When the news broke of Obama’s victory, his young staffers couldn’t hold back any longer. After almost two years of toiling for a campaign known for no drama, they punched the air and openly wept. There were around 240,000 people gathered in and around Grant Park, just a few minutes from their campaign headquarters, but this was unlike any other big event in the long presidential election of 2008. This one was, as the staffers kept repeating to each other, unreal.

If their feelings were unbelievable, so was the crowd filing through in front of them, within minutes of the networks declaring Barack Obama president-elect. There were the political elites that have worked with and for Obama: Rahm Emanuel, his likely chief of staff, Bill Daley, the former commerce secretary, and Howard Dean, the DNC chair whose 50-state strategy was largely vindicated by sweeping national gains on Tuesday. There was Kerry Washington, the talented young actress who starred in The Last King of Scotland and Ray. Then there was Oprah Winfrey,the queen of talk show TV, who helped lift Obama’s campaign when it most needed support, as it tried to reach new voters in the depths of an Iowa winter.

As for the president-elect himself, his opening words seemed to answer the very sense of unreality felt by those who have worked so closely with him for the longest campaign.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he said, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

En route to Phoenix on his last flight on board his Straight Talk Air, John McCain came back and said goodbye to the traveling press who has been tracking him for more than a year. It was the first time McCain had visited the press cabin in months, and prior to his arrival, aides asked that reporters not ask questions, that the candidate really only wanted to come back and say farewell. Walking into the back cabin, McCain was stoic, insisting that he was “feeling good, feeling confident about the way things turned out.”

He wasn’t emotional but you couldn’t say the same about others on the plane. Standing at his side, his wife, Cindy, smiled but had tears in her eyes. Behind him, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, two of McCain’s best friends, were equally emotional, their eyes wet with tears. “We’ve had a great ride, a great experience and it’s full of memories that we will always treasure,” McCain told reporters. ‘We’ve spent a lot of time together…We’ve had a great time. I wish you all every success and look forward to being with you in the future.”

McCain skipped many of his election rituals, including watching a movie. For the past several hours, he has been holed up at his Phoenix condo, watching returns with his family and friends. Shortly before 10 p.m. EST, McCain and his entourage arrived at the Arizona Biltmore, the hotel where he is set to address supporters shortly.

John McCain just voted. Accompanied by his wife, Cindy, his sons, Jack and Jimmy and his adopted daughter, Bridget, the GOP nominee went to a local church near his Phoenix condo and participated in his civic duty. On television, it will probably look like a relaxed, calm setting, as most political events do. But the scene was total chaos: local reporters screaming and cursing at each other trying to get the shot (Think “Eddie Murphy Raw”); Secret Service, which looks to have doubled in numbers today, trying to control the crowd. Reporters weren’t allowed to go inside to watch McCain vote—It’s against the law here in Phoenix—so the campaign positioned the press pool at windows looking into the room. As McCain moved to drop his ballot in the box, one photographer almost went through the glass window trying to get the shot. This reporter would like to say this is unusual behavior on the campaign trail, but in truth, it’s not.

McCain looked like he was in a good mood. Already, something a little out of the ordinary has happened. The candidate who once used to talk to us all the time, but stopped, was spied pacing his condo’s balcony this morning before he went to vote. Eleven stories below, the press pool was watching. This reporter and a Newsweek photographer waved to see if he would respond, and low and behold, he did, before going back inside. Shortly, McCain will head out for last minute campaigning in Colorado and New Mexico before hitting up his election party in Phoenix tonight.

After the storm, the crowds. At the last rally of his presidential campaign – more than 600 days after he announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois – Barack Obama gathered around 100,000 supporters to Manassas, Virginia.

He was uncharacteristically late – more than an hour, in fact – after bad weather in North Carolina delayed his departure. On board that delayed flight, the press corps was buzzing with wire photos of the candidate crying through his comments about his grandmother. From the press area, Obama’s tears were not visible. Seen from the press buffer close to the stage where the photographers work, his public emotion was as striking as it was rare.

So he began his last rally – in the DC suburbs that one of McCain’s advisers described as lying outside the “real Virginia” – with a profound thanks to his crowds. All the tens of thousands who have waited for him for hours in so many battleground states in the general election, stretching back to the primary states at the start of this long contest. 

They had enriched him, he said, and lifted him up when he was feeling down. Now it was time to vote, and to work to turn out the vote, no matter what the weather tomorrow. No matter how hard it rains. 

So what better note to end his final rally than the classic South Carolina tale of the state representative who taught him how to be Fired Up and Ready to Go? His Virginia audience barely needed the chant and call. But the candidate thrived on it, at a late hour of a long campaign, when he sorely needed some firing up.

It was raining before Barack Obama walked on stage in Charlotte, North Carolina. The crowd in the field behind the University of North Carolina was still moving in, snaking through the security barriers round the car park and beyond. A slight rain rapidly turned into a drenching, heavy downpour.

On this, the third rain-soaked event of Obama’s final week of the election, there was the saddest of news: his 86-year-old grandmother passed away after losing her struggle with cancer.

Madelyn Dunham was more than just Obama’s grandmother. She was a surrogate mother for many years, while he lived in Hawaii and his mother remained in Indonesia. She was above all a strong figure who held the family together, with a pioneering career as a female executive in a Hawaii bank and a steady emotional presence in a deeply unconventional family.

She was also the last parental figure in Obama’s life, since his own mother and grandfather passed away several years ago. In a joint statement with his half-sister Maya, Obama described her this way: “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment,strength and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and lef tthis world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.”

John McCain just arrived in Indianapolis, otherwise known as stop No. 4 on his seven state, 22-hour campaign extravaganza leading into Election Day. So far, there hasn’t been much big news today. McCain is delivering pretty much the same stump speech he’s been giving for the past week or so, hitting Obama as the “redistributor in chief” and talking up his own cred as someone who would enter the job with decades of experience, especially on foreign policy. What’s interesting are the little things. For one, McCain, like many candidates in the final heat of a campaign, is losing his voice a little bit. That’s bad news for the folks for the several hundred people who met him at an airport rally here. Not only are the acoustics pretty bad, but the McCain gathering seems to be positioned directly under the flight path for incoming planes here. So far, four massive jetliners have flown directly over McCain’s head as he has been speaking, making it almost impossible for folks on the ground to hear. That may not be the best news for McCain, who is struggling to keep Indiana from going blue. Polls here show McCain virtually tied with Obama heading into Tuesday. Even so, McCain hasn't spent much time here. Today's visit was only the third time McCain has been in the state since the spring.

It’s been a long final swing of the presidential campaign,and everyone – from the candidate down – is exhausted. In Barack Obama’s forward cabin on his plane, the lights are frequently turned off during afternoon and evening flights, to allow him to sleep.

But even on the morning of the last full day of the election, the fatigue creeps in.

In Jacksonville, Florida, Obama started his final stop to this critical state – the one battleground that troubles Obama’s senior aides more than any other – with yet another arena rally.

Although the arena was only two-thirds full, the crowd was boisterous. When one group of supporters shouted to him about having voted early, Obama said, “Thank you for your vote!” The cluster of fans went wild.“All right y’all,” he said. “Settle down.”

Maybe Obama was too calm for his own good. “After 21 months and three debates, John McCain still has still not been able to tell you, the American people, a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” he began on a familiar riff.

“The Republicans are spending a lot of money on ads here in Ohio. But if you watch those ads, you don’t know…”

At which point, the crowd in Florida started booing loudly enough to stop him mid-flow.

“Florida,” he corrected himself. “I’ve been traveling too much. They’ve been spending a lot of money in Ohio too!”

And just to prove that he knew where he was – that this wasn’t a Bob Dole moment – Obama threw in a quick reference to the city too.“And let me tell you Jacksonville, you have to ask yourself is there one different thing that you’ve heard in these ads, that would tell you what he’d do for the economy in the future?”

Obama’s aides must be relieved their candidate is only campaigning in three states today – not McCain’s seven – before returning home to Chicago.

It’s hard to believe, but the end is in sight. With Election Day less than 24 hours away, John McCain will hit nine cities and seven battleground states today in a grueling schedule that will have the candidate and his entourage on the road for the next 22 hours. After a midnight rally in Miami, last night, McCain this morning flies to Tampa and then is scheduled to continue on to rallies in Bristol, Tenn., near the Virginia border; Pittsburgh; Indianapolis; Roswell, N.M.; Las Vegas; and will end up in Prescott, Ariz., where he will hold a midnight rally on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse, the place one of his political heroes, Barry Goldwater, began and ended his own presidential campaign. From there, McCain will head home to Phoenix, where he is set to arrive around 4 a.m. EST. Yet McCain won’t get to sleep in. Ignoring his usual Election Day rituals of seeing a movie and awaiting the results, the candidate will likely be back on the road early Tuesday, when, after voting, he is tentatively scheduled to hold last-minute rallies in Colorado and New Mexico. He’s tentatively scheduled to be back in Phoenix around 7 p.m. EST—around the time polls begin closing in Indiana and Virginia, two GOP strongholds that threaten to turn blue this election. It’s unusual to see a presidential candidate actually campaigning on Election Day, but McCain’s advisers continue to insist the race is tightening even more than what public polls suggest. Speaking to reporters on the plane last night, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, repeated a line he and other aides have been using in recent days. "We are in striking distance," he declared.

Four years ago, Bruce Springsteen traveled to Ohio to play an acoustic set for another Democratic nominee. His gig, at Ohio State University in Columbus, wasn’t without trouble. The power failed and the set was delayed for an hour. The crowd was a respectable, but not overwhelming, 25,000.

This time around, Springsteen has been playing free gigs without the candidate—until he returned to Ohio on Sunday night to appear onstage with Barack Obama. The crowd size: a much more impressive 80,000. His final song before bringing the Obama family on stage: "The Rising," which has become part of the soundtrack at each campaign rally.

The night wasn’t without problems. It started raining a few minutes into Obama’s speech, soon after he started poking fun at Dick Cheney’s endorsement of John McCain. “Sunshine is on the way,” he promised metaphorically. “We’ve got just two more days of these clouds.”

Still, Obama seemed not to care much about the weather when it came to his mood. After traveling with his family for the last 24 hours, the candidate seemed more upbeat than he has at most other events, where he normally warns his supporters against complacency.

“The last couple of days, I’ve been just feeling good,” he said. “And part of the reason that I’m feeling good is that because sometimes it’s lonely on the road. But when you’ve got a wife like Michelle Obama, when you’ve got daughters like Malia and Sasha Obama, and when they’re with you on the road, boy, everything looks a little better.

“The crowds seem to grow and everybody’s got a smile on their face. You start thinking that maybe we might be able to win an election on November 4th.”

Some final clues about what the Obama campaign will be watching for, and worrying about, on election night. The Democratic candidate is spending most of the penultimate day of the election in Ohio: first with 60,000 Buckeyes in Columbus, then with Bruce Springsteen in Cleveland, and finally in Cincinnati.

Columbus and Cleveland are Democratic strongholds in the state. Kerry won Franklin County around Columbus by 9 points in 2004; and he won Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County by 34 points.

But Cincinnati was Bush Country in 2004, where Kerry lost by 5 points in Hamilton County. To end the day in the corner of Ohio where Republicans need to rack up votes is a clear challenge to McCain’s base in the state.

After a late-night flight south, Obama wakes up on the final full day of campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida. That lies in Duval County,which Bush won by 16 points four years ago. From there he makes a big play for the South – Charlotte, North Carolina, and finally Manassas, Virginia.

The symbolism of ending election eve in Northern Virginia is irresistible to the Obama campaign.

At the start of this final week, Obama visited Harrisonburg, at the western side of the state, where he noted that the last Democratic presidential candidate to visit the town was Stephen Douglas in 1860. At the next event, in Norfolk, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said he believed a Democratic candidate could win Virginia for the first time in 44 years, since LBJ. Either Obama hopes to take Virginia out of the confederacy or he hopes to turn back the clock to a time before Nixon and Reagan.

The latest NBC/Mason-Dixon polls split all four states, with the numbers well within the margin of error. In Ohio, McCain is up by 2 points;in Florida, Obama is up by 2. In North Carolina McCain is up by 3 points; in Virginia, Obama is up by 3.

That means Obama could easily lose them all, although his senior aides say that Florida is the big prize that concerns them most. On the other hand, an early win in Virginia could spell a sweeping victory for Obama on Tuesday.

You’ve probably heard by now that Sarah Palin this week was unwittingly duped into taking a phone call from a guy claiming to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy when in fact it was really a Canadian comedian well known for pulling pranks on celebrities and other well-known politicos.

So how exactly did that happen? According to a senior McCain aide, the caller made initial contact with Palin’s advisers by first calling the governor’s office in Alaska. The call had been routed through France, and the comedian used the name of one of Sarkozy’s top aides, which suggested the phone call was legitimate. “He did all the right things,” this aide insists. The message was passed on by Palin’s aides back in Alaska to the McCain campaign and was ultimately routed up the food chain, ending up in the hands of Steve Biegun, a former National Security adviser to President Bush, who is now one of Palin’s top aides. Seeing no warning signs, Biegun and other top McCain aides signed-off on the call, and the rest is history.

Privately, McCain aides see the phone call as more of an embarrassment for the staff than for Palin—after all, it’s up to the staff who gets to talk to the candidates and who doesn’t. But that may be lost on voters who already have doubts about Palin’s experience and readiness for the office.

UPDATE, 4 PM EST:

A second senior McCain aide clarifies what exactly the campaign knew about the call. According to this aide, none of McCain’s top staffers were aware of the call between Palin and the fake Sarkozy until after the fact. The call was routed from Palin’s Alaska office directly to the advisers working directly with the GOP VP hopeful, and they made the decision to initiate contact without notifying other members of McCain’s senior staff. Upon word of the fake-out, the campaign’s upper echelon organized a conference call yesterday afternoon with both McCain and Palin senior aides to discuss how to handle. According to one participant, who declined to be named, aides went back and forth venting their frustration. “Does anyone not think it’s strange that the French president would want to talk to a candidate in the final 72 hours of the campaign,” one senior McCain aide demanded, noting that the White House and the National Security Council would likely be involved in any such phone calls. “It’s appalling.” Bigger picture, the episode provides a glimpse at what have been increased tensions between the McCain plane and the Palin plane in the final weeks of the campaign. Aides have pushed back in recent days against stories that all is not well between the two camps, but it appears that may not be exactly true.

There has been a flurry of news stories on this final weekend of the epic 2008 election, and everyone – inside and outside of the campaigns – is trying to figure out what impact they might have.

Such things are hard to assess except in hindsight. So it’s worth looking back four years ago, to where we stood so close to the Bush-Kerry contest.

On the Saturday before the election, Osama bin Laden released a new video in which he claimed that American security lay not in Kerry or Bush’s hands, but in the hands of voters to end the war on terror. Kerry’s aides later blamed the video for their ultimate defeat.

This time around, the stories that have emerged include the illegal immigrant status of Obama’s half-aunt, and Dick Cheney’s late endorsement of John McCain. Neither has the impact of the world’s most wanted mass murderer. Neither speaks to any voters beyond the base of supporters who already support McCain and Obama.

And inside the Obama campaign at least, there’s no sign that the numbers are moving anywhere.

The Gallup polls on November 1, 2004, showed an even split in the battleground states and a national race that leaned toward President Bush by just two points. In Wisconsin Bush led by 8; in Minnesota Kerry led by the same margin. In Iowa Bush was up 2, and in Pennsylvania he was up by4. In Florida Kerry was up by 3, and in Ohio he was up by 4.

Of those six states, the only two correct results were Kerry winning Minnesota and Bush winning Iowa. The lesson: in the tightest battleground races, the margin of error is a meaningful measure. This time around, those states include Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, Florida and North Carolina.

This weekend, Gallup’s tracking polls have remained remarkably consistent. Gallup has three sets of numbers – registered voters, likely voters based on an expanded turnout, and likely voters based on traditional turnout. On Saturday, Gallup showed Obama up by 11 points among registered voters, and 10 points in both models of likely voters.

Perhaps the most remarkable Gallup number of all: 27 percent of their sample has already voted. At the current rate, by Election Day that figure will be somewhere around 40 per cent. That means last-minute stories have far less impact in this cycle than they did four years ago.

John McCain is in Virginia this morning, kicking off the final weekend of the campaign in a red state that is threatening to turn blue. It’s worth noting that he’s in what his campaign has referred to as “real Virginia”—Newport News—but we’ll be flying from here to Springfield, a suburb of Washington, D.C., for his final rally in the state before Election Day. From here, we will spend the rest of the day in Pennsylvania before heading to New York City, where McCain will appear on Saturday Night Live tonight. Details are still being worked out, but, according to a senior McCain adviser, the candidate will almost surely appear in a skit with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.

Tomorrow, McCain spends part of the day in Pennsylvania before heading to New Hampshire, where he’ll hold his final town hall of the campaign in Peterborough, a place that McCain regards as something of a lucky charm. He held his first town hall meeting there during his 2000 campaign and wound up there on the eve of his comeback primary victory earlier this year. It’s “where our campaign has been rescued and resurrected many times before,” Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, told reporters yesterday. Yet privately, McCain and his aides are unsure if it will be as lucky this time around. Down by 13 points in the state according to poll released yesterday, McCain and his aides view his stop there as more nostalgic than game changing. Indeed, a senior McCain aide says the candidate and his advisers have gone back and forth in recent days about whether the stop was time well spent in the final hours of the campaign. Also of great debate: Whether it was a good idea for McCain to take questions from voters, that could risk sending the candidate off message, or simply hold a rally. His aides were split, but in the end, McCain himself made the call: He would do a town hall.

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.