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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.