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.