John McCain targeted his rival's associations with radicals like Ayers, and Sarah Palin hyperbolically accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." Ayers rebuffed interview requests throughout the campaign, but has dropped his reticence with the republication of his 2001 book, "Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist."

After appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" last Friday, Ayers sat down for a 55-minute interview with Salon's Washington bureau chief, Walter Shapiro. During the late 1960s at the University of Michigan, Shapiro knew Ayers as a "guy in the neighborhood." The following interview, conducted in Shapiro's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been edited for length.

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If the fall campaign brought with it the risk of drowning in a tidal wave of polling data, the occupational hazard during the transition period between presidents is dying from thirst in a parched landscape devoid of any reliable information. Even the ballyhooed release Wednesday of the identities of Obama's major transition team leaders in Washington may have been a diversion from the real drama in Chicago. As one veteran of the Clinton White House says, "The only transition that matters is in Barack Obama's living room."

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As Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of Obama's transition team, put it with deliberate blandness on "Meet the Press" Sunday: "I think one of the real strengths of Sen. Obama's campaign and now President-elect Obama's transition is that he really does like to think this through thoroughly and not telecast what he's going to do until he's ready to make a decision."

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But Tuesday night was a time of joy for Democrats and independents -- a glorious affirmation of America's capacity for rebirth as Obama rolled to an unequivocal victory over John McCain. With three states still undecided, Obama was guaranteed at least 349 electoral votes, winning a minimum of eight states carried by Bush in 2004 (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico). The Democrats also picked up a minimum of five Senate seats, giving them a healthy (if not quite filibuster-proof) majority along with comfortable control of the House of Representatives.

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No one is suggesting that the battle for Ohio's 20 electoral votes will be decided by greasepaint smiles and off-key renditions of "Stars and Stripes Forever." But in a campaign year when parsing the polls has become a national obsession, the impossible to quantify X-factor is the potency of Barack Obama's ground game for getting out the vote. "There are no phone calls in Ohio today by the Obama campaign," said David Wilhelm, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who lives in suburban Columbus. "Everything is door-to-door. I think the impact is different from this kind of personal validation, neighbor-to-neighbor. It's a big deal, especially in rural southeastern Ohio."

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"I think God had it all planned out for Barack-o to be our man," said Tom Morris, 73, a lifelong Republican whose career was mostly as a self-employed truck driver and electrician. Eighty-two-year-old retired coal miner Rufus Fultz, one of the most active Obama volunteers in Perry County, chimed in, "I believe it too." Morris and his wife, Ernestine, who also crossed party lines to vote early for Obama, live in a trailer in their backyard because they lack the money to repair their ramshackle house. Morris confessed, "I pray every night that Barack and his wife will be elected to the White House unanimously."

There is nothing unanimous about politics in Perry County, located about 60 miles southeast of Columbus at the point where Midwestern Ohio gives way to Appalachia. With only 15,000 voters in 2004 (New Lexington, its largest town, has fewer than 5,000 residents), Perry County appears to be a fly speck in a swing state where turnout is expected to exceed 6.5 million.

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But this year all the signs and portents are pointing in the opposite direction. Barack Obama has led in the last 11 published statewide polls, breaking the 50 percent threshold in the most recent survey released Thursday. Unlike 2004, the Democrats control the levers of state government, with Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner now portrayed by the Republicans as being as overtly partisan as her notorious GOP predecessor Ken Blackwell.

With all this good fortune, no wonder prominent Democrats are nervous. "This is not over until 7:30 on the night of Nov. 4 when the polls close," said Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, an early and avid supporter of Obama. "I know the other side will do all they can -- say anything -- to discourage the vote and to sway voters and persuade them. I hope it doesn't get any nastier from the other side. And we have to turn out our vote. Voter turnout is the key."

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That was the fabled McCain who wooed reporters with nonstop rolling press conferences about the Straight Talk Express, who electrified independent voters in the New Hampshire primary with his clarion call for political reform and who late in the campaign denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." Make no mistake, McCain 2000 was an unabashed hawk ("rogue-state rollback" was his bellicose mantra) who never deviated from conservative orthodoxy on abortion (though he did give off the impression that rolling back Roe v. Wade was about 993rd on his list of life ambitions). Whether that candidate was the authentic McCain or an impromptu confection whipped up for a gullible press corps, the result was one of the most beguiling losing campaigns in modern political history.

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That verdict was offered before the Boston Globe released a New Hampshire poll Sunday, which showed Barack Obama leading McCain by a lopsided 54-to-39 percent margin in a state that John Kerry carried by just 9,000 votes in 2004. "What we've found is a depletion of enthusiasm among Republicans," said University of New Hampshire pollster Andy Smith, who conducted the survey for the Globe. "Some of the more marginal Republican voters are now not getting through the 'likely voter' screen."

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During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?

Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally fallacious theories about the fall campaign that have been the stuff of Sunday morning round tables and newspaper Op-Ed pages? Granted, we at Salon have sometimes stumbled on the road to omniscience. But that shared sense of humility does not dampen our glee in pointing out the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders, homestretch edition.

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Demographer Cheryl Russell is the former editor in chief of American Demographics magazine, the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the author of the just-published "Bet You Didn't Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts About Living in the USA."

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So what was Sarah Palin doing in the northern Indianapolis suburb of Noblesville Friday afternoon motivating the GOP faithful? Why are Barack Obama and the Republican National Committee advertising heavily on Indianapolis television? How come most recent polls (there have been only a handful of statewide surveys this month) show Obama within striking distance of the lead? Why has Indiana become 2008's most unlikely battleground state? 

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The opening that McCain had been craving came early in the evening when Obama pointedly contrasted the Bill Clinton economic record (a budget surplus) with the scorecard on George W. Bush (doubling the national debt in eight years). "Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush," McCain declared. "If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country." McCain, to his credit, delivered the obviously rehearsed lines with conviction. But the Arizona senator then spoiled the moment by immediately veering off to talk about Obama's tax votes in Congress and the "completely out-of-control" budget.

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Republicans are already starting to gird themselves for a Nov. 4 debacle. A front-page story in Sunday's New York Times featured GOP leaders lamenting the disarray in the McCain campaign. More ominous for McCain are the results of a secret-ballot survey by National Journal magazine of roughly 100 prominent Republican campaign consultants. Freed from the demands of on-the-record spin, 80 percent of these operatives admitted that it was highly likely that Obama would win the White House. The other 20 percent -- the cockeyed optimists of the GOP camp -- predicted that the election could go either way.

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Never before in the 48-year history of presidential debates has a candidate begun his substantive remarks, as Obama did, by starkly declaring, "I think everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." Yet as a first-term senator -- a candidate whose meteoric rise has been fueled by his opposition to the Iraq war, his charisma and his life story -- Obama did a masterly job of coming across as the candidate of economic reassurance.

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The driving narrative of John McCain's political career is not enduring five and a half years in a POW camp, but suffering through four years in the cross hairs of a late 1980s congressional scandal known as the Keating Five. As McCain tells it (and he has discussed it in almost every medium aside from Japanese manga comics), this was a classic tale of sin and salvation as an erring senator makes a grievous mistake in judgment, is hauled before the Senate Ethics Committee and, as a result, is forever changed by the public humiliation.

"I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor could be bought. From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable," McCain writes in his 2002 memoir. "Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life." (For those who lack an encyclopedic memory of 1988 news headlines, McCain, along with four other Democratic senators, improperly intervened with federal regulators in an effort to save the crumbling savings-and-loan empire of Charles Keating, an Arizona friend and campaign contributor of McCain's.)

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Two hours later, in contrast, the pulse rate was racing at the local Democratic headquarters as more than 70 political foot soldiers (most of them middle-aged) readied themselves for an afternoon of canvassing, phone calling and scrawling vote-for-Obama postcards to neighbors. On the sidewalk of the down-at-the-heels strip mall, Obama volunteers grilled lunchtime hamburgers and hot dogs as if this were an alcohol-free Packer tailgate party outside of Lambeau Field.

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Ninety minutes later -- even among the GOP volunteers who had been worried about McCain's vice-presidential pick after the disastrous Katie Couric interview -- there was not a sliver of doubt about who won. "Palin came across as tougher than ever before," said Karen Seas, a mother of three with frosted silver hair. "She was witty too." Even though Joe Biden had been the butt of wisecracks and occasional boos all evening, there was surprisingly little venom directed at him when the debate was over. "Biden did control himself very well," said Barbara Catalano, a registered nurse, who was working on the phone bank for the first time. "He must have been well-prepared because he didn't get angry."

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Sarah Palin will have her own opportunity to play against type Thursday night during her meet-me-in-St.Louis rendezvous with Joe Biden. Perhaps the first-term Alaska governor -- who seemed so over-matched during her TV interviews with Katie Couric -- will suddenly drop the name of the hard-line president of Uzbekistan (Islam Karimov) and speak with statistical precision about the peculiar "doughnut-hole" benefit formula of Medicare Part D (the prescription-drug program). But while Biden has his own history of making remarks that do not play well in YouTube videos, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may be perceived as a mere bystander during Palin's biggest career performance without a teleprompter.

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-- John McCain, Tuesday

"Continued inaction in the face of the gathering storm in our financial markets would be catastrophic for our economy and our families."

-- Barack Obama, Tuesday

Money talks -- or moans, in the case of most stock portfolios this week. That is why the most revealing responses to the market mayhem are not what the two presidential candidates say, but what their campaigns pay to put on television.

The morning after the 778-point market mayhem, three TV ads were released with public fanfare, two by the candidates themselves and the third by the Republican National Committee blasting Obama. It was stunning how unresponsive all three commercials were to the real-world details of the worst financial crisis since brokers drank their martinis in speak-easies. Both campaigns seem determined to cling to their familiar arguments (Obama is too liberal and McCain is an out-of-touch Bush III) in the face of the dramatically reshaped realities on Wall Street.

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