis Giunta, when the city had the dubious distinction of landing on the cover of Time magazine for having — at 25 percent — the highest unemployment rate in the country. In a bid for wavering Catholic voters, Kerry recently attended mass in Dubuque with state Rep. Pat Murphy, a Democrat who opposes abortion rights.

I joined former political science student Ben Rogers, a regional organizer for America Coming Together, in a walk around a working-class neighborhood of Davenport, a mix of rundown or abandoned homes and others that were carefully maintained. It looked like a place where complaints about job losses, cost and availability of health insurance or prescription medicine, retirement insecurities and other bedrock Democratic issues would be paramount. While residents often mentioned those issues, their strong opposition to Bush was most often expressed as criticism of the war in Iraq.

“I don’t believe George Bush is doing what he said he would do,” said Rebecca Brodersen, a waitress with two children. “We shouldn’t focus so much on Iraq — being over there rebuilding — and not on our own economy and education.” Leroy Hull, a retired factory worker and avid woodworker, was opposed to the war from the beginning. “Saddam wasn’t causing any trouble,” he said. “Bush had that [invasion] in his head even before he was president.”

Democrats are convinced that Kerry will ultimately win Iowa because voters are upset by a weak economy. In addition, Kerry has campaigned on Iowa-specific issues, such as support for biological fuels and a crackdown on methamphetamine production. In September Iowa still had 22,000 fewer jobs than at the start of the recession in March 2001 — not as large a percentage loss as in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, but worse than in many other neighboring states. Over the past four years 70,000 Iowans became uninsured, and the average family health insurance premium increased by 40 percent. Voters are “being driven by economic issues — plant closings, offshoring, shifts to Mexico,” said Gov. Vilsack. “They realize their economic future is on the line.”

Iowa Federation of Labor president Mark Smith, a harsh critic of both Bush and the war, largely agrees, and the labor movement has mostly limited its references about the war to a critique of Bush administration priorities — money for war, not education — and a defense of Kerry’s military record by union members who served with him. “It’s so hard for me to figure out why anybody with a 75 IQ or above could be for this guy Bush,” Smith says. “Bush four years ago, I could understand, compassionate conservatism and all that bullshit.” This year, he said, “healthcare, jobs, retirement security seem to be the issues people will choose. Like [former Labor Secretary] Robert Reich says, they’re the anxious class: If you’re not laid off, you know somebody down the street or in your union who is, and your children are not even going to have the opportunity for decent jobs.” Gerald Messer, who heads the local labor federation encompassing Davenport, added, “I think the war has taken on more importance than economic issues. However, it will ultimately come down to whether you are better off today than four years ago. We’re sticking with economic issues, Social Security, healthcare. Those are the major issues. But the war is playing a bigger role than I thought it would.”

Aside from the vote-early efforts by Democrats, there’s a last-ditch battle for undecided voters. “Even at this late date,” said Dino Leone, a staff representative for the public workers union (AFSCME) in Illinois, on loan for political work in Iowa, “undecideds are going slowly to our side, and we’ve been able to get some turnarounds. One bricklayer who came here from Chicago had a story about canvassing another bricklayer in Davenport who was for Bush all the way. Then they talked about issues, about how good jobs were leaving the country and what that means to union people as a whole. Then he got into it about health insurance, how Bush had done nothing. He got the guy to commit for Kerry, and even got him to put up a Kerry sign in front of his house.” By the Davenport labor movement’s count of members it has canvassed, about 73 percent support Kerry (compared with 65 percent who said they supported Gore four years ago), and some remain undecided. “My gut feeling is we’re even higher than that,” Messer said.

But the biggest challenge for Kerry may be the widespread sense of despair and futility among low-income voters. As Rogers and I made the rounds of the blue-collar neighborhood, we encountered Chester, a radio DJ from Dominica, who refused all pleas to vote. “I don’t want Bush to win,” he said. “But I’m not into voting. The system is crazy. Bush is going to win.” Down the street, 75-year-old June Knutsen was slightly more receptive. “If I do vote, I’ll vote for Kerry.” She signed up for an absentee ballot, but it may take more visits to make sure that ballot is cast. Likewise for Derrick Hahn, a 19-year-old nonunion construction laborer who succinctly explained his job: “I get paid dirt for hard work.” He hadn’t followed the election or any issues closely and had no interest in voting. “I don’t really like either of these guys,” he said. “I probably ain’t going to vote.” What kind of candidate would he like? “Maybe a guy out to help the lower class more,” he said. Who would help the lower class more, Kerry or Bush? He paused and thought. “Kerry,” he said finally, “more than Bush.” Then he asked for an absentee ballot application.

On both sides, the campaigns and their supporting groups report more volunteers and a sense of optimism. “The race in Iowa is going to be very close, but we’re confident we’ll take it for the president,” said Bush Iowa campaign spokesman Dan Ronayne. “We’re working harder than ever. But Iowans are more in line with Bush’s values. Kerry is out of the mainstream, a liberal tax-and-spend politician from the East Coast. They can’t risk the safety of their families with him. The economy is doing better, and they’d rather keep more of their paycheck.” “We’re doing much the same operation we do every two years to get out the vote,” Republican Party co-chairman Frazer said. “Our GOTV operation has been in place for some time.” They’ll have a bank of 50 phones for Election Day in Davenport, backed up by door-to-door precinct workers.

But the pro-Kerry operation’s final push is likely to be much larger than its predecessor four years ago and larger than the Republicans’ effort. The unions in Davenport alone will have 300 volunteers on the phone or walking door to door.

Meanwhile, ACT is taking a daring gamble. Although it has focused this fall on contacting Democrats in cities who voted once or less in the past three general elections and urging them to vote early, the group is turning its get-out-the-vote efforts “upside down,” according to Jeff Link, ACT’s state director and former Iowa campaign manager for Gore and Sen. Tom Harkin. Instead of concentrating on door-to-door contacts in the cities, it has recruited 700 volunteers to go to 195 small towns and reach out to rural voters, including many elderly residents, whom Democrats often neglect. “We’ve never done anything like this,” Link said. “The way we’ll make a marginal difference is to go where people have never gone before and where people have never knocked on doors.”

The stakes are high in Iowa for the two candidates, but many Iowans feel that their own lives and the future of the country are on the line as well. Outside the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center in Waterloo, a venue named for five brothers killed in the same Pacific naval battle in World War II, Bryon Sells had parked his rusty, light-blue pickup truck in full view of everyone coming to hear Kerry speak on national security issues. On the back and sides were large, carefully painted signs bearing Sells’ message. The words “The Son of a Bush keeps getting our kids murdered in Iraq — no rich kids — and in your heart you know it’s wrong” are part of a long attack on the war and corporate profiteering. There’s a tribute to Kerry (a “true American hero”) and an attack on Dick Cheney (the “biggest crook in the world”). One recent addition: “The Son of a Bush and His Swiftboat Gutter Rat Cronies Must Eat out of a Toilet For All the Bull—- They Put Out.”

A retired factory worker, now wealthy with the proceeds from the sale of his father’s farm, Sells is a soft-spoken man with short gray hair who wears a Fillet and Release Club sweat shirt with a picture of a fish skeleton. “I tell you, the last four years the working class of people have been going down the drain,” he said. “I’m retired. I’ve got a ton of money. But I feel for the working class.” His son works at the factory where he worked, even though most of the jobs have been shipped to China. (Some are now coming back because of quality problems with the imports.) “I’m worried for the kids,” Sells continued. “I’ve had a good life, but I’m worried to death about these young people coming up. Bush is strictly for the rich. It’s a split country. Everyone can see it.”

But didn’t he want to benefit from Bush’s cuts in estate and income taxes? “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m not that way. Neither are my brothers. We’re all here to help. That’s what we’re here for. Not to rob each other. This is just a big money-power grab. If Bush gets away with, I don’t know what we’ll do. I’ve never been worried about a president before. But he tells so many lies.”

Sells’ voice then choked up as he fought back tears. After a pause, he said quietly, with a weak smile, “I think we’ll make it.” Across the street, a group of United Auto Workers members held up a banner: “Help Is on the Way.”

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

“What? Are you sure? Where did you hear this?”

“It’s online.”

The texts and calls and tweets and Facebook posts and cable news ticker feeds piled up from there, morphing into that familiar buzzing audiovisual din. Our other atmosphere.

At first there was no actual news, just rumor and speculation. Finally the Sunday night shows were interrupted by reports that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida mastermind and America’s most wanted criminal, might finally be dead, nine-and-a-half years after the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil.

On NBC’s East Coast affiliates, the announcement of an impending presidential address cut into the final moments of “Celebrity Apprentice,” starring would-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Take that, you combed-over bigot.) Obama did not appear for another hour. After he spoke — confirming that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Joint Special Operation Command forces working with the CIA — NBC and CBS returned to previously scheduled programming. ABC and the cable news channels stuck with the story. “The minute I heard that the president was doing an announcement at 10:30 and breaking into TV, I sort of guessed, I thought, ‘They got bin Laden,’” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told New York’s WABC. “They wouldn’t break into TV for any other reason.”

Fox News Channel somehow managed to deliver comprehensible audio over the collective, bloody grinding of teeth, even when relaying a statement from ex-President George W. Bush congratulating Obama: “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”

“This will probably prove to be one of the most significant, if not the most significant accomplishments of the president,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told anchor Brian Williams, in a bloc of live MSNBC coverage that displaced a taped program titled “Sex Slaves UK.”

On ABC, Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of the hijacked flight that struck the Pentagon, told anchor George Stephanopoulos, “This has been a long time coming. It’s been rough because it pretty much dominated my life, all of these national security issues. And we’re not out of the woods yet, George, but this is really big.”

Yes.

So big that after a certain point, a New York-based TV columnist can no longer sit in his living room, typing on a laptop while stealing glances at a TV. Next stop, ground zero.

2.

The Cortlandt Street R train stop deposits riders on the perimeter of ground zero, in front of the Century 21 department store on Church Street, meters away from a chain link fence festooned with banners detailing the splendors that will appear on the former World Trade Center site: Freedom Tower. Reflecting pool. High-end retail shops.

At first the street seemed unnervingly quiet. Yes, it was 1:30 Monday morning at the the start of a work week, but this was supposed to be V-E Day all over again, at least in theory. Where were all the people?

Two blocks away, as it turned out: Klieg lights. Waving flags. The distant roar of a crowd’s cheer building and cresting:

“HhhhhhhhhhRRaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

How many people were there? Thousands, I’m told. 

They’d stuck bunches of red and white roses into the fence and taped up signs: “Thanks, Barack!” “USA WINNING.” There was a scrawny young man in a red, white and blue top hat, and a tearful man with a hand-lettered sign that read, “He’s dead,” and a man holding an iPhone with a viewscreen spelling out, in huge letters, “OBAMA 1 OSAMA 0.” One woman came dressed in an Old Glory jumpsuit complete with hoodie.

“It feels like the world’s guiltiest criminal is now gone from this earth,” said Eric Brehm of Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting New York with his girlfriend, Megan Sander. “I’m happy for the people of New York and happy for the world.” Sander recalled watching the second plane hit on TV almost a decade ago. “My boss’ sister was a flight attendant on that plane,” she said.

A number of celebrants wore American flags as capes. “It’s an amazing night,” said one flag-caped celebrant, Juan Rodriguez of Cliffside Park, N.J. “I feel like I can breathe again.” He said the flag around his shoulders once belonged to his grandfather, who served in the Pacific during WWII.

Archie Archipolo, who grew up on the Lower East Side and has lived in lower Manhattan for over a decade, recalled the madness in this neighborhood nine-and-a-half years ago. “The Red Cross set up a station with bottles of water. There were tanks in the streets.”

Archipolo was wearing a VFW cap that belonged to his grandfather, who served in the 1st Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was there with his girlfriend, Danielle Cristiani, and her godson Max Sperling, a teenager who was 5 when the towers fell. “It was like a war zone down here,” Sperling recalled. “But it was so quiet that first night.”

“We lost friends, cousins that day,” Archipolo said. “Everyone did. Now I think we’re on the way back. But we have to be careful. It could happen again any time. It might not be as big as it was before. It could be some guys strapped with C-4.”

A young Navy officer in dress blues and a sailor in white joined a drunken civilian teenager atop a lamppost at the corner of Church and Vesey and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. 

3.

What didn’t come through in the TV feeds and newspaper stories was the peculiar character of the crowd: half in-the-moment, half outside of it.

There were engaged, ecstatic — and over time, increasingly tipsy — revelers. There were news vans and trucks with broadcast-quality cameras and bright lights and rumbling generators. There were roving reporters with notepads and hand-held digital tape recorders. I saw people collecting video and audio with their iPhones. One woman circled the outer edge of the crowd, holding her iPad slightly above her head, getting a smooth tracking shot around the edges of the gathering and double-checking her framing by glancing up at the screen.

In some sectors of the designated celebration zone — a two-block area ringed by cops and barricades — witnesses to history appeared to outnumber participants.

Then again, the distinction between participants might be a false one. Nowadays just about everybody has the ability to record his or her life at any time, for any reason, via digital stills, video, audio. And there was a whole lot of recording going on last night. Three young men in kilts climbed on top of a bank of pay phones and gave an impromptu bagpipe concert; the strobe-flash illumination of shutterbugs was so intense that they might as well have been performing on the floor of a disco. There were people taking video and still photos of cops, construction workers, Marines, sailors and civilians wrapped in American flags or carrying signs. There were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures. And there were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures.

Clouds of pot smoke occasionally wafted through the scene, and as the celebration wore on, it became harder to move through the throng without accidentally kicking an empty beer bottle and sending it clattering down the street.

If you stood back and squinted at the crowd, hundreds of rectangles of electronic light seemed to bob like embers on a dark wave. People were showing each other their iPhones, sharing Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, uploaded and downloaded photos, YouTube clips, streaming video from CNN. They were discussing the coverage, repeating what they’d heard, saying what they did or didn’t believe.

“They should show pictures of the raid, pictures of the body, a picture, something,” a man holding a bottle of water told a man holding a tall can of Budweiser. “They have to show proof that he’s dead, that it’s him they shot, otherwise the tinfoil hats come out.”

And yet despite the anxiety and intense self-consciousness, there was a bustling energy to the gathering, with undertones of joy, relief and hope — plus a brute satisfaction than somebody finally tracked the son of a bitch down and put one in his brain. Songs and chants erupted and faded, some merely patriotic, others belligerent: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America the Beautiful.” “You ess AY! You ess AY” “Nah nah NAH nah!/Nah nah NAH nah!/Hey HEY-YYYYY/Good BYE!” One especially wasted young man lunged at a TV camera and yelled, “Iran is next! I don’t care what anybody says! Iran is next!”

Jonathan Jirack, formerly of Pittsburgh, left his apartment near ground zero around 2 a.m. bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, “We cheer for [PEACE SYMBOL], not death.” He walked through the crowd for hours holding it over his head. “I saw the gathering on TV and I thought, ‘I need to go down there and try to put an asterisk on the event,’” he said. “I understand the jubilation. I can feel it. But a lot of people are watching this thing on TV, and I’m afraid what we’re putting out there can be manipulated or misinterpreted.”

“That’s noble,” said Kevin Caslava, a San Diego-born writer who has lived in New York off and on for a decade, indicating Jirack’s sign. “But you’ve also got people here chanting, ‘Fuck Osama,’ so it’s not like what you’re describing is the only subtext out here.”

They argued politely about the sign — Jirack insisting that most of the people here were more relieved and happy than bloodthirsty, even though it might not come across that way on TV, and Caslava was taking a more skeptical view.

“Look, I get it,” Caslava said. “I feel a deep-rooted satisfaction, but also a sense of, ‘Should I be cheering because a man got shot?’ I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve met people who argued for bin Laden as a freedom fighter, as somebody who had reasons for what he did. When you hear them talk, intellectually you understand the reasons, even though you have a visceral hatred of what happened in this country, right here on our own soil. Deep inside us, there’s a very strong voice for war. You try to be rational, but there’s that voice inside that says, ‘Fuck this.’ That’s the voice I’m hearing here, mostly.”

“And,” he added, “when you’re watching news from Middle Eastern countries and you see people holding up signs in Arabic, how do you know what they’re saying? If you can’t read Arabic, you can’t know. You might think what’s on that Arabic sign was a message of peace when it’s actually something like, ‘Fuck all y’all!’ How do you know that somebody in another country where they don’t speak English won’t look at your sign and just not understand it at all? Or misinterpret it?”

“That’s why I put the peace symbol on there,” Jirack said.

4.

Back in Brooklyn again after a brief subway ride in an R train car filled with mostly sleeping people and other awake persons — fellow pilgrims to ground zero who thought the timing of Obama’s announcement was a bit too convenient, that maybe the president delayed the raid, or delayed announcing the news, until tonight because it would put a lid on the celebrations.

“They were building up to this raid for weeks,” a man said. “He didn’t give the go-ahead last night. Why? Because if he’d done it last night, Saturday night, around the same time as tonight, the word would have gone out when half the people in America were already half-drunk, and then what would the TV have shown? It would have been insanity. So he waits until late Sunday night. Everybody’s happy, but they’re tired. They want to celebrate, but they also gotta go to work in the morning.”

“Not everything is a conspiracy,” another rider said.

“They’re very precise in how they manage the country,” the first rider said. “They got shaping P.R. down to an exact science.”

Home at last.  The kids were zonked out. On CNN, Steve Bernstein, whose brother Billy died on 9/11 when Cantor-Fitzgerald’s World Trade Center offices went up in smoke, said that when he heard about bin Laden, “I felt like my brother could finally rest in peace. I felt the same way.”

Then the newscast cut to correspondent Ted Rowlands reporting live from “a hookah lounge in Anaheim, California” at 2 a.m. Pacific. His topic: the reaction of Muslim-Americans. He sidled over to one side of the club and approached a couple of attractive young women. “Leila,” he said, extending his microphone to one of them, “as a Persian-American, give it to me: What is your reaction to Osama bin Laden being killed?”

“We’re elated that someone who is the biggest symbol of terrorism is finally gone now,” Leila said. “And I can’t wait to see his picture now, to be honest with you.”

Rowlands led the camera crew toward the back of the club, where the owner was waiting for him. Ninety minutes earlier, Rowlands explained, the owner — a U.S. armed forces veteran — had been the victim of a drive-by egging. There was still a splotch of yolk on his shirt.

“This is Mohammed, the establishment’s owner,” Rowlands explained. “He was actually hit in the neck by an egg.”

“Good job, U.S. Army, and Marines, everybody, Obama, we’re glad that’s over with,” Mohammed said. 

Rowlands followed up: ”Does it help? Do you think this is the beginning of the end of discrimination here in America, or no, is it an ongoing thing?”

“It’s gonna be an ongoing thing as long as we have a lot of the biased media and ignorant people out here,” Mohammed said. “Hopefully, this brings a little closure … We’re happy that he’s dead, we’re happy that he’s gone.”

I glanced down at my laptop. In my Twitter feed was a link to a wire story saying that Osama bin Laden’s corpse had already been buried at sea.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman tells Ambinder. Plus he recently moved:

Mehlman said that his formal coming-out process began earlier this year. Over the past several weeks, he has notified former colleagues, including former President Bush. Once he realized that the news would probably leak, he assembled a team of former advisers to help him figure out the best way to harness the publicity generated by the disclosure for the cause of marriage rights. He is worried that some will see his decision to go public as opportunistic. Mehlman recently moved to Chelsea, a gay mecca in New York City.

Hm.

Well, welcome to being on the right side of one issue, Ken. (And this marks another one that Mike Rogers was right about.)

The Obamas’ answer is usually some variation of: “Work really fucking hard for it.” Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the couple is that while their marriage is most often held up by others as an ideal to aspire to — or flat-out envy — the two people in it, when asked, spend much of their time dissecting the ways in which they have failed each other. “The image of a flawless relationship,” writes Jodi Kantor, is, according to Michelle, “the last thing we want to project. It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair to young couples trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”

Although it seems paradoxical that one of the most envied couples in the nation is also one of the most vocal about the hardships of marriage, it makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly, the Obamas wouldn’t have the luxury of nitpicking at the flaws, major and minor, of their relationship if others made a habit of doing so, too. But they have quite a bit of distance to fall before they would succeed in knocking themselves off their own pedestal. And in many ways, it’s entirely consistent with the rest of their philosophy: Just as one’s accomplishments shouldn’t be limited by birth, marriage isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you do. And just as you’d expect, the Obamas see yet another “teachable moment” in describing the mechanics of their marriage.

The first couple recognizes that their personal life is political; Kantor even describes it as central to Barack’s overall “political brand.” But politics itself is the thing that, for a time, made their personal life nearly untenable. She writes: “Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.”

In fact, when you read the Obamas’ account of their marriage, the shocking thing is that any family manages to combine the stress of marriage and politics, much less endure the unfortunate side effect of having their marriages scrutinized by an unforgiving public. Let’s just start here: Until moving into the White House, the family had not lived full-time under the same roof since 1996, two years before Malia was born. To repeat: Barack has been at least a part-time absent father and husband for nearly 13 years.

This left Michelle, obviously, to care for their two children largely on her own. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” says Susan Sher, her former boss and current chief of staff, who remembers that Michelle showed up for her interview at University of Chicago Medical Center carrying newborn Sasha, because her sitter had canceled. Not only was she left with the bulk of the childcare, but Barack’s political career wasn’t enough to pay the bills, leaving her to earn the income as well. As Barack recalls, “She said, ‘Well, you’re gone all the time and we’re broke. How is that a good deal?’” (Note that the guy who put her in the situation is also the guy who remembers just exactly what he did.)

How indeed? The answer, it seemed to be, was that Michelle just happened to find herself married to a Great Man, though neither of them knew it yet. “Barack doesn’t belong to you,” Michelle’s friend Yvonne Davilia recalls telling her back in the mid-’90s, when Barack was finishing up his memoir and considering getting into politics. But at first, Michelle “just wasn’t ready to share” her husband. Which begs the question: With what? His future destiny as leader of the free world? And would that destiny have been possible had a Great Woman, who also happened to be his intellectual and professional equal, not stepped in to look after the more prosaic concerns of raising the children and collecting a paycheck? “That was sort of an eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard,” says Michelle. “But going into it, no one tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love him? What does the dress look like?’”

At this point it might be worth noting that in seeing a temporary absence from his family as a fair price to pay for greater goals, Barack was not simply following the model of his father (who had “fleeting” relationships with his wives and children), but also the model of his mother, who spent long periods of time away from her children while working as an anthropologist in Indonesia. Michelle had to point out to him, according to Sher, that a lot of parenting is about “sheer physical presence, which wasn’t something he was used to.”

The very essence of marriage is finding ways to calibrate individual aspirations with the cumbersome, day-to-day workings of a larger family unit. And it’s beyond ludicrous that those people whose individual achievements make their family lives most visible — politicians, actors, writers, musicians — are often those whose family lives are most compromised by the costs of individual achievement. But in asking us to take a good long look behind the curtain of their marriage, the Obamas have given us a better lesson in the real costs and benefits of family values than any fairy tale could.

Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean’s successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee’s national field effort that helped produce Al Gore’s national popular vote victory.

Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I’d like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.

Kenneth Baer: I think right now it’s not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can’t get people saying, “My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don’t need to go out and vote. It’s cold out, it’s rainy.” [You can't have] staff people who are like, “I don’t need to work that hard, we’re going to win this anyway.” Just really keeping motivated, that’s the big challenge.

Steve McMahon: Obama’s got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it’s dangerous. The best thing to do when you’re winning is to keep doing what you’re doing because that’s the reason you’re winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he’s done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they’ve got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it’s important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.

Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that’s definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They’re just going into high gear, right?

Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that’s what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.

Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn’t tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS — jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?

Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we’re in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s about, it’s about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it’s basically been the same thing. And it’s working. It’s a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you’re doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.

McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn’t really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn’t really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they’ve set a frame for Barack Obama’s campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it’s very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it’s very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it’s also pretty clear because they’ve set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they’ve stuck to very, very religiously and that is he’s John McSame. He’s going to just give us four more years of George Bush.

If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That’s really what he’s struggling with and the fact that he’s now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They’re now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.

Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?

Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they’re voting for. They know what they’re going out and casting their ballot for and that’s a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they’re so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, “Oh well, it just won’t matter if I get to the polls that day.” You have to convince them that’s not the case, that it actually does matter.

Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don’t know if it’s the night before or Sunday night, but he’s going to have this 30-minute segment. We’ve seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It’s usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?

McMahon: I actually think it’s the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address — which, by the way, I don’t think there are at this point — it gives him an opportunity to address those. It’s a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it’s something that’s going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.

Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it’s feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it’s a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven’t seen.

Baer: It’s interesting listening to you two guys because I’ve actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don’t?

Moskowitz: There won’t be any Greek columns.

McMahon: No, I’m just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we’re fixing to find out.

Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we’ve seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you’re Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you’re ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?

McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn’t. I don’t think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it’s smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who’s not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it’s going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain’s name.

Baer: I think that you can’t look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they’re throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don’t mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can’t let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It’s not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it’s going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.

Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it’s just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?

Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny’s right in the sense that the campaign can’t let up. We don’t want them to and we can’t afford to. This isn’t going to be a landslide. We’ll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they’re throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.

Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it’s already performing.

Moskowitz: It’s definitely real. It’s phenomenal. And I think, whether it’s a buzzword or not, it’s organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that’s having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it’s definitely a new operation the likes of which we’ve not seen before.

Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it’s more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?

Moskowitz: No, it’s not more command and control. Again, there’s framework, there’s structure, there’s goals. But again, they’ve really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They’ve provided them with a slate of tools to use. They’ve really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They’ve definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who’s running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn’t matter; as long they’re willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they’re included in the operation.

Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign’s use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?

Baer: Well, maybe. There’s something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he’s breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that’s exhilarating, is that you just don’t know if it’s going to work or not. This is the field program that you’ve dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like “The West Wing.” We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it’s exhilarating partly because we don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a huge gamble.

We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That’s how you win. Registering a million new voters like they’ve done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that’s a high-risk strategy, and it’s exhilarating. Because if it works, we’ve just done something great. It’s great for democracy. I hope it works. And there’s every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it’s a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn’t been successful because it’s done the tried and true. It’s been successful because it has done things differently.

Moskowitz: I think what’s also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that’s not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I’m even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don’t necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They’re going door to door, they’re getting people to vote early, they’re making phone calls from their homes, they’re doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.

Schaller: It’s been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?

McMahon: I don’t think it’s a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama’s staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it’s just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He’s organized; even in places where he’s not necessarily competitive, they’ve got campaigns. They’re going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.

Moskowitz: Steve’s absolutely right. They’re not going to go do this where it doesn’t help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they’re not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.

Schaller: Ken, you’ve written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?

Baer: That’s a good question. It’s a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you’re not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it’s a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we’ve got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era — or it’s an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it’s screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.

Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he’s already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don’t count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It’s definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?

McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.

Baer: Hire Steve.

McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you’ve got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I’m sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I’m sure he’d be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that’s what I’d encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.

Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That’s a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.

Baer: I look at it differently. I’m sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it’s a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That’s expanding the map. It’s a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let’s just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let’s not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that’s sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?

Schaller: We’ve reached the final question. We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.

Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They’re already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Hold your breath for the last day.

McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don’t go to church at Rev. Wright’s church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.

Baer: Yeah, that’s very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that’s a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don’t talk to your transition team. Don’t even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.

Schaller: That’s some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.