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.

Gov. Sarah Palin's future is secure. She's a genuine grassroots sensation and will remain one. Too bad that John McCain, the man who made her a star, isn't prospering with her. In fact, despite her nice turn on "Saturday Night Live," she has turned toxic for the McCain camp.

Palin's cheery good looks-and her gun-toting, Bible-thumping small town conservatism - electrified the Republican convention and temporarily transfixed the "mainstream" media.

But her drawbacks have become painfully clear. For a variety of reasons, she has sent wavering Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans scurrying to Sen. Barack Obama - even as she has failed to substantially expand Sen. John McCain's support, even among the ranks of self-described  conservatives.

Is it over? And if we think so, do we say so? And if so, how do we say it? These were some of the questions that Michael Calderone, who covers the media for Politico, asked me the other day. He’s a good reporter, and the questions were the right ones.

My essentially weasely but honest answer was: Barack Obama’s chances obviously are better than 50-50, if for no other reason than he has led (with only a brief exception) from wire-to-wire in the national polls. Candidates who have done that have won.

Obama has been the default setting, if you will, from the start and nothing that John McCain has done so far has changed that fact. From that first cold day in Springfield, Ill., this election has always been about Obama.

But what impresses me--and should give Obama himself pause as he considers a possible victory--is that this race is far closer than it should be. Consider:

• The economy is headed for its worst recession since the Great Depression and most Americans now know that, even if they have not lost their own jobs.
• Studies show that the party that controls the White House loses if the economy grows at less than two per-cent in the year before Election Day--and the economy right now is shrinking.
• McCain’s Republican Party brand is in ruins thanks in good measure to the current GOP president, who is fin-ishing his term as one of the most unpopular chief executives in history.
• The war in Iraq, which McCain supported, is widely seen as a horrendous mistake. His neo-con foreign policy is in disrepute.
• Obama is spending four times as much on advertising as McCain, and has pioneered new methods of voter education and outreach on the Inter-net that McCain cannot match.

I’ve been talking to some plugged-in moneymen who own a company distinguished by several virtues: it’s based in the less volatile Midwest and a Scotsman runs it. They dumped real estate years ago and never got involved in the derivatives craze.

So they are worth listening to, and what they told me was sobering--words the next president needs to hear, and realities the two contenders aren’t fully acknowledging. There’s a smattering of good news, but most of it is pretty grim. A summary:

• Unemployment in the U.S. could reach at least 10 percent in the next couple of years. That is a powerful and politically explosive number. The highest post-war percentage was 10.8 in 1982, just before a mid-term election that decimated the GOP in the House. Other post-war highs include 8.8 percent in 1975, during the dismal Gerald Ford Interregnum; and 7.7 percent in 1992, a few months before Bill Clinton wiped out President George H.W. Bush. The point is that whoever winds up in the White House will have to brace himself for the unpopularity that comes with rising unemployment-not to mention the extra burdens that could be placed on the federal budget by extended unemployment pay.
  
• High unemployment means a tough recession, which, in turn, means a global economic slowdown, the extent and duration of which is hard to predict. America will muddle through, so will Europe as will the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, known collectively as the BRICs. It’s the smaller, poorer and newly “democratic” countries that will suffer most, with difficult-to-forecast political consequences.

This presidential contest is down to a clash of two “effects:” the Bradley Effect and the Facebook Effect.

Let me explain.

Yes, there are white voters, especially older ones, who will hide their prejudice until, alone in the voting booth, they vote against a black candidate because of his race. That apparently happened to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who was ahead in the final polls for California governor in 1982 but lost the election.

Depending on the poll, the difference was perhaps 6 percent. No one knows how big that “Bradley” number right now. There may be some Bradley voters lurking among Obama’s supporters, but it’s more likely the Bradley types are hiding among the allegedly undecided.

If you are a white person 50 years or older and you say you are still undecided, my guess is that you probably are not going to vote for Obama---or maybe (if Obama is lucky) you won’t vote at all.

But this year there is another force at work: young voters, especially those under 30. Most of them are more or less oblivious to race in their political thinking. They have grown up in an integrated world. Or, if they do take race into account, they like the fact that Obama is a mixed-race African-American with an international background.

Obama is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to organize and turn out these young voters, many of whom got con-nected to his campaign through social-networking sites such as Facebook.

Now he has to turn them out---make them do something in real space as opposed to digital space. Pollsters do not have accurate “turnout models” for this new cadre of voters. Obama has registered millions; how many will actually vote remains to be seen.

Here in Nassau County on Long Island, where last night’s debate was held, will be a good test of the two effects. Many voters here are first- or second-generation refugees from New York City, and some racial calculations were at least a small part of their decision to migrate.

But there are several colleges here (Hofstra being one) and a new generation of students and young voters who have been drawn by Obama (and, earlier, by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) to register.

Bradley or Facebook? We’ll know soon enough.

 When you cover a presidential campaign, you never know where you will find a useful data point. I just found one in a series of email exchanges with my best friends from high school days in my hometown of Pittsburgh.

This will take some explaining—be patient—but here is the bottom line. We took a vote of our old club (plus a few wives, girlfriends and prom dates who frequent our email list) and, by a stunning 9-1 margin the group voted in favor of Sen. Barack Obama.  (I and the other professional journalist in our group abstained.)

Here is why that the results are worth noting: I think they signal that non-Orthodox Jews, a crucial constituency in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, are going to vote big time for Obama—far more enthusiastically than published polls suggest.

A recent national survey sponsored by the American Jewish Committee found that 57 percent of Jewish voters supported Obama, compared with 30 percent for Sen. John McCain, with 13 percent undecided. (The Orthodox, a small but fervent minority of a minority in the United States, overwhelmingly support McCain).

If that 57 percent figure holds, Obama will do 12 percentage points worse among Jews than Sen. John Kerry did in 2004. Among the non-Orthodox (approximately 90 percent of the four million Jewish Americans), the survey found little difference based on age.

I think the numbers are low. If my friends are any indication, and I think they are, Baby Boomer Jews will turn out in droves for the Democratic nominee. And if they do, their children will, too.

The question is why.

That requires knowing a little more about my old friends. We were a tight-knit lot, devoted members of a social and athletic club with a comically grandiose French name, the Marquis. (I don’t think we had heard of Lafayette, let alone de Sade.) We were students at Taylor Allderdice High in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. There were a couple of fairly rich kids among us, and a couple whose families labored in the lower middle of the middle class. But no one struggled, and no one put on airs.

We went through junior and senior high from 1960-1966—before the earth caught fire in our college years. At Allderdice, few of us smoked; few of us drank. In our personal lives there were no divorces (that I can remember). Families were as solid as the soot-blackened stones that held up the Allegheny River bridges.

Our parents, for the most part, were not scholars by trade or social activists. This was Pittsburgh, after all, not New York. But they wanted us to get the best education. Allderdice was one of the finest public high schools in the country, a pioneer in the use of AP classes. And our folks weren’t ignorant of social change.

The dreams fired by that superb education—and the job-draining collapse of the city’s steel-based economy—sent most of us elsewhere to live, work and rear our own families. (We’re the ones waving Terrible Towels when the Steelers visit our adopted towns.)

But by far the biggest contingent of Marquis expats is in California, with most of the rest elsewhere in the Sunbelt. Of the 25 of us who survive (out of 29 originally) only five live in Pittsburgh.

What kind of work do we do? As I count it, there are six businessmen (plus one of us who cops to being a mortgage banker), five lawyers, three doctors, a dentist, a computer programmer, a social worker, a federal bureaucrat, a charity fundraiser, a cantor, one guy whose occupation is “loafing” and a farmer—yes, a farmer.

Of the 21 Marquis who voted for a candidate in our little survey, 18 were for Obama, two for McCain and one for libertarian-independent Bob Barr. The tally was 18-3, plus 9-0 among the women on the list, for a grand total of 27-3.

Why?

At this point I want to turn the Marquis gavel over to Howie Gordon, the club’s most charismatic, committed leader. Naturally, he tends the email list and conducted the survey. A writer and father of three, he and his wife, Jeremy, have lived since for decades in Berkeley, California.

One factor, Gordon and his wife suggested to me in an email, was personal and particular to our little group. The Marquis had forged a strong bond and had maintained it across the continent and the decades. Their communal dialogue “has not been about advancing their careers or fortunes,” she said. “It’s basically sentimental, heartfelt, loving. The kind of people interested in such a thing, probably tend to be more idealistic, more prone to hope.”

It’s just my guess, but the advent of Gov. Sarah Palin and her backwoods evangelism may not have helped the GOP cause with my fellow club members.

The rest of the explanation, Howie said, was generational.

“We were the children of the generation that won World War II,” he wrote me. “We are the children of what was a rising and successful middle class...who were so free of the daily struggle just to eat and have a roof over our heads that we actually had the luxury of being able to care about the lives of people less fortunate than ourselves.

“We were weaned on the Nuremberg Trials,” he continued, “ and taught that there was a right way and a wrong way to live in this world.

 “We came of age with the American civil-rights movement and understood the simple correctness of Martin Luther King in seeking to lead his own people to social justice, just as Moses had once led ours.

 “And you ask, `Why Obama? And, ‘why now?’ Well, let’s just say, it’s been a long time comin’, the way I see it.”

Maybe it’s the crisp fall weather. Maybe it’s that the top local football teams are playing out of state or not at all. But whatever the reason, this is Pennsylvania Weekend in the 2008 presidential race. And it is the last time, as I see it, that the campaign will focus intensively on my own Keystone State.

Why? Because, barring some as of now unforeseeable “October surprise,” Barack Obama and Joe Biden are about to put Pennsylvania away--frustratingly out of reach once again for Republicans who have been yearning to take the state for the first time in 20 years.

It’s almost certainly not going to happen.

This weekend, all of the presidential players are where they should be: Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain in the West and the rural “T” (the wooded Appalachian hills and coal towns between and surrounding Pittsburgh and Philadelphia), while senators Obama and Biden work the East, especially the big, vote-rich suburban counties near Philly and, in Biden’s case, up in his famous first hometown of Scranton with the Clintons in tow. In the campaign’s last days, the strategy is as plainly visible as your travel schedule.

It has been the GOP’s hope--and Karl Rove’s dream--to win Pennsylvania by focusing on cultural issues (abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, evolution and the like) in the “T” and in the Roman Catholic-dominated old mining and mill towns of Western Pa. It is a strategy that helped produce GOP victories for Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder, but it hasn’t worked since 1992, when Bill Clinton took the state and established a close working relationship with the current governor, Democrat Ed Rendell of Philly. Rendell was for Hillary in the primaries, but that was bound to change once Obama wrapped things up and shrewdly chose Biden (a semi-Philly guy, being from Scranton and nearby Wilmington, Del.) as his running mate.

The easy explanation for why Obama is ahead by 14 points in the average of state polls in Pennsylvania is that the collapsing economy has trumped culture-war issues. As blue-collar workers watch the collapse of the auto industry, so the story goes, the deer hunters and anglers in economically depressed Appalachia forget culture and remember their Democratic Party roots.

But the “Deer Hunter” explanation is dead wrong. The real reason why Obama is so far ahead is that there is a new Pennsylvania--a new Pittsburgh having joined what became a new Philly long ago. The economy is not devastated in Pennsylvania right now any more than, say, Massachusetts--with which it now shares many characteristics. Pittsburgh is a college and research town; the Philly suburbs, once the home of the old GOP establishment, long ago took their tolerant attitudes into the Democratic Party.

As America awaits the start of the second presidential debate, it occurs to me that we are missing the real story of this presidential campaign. To be sure, it’s about the economy, stupid, and the temperament of the candidates, and taxes, health care and the war. But it’s also about organization. If Sen. Barack Obama wins, the reason-as much as any other-will be a superb ground game.

Obama was not very successful as a “community organizer” in the Chicago housing projects, but he adapted whatever he learned-and whatever knack he was born with-to build an innovative, lavishly financed and meticulously-run outreach machine.

From text-message signups to email-based organizing-to the hordes of young staffers deployed in force to swing states-Obama has focused to an unusual degree in modern campaigning not on broadcast TV advertising but on real-life, person-to-person contact.

He is hoping not only that his medium is his message-personal testimony to his ability to bring the country together-but also that his voter-identification work will yield results on Election Day.
The central (but by no means only) target of all of this organization: turning out younger voters, that is, those between the ages of 18 and 30.

But I got sidetracked reading the Chicago history of Abraham Lincoln, the only president “from” that city. He often rode up from Springfield to handle major cases, and he built his political base there from 1847 to 1860, when the new Republican Party, meeting in an oversized wooden wigwam, nominated him for president.

And that made me ask myself some questions. Is there any reason, other than the lean frame and knack for giving good speeches, to compare the two men? Is there any reason to see in Obama a Lincoln-like ability to unite a “house divided’ in our perilous times? Is that even a fair question to ask or comparison to make?

I feel justified in asking because Obama himself begged these questions when he launched his candidacy February a year ago in front of the Old State House in Springfield. He didn’t lay the Lincoln references on thick, but he didn’t have to. Even I could hear the historical echoes. It was in that building, exactly a century and a half earlier, that Lincoln had committed himself to the cause of excising the cancer of slavery from our body politic.