Sexism sneaks in over open mic

Popularity: 28% [?]

Well, it took just two weeks to get our first broken promise from President-elect Obama. After campaigning on the promise that “no lobbyists will find a job in my administration”, President-elect Obama appears to be having a change of heart. While he and his staff have laid down rules to keep lobbyists from working in their lobby field, we find this to be an attempt to get around the campaign promise since those rules were not disclosed before the election.- Campaign-Promises Staff

Obama softens ban on hiring lobbyists

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | November 12, 2008

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama, who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” said through a spokesman yesterday that he would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.

Obama’s transition chief laid out ethics rules – which also bar transition staff from lobbying the administration for one year if they become lobbyists later – and portrayed them as the strictest ever for a transfer of presidential power.

But independent analysts said yesterday that the move is less than the wholesale removal of lobbyists that he suggested during the campaign – and shows how difficult it will be to lessen the pervasive influence of more than 40,000 registered lobbyists.

“That is a step back and there is no other way of seeing it,” said Craig Holman, who lobbies on governmental affairs for the watchdog group Public Citizen. Nonetheless, he said, Obama is still making “a very concrete effort to avoid what I consider a potentially corrupting situation.”

Obama, who promised to change how business gets done in Washington, railed against lobbyists in the upper ranks of rival John McCain’s campaign.

The Democrat also refused to take money from federal lobbyists, and lobbyists will be banned from donating to the transition, which is expected to involve 450 employees and cost about $12 million, $5.2 million of that from taxpayers. The remainder is to be raised privately, with a $5,000-per-person contribution limit and a ban on donations from corporations and political action committees, as well as lobbyists.

“Barack Obama has pledged to change the way Washington works and to curb the influence of lobbyists,” John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, told reporters. “We are announcing rules that are the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”

To reinforce that point, Obama’s camp office also issued statements from two Washington think tanks often at ideological odds, which praised the rules as tough and bold. Podesta said staff members who lobbied in the last year won’t be allowed to work in their field in the transition and will have to cease all lobbying while they are part of the transition team. He said he would have “more to say” later regarding details about rules for lobbyists in the administration, apparently including whether such people could be hired immediately to work in areas on which they have not lobbied.

During his campaign, Obama declared: “I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race. I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.”

That left unclear whether he was referring to the relatively small number of staff members in the West Wing or to the hundreds of political appointees throughout an administration. Obama’s campaign website said a lobbyist could join the administration as long as he or she didn’t work on “regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” He also proposed that political appointees be prohibited from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of the administration, if they left government.

During the campaign, Obama’s anti-lobbyist rules weren’t ironclad. His staff included some lobbyists, though his aides said they stopped all such activities once they joined the campaign full time. He accepted fund-raising help from lobbyists registered with states and took money from associates and family members of federal lobbyists.

Brian Pallasch, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said yesterday that members of his organization grew weary of being pummeled by both presidential candidates. Invoking the right to present their case to lawmakers, thousands of lobbyists represent millions of Americans, Pallasch said.

The change of administration and the prospect of dividing up billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street firms and to stimulate the economy are bound to create more business for lobbyists, he said.

Pallasch said that many lobbyists have expertise on an issue that would prove helpful in improving the efficiency of the large and complex federal government. “They can use that knowledge to make the government better,” he said. “I don’t think that should necessarily be seen as a negative thing.”

Podesta said yesterday that he has heard complaints that Obama’s policy would leave “all the people who know everything out in the cold.”

“So be it,” he said. The American public expects Obama to carry through on his campaign pledges “so that the undue influence of Washington lobbyists and the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist,” said Podesta, who was President Clinton’s chief of staff in the final two years of that administration.

Podesta, in a wide-ranging update on the transition 70 days from the inauguration, said that Obama would like to begin naming Cabinet nominees as soon as possible, but would take the time needed to make the right choices.

He reiterated that Obama wants to provide aid to the troubled auto industry, but said no decisions have been made. Congress may meet next week in a lame-duck session and consider whether to approve an economic stimulus package and more aid to automakers, but it is unclear whether Republicans will support the measures. If Republicans balk, the matter will be held over until after Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration, when Democrats will have a larger majority in Congress.

Podesta also said that Obama has no plans to meet with foreign leaders at a global economic summit in Washington this weekend, hosted by President Bush. “We have one president at a time, and it’s important that the president can speak for the United States at the summit,” Podesta said.

Material from the Associated Press was also used in this report.

Popularity: 100% [?]

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama wants to renew the U.S. commitment to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to his national security advisers.

The Obama team believes the Bush administration has downplayed the importance of catching the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist because it has not been able to find him.

“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority,” Obama said during the presidential debate on October 7.

But tracking down bin Laden won’t be easy.

In May, al Qaeda released an audiotape featuring bin Laden. But U.S. intelligence officials say they haven’t had a solid lead on the terrorist mastermind’s whereabouts since late 2001, when he was nearly captured in a battle with U.S. forces near Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he’s talked to “a dozen CIA guys who’ve been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don’t know.” Watch the hunt for bin Laden ¬ª

Intelligence officials believe bin Laden is hiding in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, a remote and primitive region with mountain peaks as tall as 14,000 feet (4,270 meters) that make the terrain difficult to navigate.

“If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie ‘Deliverance,’ multiplied by a factor of 10, that’s really what you’re focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,” said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan.

The region is divided up by tribes, some of them warring. Developing human sources in the area has been extremely difficult. See a timeline of bin Laden’s terror messages ¬ª

“What you literally need to have is an army of individual informants, hopefully focused on the areas that you think bin Laden is most likely to be hiding in,” said Grenier, now a security consultant with Kroll.

“But again, you need to have a whole lot of them because one individual who may have access to the families and the clans in a particular valley, if he goes to the valley next door and starts asking questions, he’s probably gonna end up dead pretty quickly.”

The U.S. government is offering a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture, but officials who have worked in the region say the people living there would consider it dishonorable to take the money.

The United States has had some success killing al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan using unmanned drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, but those attacks have killed innocent civilians as well, complicating the political situation between the two countries.

Obama plans to send more troops into Afghanistan to push back the growing Taliban insurgency, but experts warn there could be severe consequences.

“The president is going to inherit the problem the Soviets had roughly 15 years ago during the Soviet jihad. You cannot tame the people in the North-West Frontier Province and on the border in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora Bora.

“The only army that has been successful has been Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde. They cut off heads and killed everyone in the villages, and since we have self-imposed rules of warfare, we are not going to do what they did.”

Cooperation from Pakistan’s military has been touchy, and most experts agree finding bin Laden is just not a priority for Pakistan’s troops.

Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden. Intelligence officials do not believe he is playing an operational role and so has no reason to move around or communicate.

“I think it’s important to understand that bin Laden had his chance at martyrdom. He was in the mountains of Tora Bora, he ran away. In my opinion, I think we ought to promote this,” Fury said.

He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he’s relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him.

Despite the challenges, many experts agree it is important to capture bin Laden.

“I don’t think the American people will accept him surviving and us leaving. We will be the laughingstock of the world,” Fury said.

Popularity: 62% [?]

WASHINGTON ‚Äì In one of the economy’s darkest hours in decades, it looks as if people are taking Barack Obama up on his exhortations for hope and change. Seven in 10, or 72 percent, voice confidence the president-elect will make the changes needed to revive the stalling economy, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday.

Underscoring how widely the public is counting on its new leader, 44 percent of Republicans joined nearly all Democrats and most independents in expressing that belief.

The poll shows trust in Obama’s ability to succeed is even broader, at least for now. Sixty-eight percent said they think when he takes office in January, the new president will be able to enact the policies he pushed during his presidential campaign.

“I don’t think one person, the president or otherwise, can fix the problems,” said Ryan Anderson, 31, a Democrat from Bloomington, Minn. “But I have strong faith that he’ll assemble the right group of individuals to address the problems. I think that’s going to be a benchmark of Obama’s presidency.”

People signaled a willingness to wait on one of the keynotes of his agenda — tax cuts. Only 36 percent said they wanted Obama to make income-tax cuts a top priority when he takes office, and even fewer wanted higher taxes on the rich to be a primary goal.

Instead, 84 percent said strengthening the economy and 80 percent named creating jobs as top-tier priorities. Democrats were a bit likelier than Republicans to say each should be a No. 1 goal.

With Obama ending the GOP’s eight-year hold on the White House under President Bush and about to become the first black president, the AP-GfK poll showed three quarters saying the election made them feel hopeful, six in 10 proud and half expressing excitement. Newly elected presidents often embark on a honeymoon period in which the public has highly positive feelings about them.

Democrats were far likelier to feel upbeat, yet such feelings were not limited to them. Half of Republicans said they were hopeful, a third proud and nearly a fifth excited about the election results. Another quarter in the GOP said they were depressed.

“I feel let down by the American people that they were so blind to many things I’ve seen in him,” said Shelli Pierson, 38, a Republican from Elmira, Ore. Pierson she doubts Obama, a four-year senator from Illinois, has enough experience for the presidency and said she still questions his patriotism.

Nine in 10 said Obama’s race would have no impact on his ability to get things done.

Though Republicans were more negative about the election results, they were consistently more upbeat than Democrats were in 2004 when their candidate, John Kerry, failed to unseat Bush. Forty-four percent of Democrats said they were angry and half said they were depressed in a November 2004 AP-Ipsos poll, double the GOP’s rates this year.

Highlighting anew how the Iraq war has faded as a paramount public concern, only half in Tuesday’s AP-GfK poll said they wanted Obama to make a U.S. troop withdrawal a top focus.

The survey also spotlighted the enduring partisan split over the war. Two-thirds of Democrats want a troop withdrawal to be a top Obama priority, compared with just three in 10 Republicans.

In a November 2004 poll before the economy crashed, Iraq and terrorism were most mentioned as the issues they wanted Bush to make his top priority. Until the weakening economy overtook Iraq as the No. 1 problem on the public’s mind nearly a year ago, Obama’s pledge to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from the war was his highest-profile issue.

Six in 10 cited stabilizing financial institutions and reducing budget deficits as top goals in the AP-GfK survey.

Half said they wanted national health care coverage — another Obama priority — to be a No. 1 concern, with few Republicans agreeing it should be a top goal. Permitting offshore oil drilling, a major GOP campaign issue, drew support as a top priority from just over one-third, mostly Republicans.

Nearly three-quarters ‚Äî including most Democrats ‚Äî said they’d like Obama to name some Republicans in his Cabinet, as the Democrat has said he would do.

Most also expressed no problem with the lock Democrats will have on Washington beginning next year. Four in 10 said Democratic control of the White House and Congress will be good for the country while another 2 in 10 said it would make no difference.

Thirty-six percent said the country is moving in the right direction, about double the 17 percent who said so in last month’s AP-GfK poll. Reflecting the election results, half of Democrats now see things heading the right way ‚Äî quadruple their number who said so in October.

Bush and Congress remained mired in awful ratings, with 28 percent approving of the job Bush is doing and 21 percent approving of Congress.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Nov. 6-10 and involved cell and landline telephone interviews with 1,001 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

___

AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

Popularity: 64% [?]

PITTSBURGH – The meteorologists tell us that Wednesday morning in southwestern Pennsylvania’s largest city will be crisp and sunny with a high of 64. That’s about all we know. Being a weather forecast, it offers nothing about the political climate that will have been created by the election the day before.

The outlook is obvious but often overlooked: In a deeply divided nation, on the first dawn after we choose a new leader, every ray of victory’s sunshine brings a corresponding thundercloud of defeat and bitterness.

“There are going to be a whole bunch of people who are distraught and who won’t know what to do ‚Äî no matter which side wins,” says Chris Ivey, 36, a Pittsburgh filmmaker and ardent Barack Obama supporter. “People will try to go back to their routine, but there’s going to be a lot of soul-searching to do.”

On Wednesday, roughly half of Americans will awaken to find that the horse they backed disappointed them. That presumes we even have an immediate result; don’t forget 2000, when America had to wait more than a month.

Jokes about moving to Canada
Yet there is, in the national conversation, surprisingly little talk about not accepting the winner if things don’t go your way. Sure, some Democrats joke about moving to Canada, but gauging the severity of responses on the day after is a gauzy exercise in tarot-card reading that even television’s loudest mouths rarely discuss.

While the spectrum of possible morning-after reactions runs from water-cooler grousing to partisan lawyering to violence, the depth of sentiment this year — more impassioned, many say, than even the last two elections — could make for a bumpy ride, particularly if the results are close.

This is, after all, the culmination of a political season that saw people weeping at rallies, schoolchildren taking sides and, in one case, a teenager getting shot after trying to remove a sign for John McCain from an Ohio lawn. As David Gergen, a White House adviser during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations and now a CNN analyst said on air a couple of weeks ago: “We’ve got a country now that we’re sneering at each other across cultural lines.”

Will blacks, craving a victory that could offset the albatross of American racism, accept a negative outcome? Will Christian conservatives who got so energized about Sarah Palin reject the system and grow isolated if she’s sent back northward? Will “real America” accept a victory by “Eastern elites,” or vice versa? How will Hillary Rodham Clinton’s supporters ‚Äî and the Clintons themselves ‚Äî emerge from it all?

And the question no one wants to articulate: Will anyone unhappy with the outcome resort to uglier methods of registering disapproval?

Ask around and you’ll find partisans casting about to figure out how they’ll cope with an undesired outcome.

Nation above politics
If Obama wins, says southwestern Virginian and McCain backer Steve Nagel, he’ll put nation above politics. “I’m not going to do anything to undermine him,” Nagel said last week at a Palin rally in Salem, Va., “I’ll support the country.” Nearby, though, Julie Thornton of Roanoke expressed trepidation at Democrats’ reaction should McCain prevail. “I’m hoping they’ll be civil,” she said, “but I’m worried.”

On the same night a couple hundred miles south, at a rally for Joe Biden in Greensboro, N.C., Obama backer Maureen Mallon wasn’t as sanguine. “If we don’t get this one right, we ain’t ever going to get it right,” she said.

‘Catastrophic problem for me ‘
“Honestly, we’ve got a plan,” Mallon said. Her husband looked at her and nodded. “I’ve got family in Ireland,” she said. “I don’t feel a part of my country if McCain wins.”

Passions are high, too, in the second-largest city in divided Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is full of neighborhoods where geography doesn’t necessarily dictate political stripe. It’s not uncommon to see intersections like the one in the city’s Morningside neighborhood, where McCain and Obama signs face off across the street from each other in a silent political High Noon. That means that come Nov. 5, someone’s going to wake up agitated.

“I can’t imagine the level of despair we would feel,” said Kyra Straussman, 45, of Pittsburgh, an Obama supporter who works in real estate. “Let me put myself there for one minute: McCain is president. Catastrophic problem for me in every way you could think about it ‚Äî culturally, spiritually, financially.”

John Hinshaw, a historian at Lebanon Valley College in central Pennsylvania, sees a couple things that could dictate the aftermath of Election Day ‚Äî one aggravating and one mitigating. He says that many people profess after the fact to have voted for the winner even if they didn’t, thus leavening the strong reaction.

Perception of unfairness is problematic
But if voters perceive unfairness, which can happen in both thin margins and landslides, that can be a serious problem. “People can say, `It’s not my president. It’s your president,’” he says. “And that’s the kind of stuff that can really weaken nation-states.”

Lebanon Valley is one of three institutions doing a study this year on the emotional intensity of the election, comparing people’s expectations to their reactions afterward. A similar study done for the 2000 election showed that people who expected to be inconsolable if Al Gore lost actually felt OK when it happened.

“We have tremendous powers to make it seem to ourselves like it turned out the way we thought it was going to,” said psychologist Michael Kitchens, who is co-leading this year’s study.

If, in the end, Americans are having trouble reconciling their feelings on the morning after, we might consider Return Day, a tradition in Biden’s home state of Delaware.

On Thursday, candidates for office — winners and losers — will gather and ride down the streets of Georgetown, Del., together before thousands of people to show that divisiveness need not endure after the election. They even bury a symbolic hatchet.

“All the ill feelings and harsh remarks, all of that is buried in there, and everybody agrees to put aside their partisanship and work together,” says Debbie Jones, one of the organizers. “It’s something everybody could use.”

Reality or wishful thinking, that’s part of America’s self-image as a land of strong competitors who, in the end, draw together to move forward.

“I respect the process at the end of the day. That’s the best part about it,” said Kevin Bierschenk, 31, a Republican and a telecommunications project manager in Herndon, Va. “Good losers,” he said, “are just as good as a good winner.”

Popularity: 29% [?]

On Tuesday the nation’s fretful, hopeful voters will finally have their say, and none of the rigorously calibrated polls or demographically incisive analysts out there can tell us with any certainty what will happen.

Will one candidate win by millions, or lose by thousands? If there is a clear victor, will he be the first black American ever elected to the presidency, or the oldest American ever to win a first term?

We don’t need to know the answers to be certain of this much: no matter the outcome, it will be the climax of one of the most extraordinary presidential elections in this nation’s 232-year history, and “the first” and “the oldest” capture only some of what has made it so remarkable.

Whether judged by the milestones reached, the paradigms challenged, the passions stirred or simply the numbers — the 85 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track, or the record-demolishing $640 million fund-raising mark that Barack Obama passed by mid-October — the election of 2008 actually warrants the sorts of adjectives and phrases that are often just journalistic tics: epochal, pivotal, historic, once-in-a-lifetime.

It’s been so rich with precedent and incident — and so very, very long — that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times. In these final hours there’s some sense in pausing, pulling back and taking the broad measure of a contest that’s sure to affect not only this country’s civic life but also its emotional and psychological landscape for some time to come.

Much of its impact boils down, yes, to race and gender, Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin, who could become the nation’s first female vice president.

In this fiercely waged election, longstanding barriers were challenged and toppled, at times to the seeming surprise of the person doing the toppling.

Think back. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Iowa after his victory in the state’s caucuses last January, he was not yet the favorite for the Democratic nomination, and he was a long way from becoming the general-election frontrunner.

In videotape from that night, you can see and sense an astonishment and exhilaration — in him, around him — that seem almost quaint just 10 months later.

“They said this day would never come,” he tells a euphoric Iowa crowd, and not just his eyes but the whole of him twinkles, gleams. “They said our sights were set too high.”

While he’s talking specifically about himself and his campaign troops, it’s impossible not to hear in his words a statement about all minorities in America, for whom the week-by-week, month-by-month advance of his candidacy would hold an especially powerful message.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed that as Mr. Obama’s quest for the presidency caught fire, “I knew, for the first time in my life, that it would be a good year to be black.”

“Consider this fact: the most famous black man in America isn’t dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone,” Mr. Coates continued, in a recent essay for Time magazine. “He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words.”

‚ÄúWords like hope, change and progress might seem like na?Øve campaign sloganeering in a dark age,‚Äù Mr. Coates further wrote. ‚ÄúBut think of the way those words ring for a people whose forebears marched into billy clubs and dogs, whose ancestors fled north by starlight, feeling the moss on the backs of trees.‚Äù

Over the course of a campaign that was part therapy session, part consciousness-raising seminar, a few of the principal players took on meanings much, much larger than themselves. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton became vessels for the aspirations and frustrations of entire classes of aggrieved Americans. Their journeys encouraged the airing of hurts and the discussion of difficult issues.

In Philadelphia in March, Mr. Obama delivered a set-piece speech that sought to do nothing less than explain centuries of racial enmity and move Americans past it. In New Hampshire in January, Mrs. Clinton welled with tears that became catalysts for a charged examination of the treatment of women in American life.

Was sexism more potent than racism? This was the sort of impossible question raised on television shows and in newspapers, at restaurant counters and kitchen tables, revolving around Senator Clinton in winter and spring, Governor Palin in summer and fall.

For many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters she was Everywoman, called on to prove her toughness without wholly abandoning her softness, asked in the end to yield once more to an ambitious, impatient man. Come Tuesday, will these supporters be haunted anew by what might have been? And will they be haunted more by an Obama victory or an Obama defeat?

How will some younger voters react if Mr. McCain prevails? Or some older ones if Mr. Obama does? In recent weeks, the ire and ugly catcalls of some supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket have suggested a division in this election that goes well beyond tax policy or Iraq strategy.

There’s more generational, cultural and stylistic difference between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, ages 72 and 47, than between rivals in most presidential contests over the last half-century.

Bill Clinton and the first President Bush were three years closer in age, and while Mr. Clinton’s victory marked the ascension of baby boomers, Mr. Obama’s election would be emblematic of something more profound: that the multicultural, postracial society so often discussed in the news media but so seldom affirmed in public life was now, literally, the face of our nation. Mr. Clinton was Fleetwood Mac. Mr. Obama is India.Arie.

Candidates in many past presidential contests lacked life stories as compelling as those of Mr. Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas, and Mr. McCain, who endured years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.

But these two weren’t the only vivid characters in a campaign that, purely as narrative, proved sensational.

Who would have believed, at its start, that Mike Huckabee was going to outlast Rudy Giuliani? That John Edwards’s pledges of support for his seriously ill wife were going to give way to a public apology for infidelity?

That Mr. Obama would choose a running mate who once described him, in terms of plausible aspirants to the White House, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean?” That Mr. McCain would choose a running mate who could field-dress a moose and would take the stage at the Republican convention with a pregnant, unwed teenage daughter in tow?

Perhaps that’s one reason voters paid such close attention. In any case, the 2008 election contradicted any and all claims that Americans were alienated from politics.

Although cable news was supposed to be moribund, programs devoted to politics got some of their best ratings in years. “Saturday Night Live” sailed temporarily into prime time on the winds of political parody. An average of about 34.5 million viewers a night tuned into the Republican convention, versus 22.6 million in 2004. For the Democratic convention, viewership rose to an average of 30.2 million from 20.4 million four years ago.

“We’re seeing record levels of interest in the campaign,” said Michael P. McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor at George Mason University who studies voting patterns. Mr. McDonald cited evidence like new voter registration and responses in polls that asked how interested in the election voters were.

And he extrapolated from that to predict turnout of 64 percent, which would be the highest since 1908, when, he said, 65.7 percent of those Americans eligible to vote did. He said that just under 64 percent voted in the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, adding that 2008 turnout could top that.

One of the most striking measures of voters’ engagement has been Mr. Obama’s fund-raising, built in large measure on small donations made over the Internet. The final total may well exceed $700 million. In the 2004 election, the presidential candidates combined raised $684 million before their conventions, after which President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry took public financing.

Only Mr. McCain did that this time, and as a condition has had to limit his spending between the convention and Election Day to $84 million. Mr. Obama broke an early promise to take public financing and thus evaded such limits. He spent $21 million on television advertising alone during one week in October.

If Mr. Obama wins by a wide margin on Tuesday, that victory will reflect more than strides in race relations, thirst for change and the strength of his appeal. It will also reflect the power of money, and it could usher in the end of general-election candidates participating in the public financing system.

An Obama victory could redraw the political map, patches of red becoming blue or at least purple, swaths of the South no longer conceded to Republicans from the start.

So many other assumptions have been upended already. A black man with an exotic-sounding name wasn’t supposed to flourish in an overwhelmingly white state like Iowa, but Mr. Obama beat Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton there by 8 percentage points.

Someone who failed to win Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, New York and New Jersey wouldn’t seem to be on a successful path to the Democratic nomination, but Mr. Obama was.

He hasn’t fit neatly into the usual paradigms, and that could manifest itself in some way in Tuesday’s voting — if this election, like the 1980 race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, will reveal some new political dynamics and yield some new political alignments.

Are we still the center-right country we’ve heard so much about over the last decade? Mr. Obama’s success even to this point calls that into question, just as Mr. McCain’s triumph in the Republican primaries raises doubts about the putative sway of religious conservatives within — and beyond — his party. The 2008 election suggests an evolving body politic, not a palsied one.

Then again it’s hard to tell, because what may ultimately be most extraordinary about this election is its context. The country is facing what is widely regarded as the greatest financial crisis since the Depression, and that’s not just election-season hyperbole. America is fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And its claim to global leadership is being undercut by Russia, which defied the will of the West in invading Georgia last summer, and China, which staged an Olympics that was the envy of the world.

The 2008 presidential election stands out from so many before it, and will have repercussions for so many after it, because it’s a decision about who can guide us through the worst of times. We’re in trouble if we get it wrong. And maybe even if we get it right.

Popularity: 35% [?]