Here’s all you need to know about Sen. Barack Obama and his campaign. He taped the video portion of his half-hour TV special, which airs across your dial at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, last week.

Now, a week is a year and a year is a lifetime in presidential campaigns. But it is characteristic of Obama to plan ahead in the heat of the battle. The cool, collected senator has known from the start (nearly two years ago) pretty much what he has wanted to say. He kept his eyes on the prize. The small stuff didn’t distract him.

That is why his campaign and its staff, which I have checked in with twice in the last week here in Chicago, remain relatively calm as they head into the final lap of a national NASCAR race that has not quite turned into the rout that history and other factors would lead you to predict.

By all accounts and by all odds, Obama is fairly comfortably ahead in the Electoral College—which, as Al Gore will tell you, is what matters.

On TV Wednesday night, Obama will give what one aide described to me as a “meaty” discourse on his basic tax and health-care proposals. No high-flown rhetoric, but rather a briefing paper for wary undecided swing voters---most of whom, the campaign thinks, are “soft Republicans” who kind of want to vote for Obama but need reassurance.

And yet, in the meantime, Sen. John McCain has not quite disappeared in the rear-view mirror.

I find that astonishing. And, if you are in the Obama campaign, you have to find that at the very least a teeny bit troubling in these last days.

Let me repeat the following litany, just for the sake of wonder if nothing else:

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. The job performance rating of the outgoing Republican president is at Nixon-Carter levels. Nine out of ten voters think the country is off on the wrong track. The Democrats lead in the generic congressional preference vote by a double-digit margin.

Obama has outspent McCain on TV advertising three or four to one (though McCain is matching him in some key states here at the end). Obama has four thousand paid organizers in key states, an unheard of number. Most voters think that McCain’s running mate is not qualified to be president. Many people wonder aloud if McCain is in fact too old (72) to be president. Much of the media coverage of Obama has been fawning to say the least, and with good reason. He is one of the most winsome, charismatic candidates to have appeared on the scene in decades.

Still, in today’s “traditional Gallup” Daily Tracking Poll (the one that screens likely voters most rigorously, based on past votes), Obama leads McCain by only two percentage points, 49 to 47 percent.

Here in Chicago, they say that they expected a close race at the end, as one staffer put it. They are steady as she goes on ad spending, and they are fighting the end game on Red State turf, which is what the frontrunner does. They scoff at the idea that McCain could win Pennsylvania, and they are almost certainly right about that.

It’s hard to make the Electoral College numbers add up for McCain. He has to win all of the current tossup states (Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida), plus Ohio and Virginia and one of the following three: New Hampshire, Colorado or New Mexico. That isn’t just drawing one inside straight; that’s
drawing a whole casino’s worth of them.

Why hasn’t Obama run away with this?

Because the country remains culturally divided. Because the more it looks like Democrats will score huge gains in Congress, the more worried “soft Republican” voters get. Because McCain has succeeded, in the minds of some of those voters, in raising the hoary specter of “tax-and-spend” liberals. Because Obama hails from a place (South Side Chicago) and background (the son of professional academics) more reminiscent of Democratic losers like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry than winners like LBJ, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Because some voters remember the hate-filled sound bites of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

And, to a degree we cannot measure and may never fully know, because Obama is an African-American---and one with a Swahili name at that.

There is nothing that the staffers here in Chicago can do about any of that at this point. Up on the 11th floor of the office building here, staffers are hard at work. They aren’t thinking about those things. Their campaign manager, David Plouffe, won’t let them. “We expected this to tighten,” one of them said to me a few hours ago.

And so, it seems, it has.

House Minority leader John Boehner (speaking) and other House GOP leaders said Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "partisan" speech spurred defeat of the bailout bill. (Photo: Susan Walsh / AP)
 

Well, no sooner had I written a piece assuming that Hank Paulson’s Package would become law, then the U.S. House of Representatives voted “no” in a spectacular rejection of the wishes of Wall Street, the Washington establishment and the president of the United States. It was a demonstration of democracy at its finest—or worst—depending on your point of view.

Ain’t democracy grand? Infuriating, yes. Unpredictable, yes. And grand. All the Washington powers that be and all the New York money men simply could not convince the House of Representatives—"the People’s House”—to swallow the Paulson Plan.

What happened? Here are a few of the forces at work:

Triumphant: Ali over Liston. Bettmann-Corbis

In his Senate office, on a wall near his desk, Barack Obama has a framed copy of a famous boxing picture. It is of young Muhammad Ali standing in triumph over the prostrate hulk of the aging Sonny Liston. Ali has just leveled the supposedly fearsome champ. Ali is shouting, exulting in his conquest.

Well, I know Ali a bit--have shaken his mammoth hand, chatted with him and been around him in my second hometown of Louisville. I watched him fight. He liked to say that he floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. It was more like a whole swarm. 

So, I know Ali and senator: you are no Ali.

For whatever reason (I think there are several, personal and strategic), you either don’t know how to or can’t be a closer. You can’t finish with the kind of flurry that drops your foe to the canvas. You didn’t do it to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at least Friday night here at Ole Miss, you didn’t do it to Sen. John McCain.

But here’s the question: Is a devastating puncher who we want in a president? Is that who we want in our next president?

Well, maybe not. Maybe we’ve had enough pugnacity for a while. Maybe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have given pugnacity a bad name. Maybe voters want a more peaceable style. Maybe right now they want an open hand, not another closed fist.

That’s the only reason I can think of why most of my colleagues (and, apparently, judging from the instant polls of viewers) decided that Obama had “won’” the debate here in Oxford.

On debating points--and if campaigns are boxing--McCain won. He was the sneering aggressor. He had Obama backpedaling for much of the night on foreign policy. Obama, for his part, missed several chances to counterattack, especially on the economy. Obama’s answers were strewn with annoying “ums” and “ahs” as he played for time to calibrate the least-damaging response.

Note to colleagues on the White House beat, especially any of you who are (sub-consciously perhaps) cheerleading for Obama: I predict that you are going to come to hate his press conferences; they are going to make you hunger for sound bites.

But maybe: so what? Maybe boxing is the wrong metaphor. Maybe voters are fed up with leaders who start wars without studying the possible consequences. Maybe voters are tired of the kind of presidency that blows off Congress and its critics as unpatriotic. Maybe voters are tired of my-way-or-the-highway thinking. 

Surely, this is Obama’s own calculation. His operative metaphor isn’t boxing, but bodysurfing. He is the product of Hawaii, where they learn to wait for and ride the wave. He thinks he is riding the Big Curl now: a new generation, a new demographic, a new global framework at a time when voters urgently want “change” and Obama, by default, is the only one who plausibly can provide it. 

Maybe that explains why Obama had openings in the debate and didn’t take them. The economy is the best example. Yes, I know: McCain did not use the words “middle class” and he sometimes got lost in beltway jargon about earmarks and “the DOD.”

But Obama could have leveled him. All he had to do was keep mentioning Bush, especially now. Leave it to our callow president to use cringe-inducing frat-house lingo to summarize our dire economic predicament. If there is no bailout of the mortgage-credit markets, he said the other day, “this sucker is going down.”

Obama didn’t mention this. Did he need to bother? I guess not.

He was content, also, to let McCain natter on about all the places he had been and all the world leaders he had met. At one point, McCain noted that no one--even Alexander the Great--had been able to conquer Afghanistan. I half expected the senator to brag about the meeting he had had with Alexander himself. It would have been a funny line.

Obama was secure, if not serene, in the knowledge that the more McCain talked, the more he was talking about the past--and that he, Obama, was by his very being a representative of the future. McCain was winning battles in a war that seems to have ended.

Also, Obama was being graded on a curve. McCain spoke more sharply, bluntly, and, for most of the night, more effectively. But that mattered less than whether there was a “game-changer.” Because there was not, and because Obama is ahead in the polls, you have to ultimately score Ole Miss as a miss for McCain. 

And here in Mississippi, they know something about game changers. It was called the Civil War. More than two thirds of the Mississippi men who went off to fight in it died or were wounded. The numbers from the Battle of Vicksburg alone are stunning: 10,000 dead or injured in one decisive, disastrous battle.

There was no Vicksburg-like wipeout here at the first presidential debate, on the woodsy campus of the University of Mississippi. By that measure, Obama, fighting most of the night on McCain’s turf, did enough not to lose--which means that he did enough to “win.”