It was so unseasonably warm in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, that Barack Obama could deliver his stump speech in his shirt sleeves on Friday. In fact, it was so sunny in late October, that it was hard to recall just how bitterly cold it was a year ago, when Obama was still struggling to get people to believe he could pull off a surprise victory in the state’s caucus contests.

The Obama campaign savors the symbolism of returning to its roots. It launched itself in Springfield, Illinois, in February 2007 and returned there 17 months later for the rollout of the new veep pick Joe Biden. It started its nomination fight in Des Moines and returned there on the night it won a majority of Democratic delegates.

So what is the deeper meaning of Des Moines now?

According to the McCain campaign, its internal Iowa polls have tightened to the point of a statistical tie. Public polls show nothing similar. Over the course of the last month, Obama’s lead has ranged from a low of 8 points to a high of 15 points.

Iowa is indeed a battleground state, with its seven electoral college votes. But its battleground status comes less from the polls than its column-switching patterns in the last two cycles. Al Gore won Iowa in 2000, while George W. Bush won it in 2004.

Obama staffers shrug their shoulders and smile when asked about their opponent’s polling in Iowa. They insist their own internal polling shows no slippage in Iowa, and nothing like a close contest.

So why visit Iowa now? First, Iowa is close to Illinois, and the candidate is returning home this afternoon to go trick-or-treating with his daughters before campaigning in Indiana and ending the day in Nevada. Second, the campaign canceled an earlier trip to Iowa so the candidate could fly to Hawaii to see his grandmother, who is gravely ill. And third, until Friday, Iowa has only seen Obama twice since he clinched the nomination.

As for Obama himself, it’s clearly irresistible to close the symbolic circle in Des Moines. “A whole new way of doing democracy started right here in Iowa, and it’s all across the country now,” he told a crowd of 25,000 supporters. “That’s how we’ve come so far, how we’ve come so close, because of you.”

The AP’s great reporter David Espo has moved a story about an early transition move by Team Obama: to approach Rahm Emanuel about possibly serving as White House chief of staff.

There are a couple of ways to look at this kind of report.The most obvious is the great Washington game of court intrigue: transitions are perfect for those who like to figure out who’s up and who’s down.Ultimately, such games don’t much matter when the next president will soon be making decisions about who is really up and down.

And for all the enthusiasm of his supporters, Barack Obama has not reached the point of making anything close to such decisions, according to several senior aides. Those same aides are deeply annoyed that transition stories are even emerging before election day.

However, there’s another way to look at this. While the decisions are not yet made, Obama’s efficient staff is paving the way for those decisions to come very shortly after the election, should they win next Tuesday. (McCain has his own transition team doing similar work.) That paving job includes approaching potential shortlists, and Obama’s senior aides are doing nothing to deny that Rahm Emanuel has been approached.

Which leads us to two additional avenues to explore, surrounding the leaking of Emanuel’s name.

First, the story suggests that an Obama transition is going to be much harder to manage than the Obama campaign. Why? Because the campaign is run by a tight inner circle of trusted aides out of Chicago. The transition is already a sprawling effort involving several groups of Washington insiders, working out of the nation’s capital. Discipline is hard to enforce at a distance, where no single person is in full control. The culture of the campaign is not the culture of Washington.

Second, Emanuel is an ambitious and talented politician who has risen swiftly from the Clinton White House to a senior position inside the House Democratic leadership. With his political ambitions come political rivals, who may engage in strategic leaking. The profile of a congressional leader is not the same as a chief of staff, and the transition between the two can be jarring.

John McCain has made no secret of the fact he’s very superstitious. Much has been written about the items he’s carries—the lucky nickel, the lucky feather, the lucky quarter, the lucky rock, etc—and the rituals he’s adhered to in hopes that fate will swing his way. On the night of the New Hampshire primary earlier this year, McCain slept in the same hotel, the same room and even the same side of the bed as did back in 2000 when he won the state. “Some people think I’m crazy,” McCain admitted to reporters on his bus earlier this year. During the primaries, McCain refused to allow himself to be called the frontrunner or even refer to himself as the nominee until it had officially happened so as not to jinx his luck. That’s why it’s so interesting to listen to McCain’s speeches today. Even after he won the nomination, he has continued to insert phrases like, “if I am elected” or “if I win the presidency—irritating some GOP supporters who wanted McCain to be more forceful. He still uses “if” a lot, but within the past few weeks, McCain has started to sprinkle his speeches when a few uses of “when.” “When I am president, we are going to win in Iraq and win in Afghanistan,” McCain told a crowd in Miami earlier this week. Yesterday, he accused Barack Obama for supporting millions of dollars in corporate giveaways to oil companies. “When I am president, we are not going to let that happen,” McCain declared. He also vowed yesterday that there will be more offshore drilling “when I am president.” It’s unclear when McCain became more comfortable using “when” as opposed to “if” but it’s a small and perhaps telling change in a candidate who has believed all his life in luck and rituals.

How big was Obama’s big night on TV? According to early numbers from the candidate’s senior aides, around 30 million people watched his prime-time infomercial. Not as much as the TV debates or the acceptance speech in Denver. But still a significant chunk of the population.

But even more than the numbers, Team Obama was pleased with their feat of pulling off another high-wire act – the third high-risk, high-profile event they have staged, following the summer’s international trip and stadium night at the convention.

The candidate himself only recorded his contribution to the infomercial late last week in Indiana, viewing a final cut just a day before broadcast. Despite that late contribution, the end result was widely praised for its high production values.

At the top of the list of those earning credit for the production was Jim Margolis, the admaker who is Obama’s senior advertising strategist. The 30-minute ad was produced in his shop, in a team effort with fellow adman Mark Putnam and the movie director Davis Guggenheim.

The primetime ad wasn’t the only part of an unreal night of TV for Obama on Wednesday. He also taped an interview with The Daily Show on Comedy Central, where he seemed to be talking from an encyclopedia-filled library. In fact he was sitting in the Crowne Plaza hotel near Fort Lauderdale. Obama also held his first joint campaign rally with Bill Clinton, where the former president managed to upstage Obama even when he was sitting on a stool listening to the candidate.

How could you tell that Clinton was hamming it up? Obama flubbed one of the standard lines of his stump speech as follows: “John McCain’s campaign said a while back that we can’t talk about the election, because if we talk about the election, we’re going to lose,” he said,substituting the word ‘election’ for ‘economy.’ (They both begin with the letter E,after all.) “Now I have to point out, I’m not a genius – a political genius like Bill Clinton,” he continued, “but when I heard them say that, I said I guess we better keep on talking about the economy. Because that’s what the American people care about.”

At which point, Clinton himself slapped both his thighs, tipped his head back and roared with laughter. With that kind of performance,you could just about believe he wanted Obama to be his party's nominee. 

If a reporter wanted to craft a dire lede about the final days of John McCain’s campaign, the signs are coming in droves—although it’s something more akin to a satirical movie like “Airplane!” or “Hot Shots.” It all started on Monday, when McCain’s motorcade had to pull over almost immediately upon arrival in Fayetteville, N.C. The problem: McCain’s armored SUV had a flat tire. Uh oh! Bad metaphor alert! But that was nothing. Yesterday morning in Miami, reporters looked up to see a large swarm of giant birds circling in the sky above a coffee shop where McCain was meeting with local supporters. An hour later, it happened again, as McCain took the stage at a small rally near Little Havana. This reporter initially thought they were buzzards—though, admittedly, my expertise on that species is largely limited to repeated childhood viewings of Looney Tunes. Indeed, you can only imagine the jokes when, later that afternoon, reporters were sitting at another event in West Palm Beach and looked up in the sky to see a pack of hundreds of giant birds circling the perimeter above. (See photo above.) Alfred Hitchcock could not have crafted a better scene, though, in truth, it was a moment more likened to something you’d see on a show like “Arrested Development.”

Concerned that a pack of black cats might be next—or, heaven forbid, the Grim Reaper—I brought up the birds to Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and speechwriter, last night on the flight from Florida to Ohio, where McCain is scheduled to spend the next two days. “They were hawks!” Salter declared. “Hawks!” I asked him how he knew. “Did you have your binoculars out?” I said. “I’ve seen them before,” Salter, a native Iowan, told me, with a trace of faux exasperation. “Hawks!”

For a campaign that has a lot of ground to cover between now and Tuesday, the atmosphere on the plane over the past few days has been pretty upbeat, even jovial at times. Senior aides insist that McCain’s chances are better than the polls suggest. But that’s not the only reason for the smiles. The end of what has seemed like the longest campaign in history is finally in sight. Steve Duprey, the plane’s resident funny man, has been handing out his stock of unofficial McCain swag, including “Country First” coffee cups and McCain chocolate bars. “No milk chocolate left folks,” he said yesterday. Coming back to talk to reporters, Salter, at times, has had the air of a high school senior on the verge of graduation. He’s been handing reporters his BlackBerry to show off a picture of his house in Maine, where he plans to retreat after this, even if McCain wins. “Five days,” he said last night. “Five days.”

Running against any other GOP candidate, the state of Arizona would be a natural battleground for Barack Obama, alongside other western states that lean towards him, like New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. But with John McCain as the Republican nominee, a serious push to win Arizona was off the table.

Until now.

Obama’s senior aides are intrigued by several late polls that show a narrowing of the presidential contest in Arizona. Most recently, a Cronkite-Eight poll on Tuesday (for Arizona State University and the local PBS affiliate) showed the state a statistical tie, with the Arizona senator just two points ahead of Obama. That poll suggests Arizona is too close to call, with Obama making significant gains among women and independents.

The campaign is now seriously examining a late surge into the state. That may include ramping up TV advertising, on-the-ground staff, or even deploying the candidate to stop there. Obama is scheduled to make a western swing late this week, making an Arizona visit possible.

According to Pollster.com’s averages, Arizona is a six-point race in McCain’s favor, compared to Pennsylvania – McCain’s best hope of picking up a blue state – which is an 11-point race in Obama’s favor. That means Obama has more reason to travel to Arizona than McCain does to Pennsylvania, no matter how far-fetched it once seemed to try to win McCain’s home state.

Six days out, John McCain still hasn’t brought up Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, but the GOP nominee appears to be ratcheting up his attack on Obama’s ties to 60s era radical Bill Ayers and, in the process, picking a fight with the media. It all started Tuesday, when the McCain campaign called on the Los Angeles Times to release a video it had mentioned in a story published last April, which described a 2003 banquet honoring Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor and Palestinian scholar who has been highly critical of Israel. The story, which was about Obama’s friendships with Palestinian Americans in Chicago, quoted from a speech Obama gave at the event, in which he talked of his friendship with Khalidi. The paper reported it had viewed a videotape of the dinner provided to it by an unnamed source.

Five months after the story was published, talk of the videotape resurfaced in blogs and subsequently in a McCain campaign release yesterday calling on the paper to release the tape. McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb accused the paper of “intentionally suppressing information that provide a clearer link” between Obama and Khalidi. “The election is one week away, and it’s unfortunate that the press so obviously favors Barack Obama that this campaign must publicly request that the Los Angeles Times do its job—make information public.”

This morning, McCain took it a step further, telling a radio station in Miami that Ayers also attended the event and implying that the Times was guilty of a double standard for not releasing the tape. “The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public,” McCain said. “I’m not in the business about talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet. I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.”

Less than an hour later, Sarah Palin, at a rally in Ohio, echoed the talking points. “Maybe some politicians would love to have a pet newspaper of their very own,” she said. “In this case we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there’s a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in kowtowing, then the LA Times, you’re winning. But it’s not too late, and if there is an ounce of credibility there, if the newspaper wants to keep that shred of credibility, let alone its dignity, than I say the public has a right to know. Let’s go to the videotape, LA Times.”

It’s unclear where McCain got the information that Ayers may also be connected to the video. That detail has not been published anywhere. Asked about where the candidate had gotten the information, a McCain senior adviser talking to reporters on the plane this afternoon simply repeated the call for the Times to release the video.

For its part, the Times, in a story published today, said it had promised its source that it would not release the video. Citing criticism from the McCain camp that its decision was somehow tied to protecting Obama’s election chances, the paper pointed out that it was the first news organization to even report on the video. 'The Times is not suppressing anything," said Jamie Gold, a Times readers representative. "Just the opposite. The LA Times brought this matter to light."

Spotted in the McCain audience today in Miami: a large plastic banner that read "Stop Socialism. Vote McCain."

George W. Bush may be a no-show on the campaign trail for John McCain, but his little brother isn’t. Jeb Bush is on the stage this morning with McCain at a small rally at a lumber yard in Miami’s Little Havana. It wasn’t long ago that Jeb Bush was rumored as a possible 2008 contender, and he’s still very popular today, especially among South Florida’s Cuban community. When the former Florida governor arrived on stage this morning, the crowd on hand cheered wildly, as much (if not a little more) than they did for McCain. Also on hand today: Gov. Charlie Crist, looking VERY tan as always; and Sens. Mel Martinez, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.

McCain will be in Florida all day today before heading to Ohio this evening, where he’ll launch a statewide bus tour tomorrow. Florida is among a handful of states that voted Republican in 2004 that McCain is desperately trying to hold onto this time around. Yet McCain’s schedule here isn’t built around rallies where undecided voters will be able to see him. This morning’s event was a small ticketed event, attracting a crowd of a few hundred or so. Later, he’ll go to Tampa for a national security roundtable, and then to a so-called “Joe the Plumber” event at a sign company in West Palm Beach.

McCain aides have long said their guy won’t attract the big crowds that Barack Obama gets. (They are leaving that up to Sarah Palin.) But their strategy these final days seems to be centered on getting images of McCain on local television talking to small groups of “real” people. Indeed, the McCain campaign again played the Barack Obama as celebrity card in a new ad out today, timed to Obama’s 30-minute ad tonight set to air on TV. McCain aides felt the “celebrity” attack brought their campaign within striking distance this summer. We’ll have to see if it works again.

One of the earliest questions about Obama’s self-styled new kind of politics was how he could stay above the fray and yet still land apunch. For most of this election, his campaign has simply switched between positive and negative ads, mixing the two enough to avoid seeming too nice or too nasty.

Then there are the rare moments when the campaign manages to do something new: running a negative ad that sounds like it could be positive, as it did Wednesday.

It’s no coincidence that the hybrid ad’s subject should be something Team Obama has only approached gingerly until now: Sarah Palin. To be precise, the subject of the new ad “His Choice” is John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. And its goal is to highlight both McCain’s lack of economic expertise and Palin’s lack of qualifications.

How do you do that without sounding mean? The unusual feature of the ad is that it contains no voice until Obama approves the message at the end. It has none of the spooky music associated with attack ads. Indeed the guitar and piano soundtrack to the ad is faintly upbeat.

The ad asks a lot of its audience: they have to read McCain’s quotes about his own lack of economic knowledge and his suggestion that he might pick a veep with such expertise. But the punchline is a striking visual snippet: Palin winking at the camera in the vice-presidential debate.

You might never know you’d watched a negative ad. It might not be a new kind of politics, but it is a new kind of attack ad.

In the final stretch of a presidential campaign, geography is strategy. So what have we learned so far from Obama’s final swing?

He delivered his closing arguments in Ohio, where the race either remains tight or, per the new LA Times/Bloomberg poll, there is now a 9-point gap in his favor. Then he moved to Pennsylvania, which the Obama campaign sees as McCain’s futile attempt to steal a blue state. Polls there give the Democrat a lead ranging from 7 to 13 points.

Then the real prize: two stops in Virginia on Tuesday. First in Harrisonburg, in a packed gym at James Madison University, where there were 8,000 inside and another 12,000 outside (some of them banging on the doors,chanting ‘Let Us In!’). Then on to Norfolk, at the baseball field at Harbor Park. Obama’s guest for the flight between the two towns: Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, one of his earliest endorsers and one of the leading contenders for the veep position that Joe Biden was handed.

Back at Obama headquarters in Chicago, Virginia is the state to watch next Tuesday night. “Where did we go the first day after becoming the nominee?” asked one senior Obama aide. “Virginia. We always believed Virginia was key to this. Remarkably, our opponent didn’t take Virginia seriously until about two weeks ago. He lives there and his campaign headquarters are there.”

The current polls put Obama ahead in Virginia by between 2 and 11 points. If the Obama campaign is correct, we could find out the direction of election night soon after 7:00pm, when polls close in the Old Dominion. If it’s a squeaker in Virginia, then much of the polling data will look spectacularly wrong.

Barack Obama's opening lines weren’t exactly vetted by his policy team, especially those working on climate change.

Then again, the event wasn’t fully vetted by his advance team either. Whose idea was it to hold an outdoor rally in Chester, Pennsylvania, on a cold October morning in the driving rain?

“A little bit of rain never hurt anyone, although I got to say, I saw Ed Rendell backstage and his teeth were chattering,” Obama began,referring to the Pennsylvania governor. “This is an unbelievable crowd for this kind of weather. If we see this kind of dedication on Election Day, there is no way that we’re not going to bring change to America.

“By the way, I notice that a couple of you have signs saying Stop Global Warming. This is probably not the weather to hold up those signs. I’m not a fan of global warming either, but it’s a little chilly today.”

Given the miserable weather, you’d think Tuesday morning would be a good time to curtail the candidate’s speech. Wrong! With just seven days to go, the Obama campaign is driving its message every single day. Come rain or more rain.

Launching into a riff on McCain’s tax plans, Obama once again tied his rival to President Bush. “John McCain has ridden shotgun as George Bush has driven our economy toward a cliff, and now he wants to take the wheel and step on the gas,” he said.

Clocking in just shy of 30 minutes, Obama delivered a full speech with Prompters, and the rain seemed to have no impact on the electric power lines to his lights or sound system. It only seemed to affect his wardrobe; after the event, the candidate returned to his hotel to change into dry clothes for some local TV interviews. His press corps stayed under a tent in a muddy quad in the center of Widener University.

The size of the crowd? 9,000 devoted and drenched fans. 

Heading into the final week of the campaign, every second of a candidate’s schedule counts. That’s why it seems a little strange that John McCain has been spending so much time driving lately. On Sunday, he spent more than two hours driving from event to event in Ohio. Yesterday, his commute time added up to more than three hours, including an hour drive from his campaign plane in Allentown, Pa., to an event in Pottsville, and then another hour from Pottsville to Hershey, where he’s holding a joint rally with Sarah Palin this morning. It’s not that driving is anything new to McCain. Back in the primaries, McCain spent a lot of time driving through Florida and South Carolina on his Straight Talk Express, but he was often multitasking, talking to reporters. In Florida last week, he spent a leg of his bus tour between Daytona Beach and Sarasota doing interviews with local reporters. But the past few days, it’s been only McCain and his advisers on the bus. Campaign aides argue the drives are necessary since not all campaign stops are close to an airport where his plane can land. But is it a good idea for a candidate to spend so much time commuting from stop to stop with so little time left on the clock before Election Day?

Sure, the numbers are impressive. 100,000 people in Denver, 50,000 in Fort Collins. And that was just Sunday.

But the energy of even the smaller crowds in Ohio and Pennsylvania on Monday was ear-splitting. In Canton, an all-ticket audience of 4,900 was so pumped that they screamed even when there were no applause lines in sight. When Obama walked on stage, the crowd cheered so wildly that the candidate had trouble calming them down so he could start reading from his teleprompter. "I'm so grateful to all of you for taking the time to be here today," he finally managed to say. At which point, the crowd screamed their lungs out.

In Pittsburgh, later in the day, the Penguins' hockey arena was filled with more than 15,000 of the kind of supporters that were a feature of Obama's nomination-winning run of primaries in February. They cheered his extensive thank yous at the start of the speech, and they roared when he opened his speech like this: “Pittsburgh, I have two words for you: one week.” Oratory, it ain't. “We are one week away from bringing change to America,” he continued. The crowd’s response: “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!"

At this rate, complacency isn’t Obama’s biggest challenge. Crowd control is.

John McCain woke up this morning in chilly Cleveland, Ohio, a state he desperately needs to win eight days from now if he is to have any chance of making it into the White House. With polls here showing him running essentially even with Barack Obama heading into the final week of the campaign, McCain spent the morning trying to shore up his economic credentials in a state that has been particularly hard hit by the nation’s financial meltdown. Appearing before a group of supporters and volunteers (including many out-of-staters here working on the senator’s behalf), McCain went after Obama’s economic policies, tying him to Democratic leadership back in Washington.

“This election comes down to how you want your hard earned money spent. Do you want to keep it and invest it in your future, or have it taken by the most liberal person to ever run for the Presidency and the Democratic leaders who have been running congress for the past two years—Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? This is a dangerous threesome,” McCain declared. It’s a line of attack that McCain and his supporters have been pursuing more heatedly in the final days of the campaign, slyly reminding voters that if Obama wins, Washington will be under one-party rule, with Democrats in control of the White House and Congress. Several McCain advisers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, of McCain’s closest friends, believe it’s a winning argument for McCain—that voters prefer a divided government. (Indeed, McCain's "threesome" line this morning was a big crowd pleaser--perhaps a little too much, considering the subsequent giggling among some members of the audience after the fact.)

Perhaps the most interesting part of the event wasn’t what McCain said, but rather who he stood there with. Lined up behind McCain was what the senator described as his team of economic advisers, who included several people who came VERY close to joining the GOP ticket. There was Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and onetime McCain rival who stood behind the nominee; and Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO and possible California gubernatorial nominee whom McCain has come to trust as one of his closest advisers. Even Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty showed up, a dark horse candidate among McCain and his inner circle right up until decision day. Eyeing the scene, you couldn't help but wonder: How would the race be different if McCain had picked one of these three as his running mate?

Not too long ago, these folks were, as the McCain campaign might say, the biggest celebrities in the world. Network TV crews staked out their homes. Reporters scrutinized their every public statement for clues about the double super secret VP selection process. Then one day, it was over. While Romney still travels with an adviser, Pawlenty has gone back to being the solo-traveling governor whose lack of entourage sometimes led reporters to mistake him for one of McCain’s campaign advance staffers. This morning, Pawlenty was spotted in the lobby of McCain’s hotel handling his own bags, surrounded by Republican faithful who either didn’t know who he was or just didn’t care. After the event, the small pool of reporters who travel with McCain in his motorcade were waiting for the senator to board his vehicle outside the hotel’s front door when they spotted a tall dark-haired man making his way in between the vans out into the street. It was Pawlenty, alone, hailing his own cab to go back to Minnesota.

Ten months ago (a half-life in this presidential campaign)Barack Obama delivered his first closing speech. It was a week before the Iowa caucuses, in downtown Des Moines, and victory still seemed improbable.

Now Obama is delivering his final closing speech–this time in Canton, Ohio–and his aides are touting his consistency with his previousspeeches. “The themes are the same,” says one senior Obama aide. “A lot will be familiar to you.” Translation: there’s not much new here.

Is that true? To find out, it’s worth looking back at Obama’s first closer in Des Moines to see where he started.

Back in December, the senator talked extensively about the immediacy of the election. “I chose to run in this election–at this moment–because of what Dr King called ‘the fierce urgency of now,’” he said. “Because we are at a defining moment in our history.”

The defining moment, echoing FDR, was the running theme of that speech–a useful way to prod his supporters to show up and actually vote.