Sen. Barack Obama’s day is more leisurely, with three events in Jacksonville, FL, Charlotte, NC, and Manassas, VA. His day ends around 10 p.m. CST.

Obama’s load is further lightened by the absence of a large press corps. As has been reported elsewhere, his campaign decided against adding another charter plane to the entourage to seat the dozens of journalists that typically — and understandably — hop on a campaign to report on its final days. Some have interpreted this refusal as a form of revenge on outlets that endorsed McCain; the campaign itself argues that a second plane would have slowed it down. The latter is arguable.

The second McCain plane — affectionately known as the “ass plane” — tends to be ahead of the primary plane, but any time you add another person to an entourage, no matter where he or she is traveling, you increase the possibility of delays.

We know that the Obama campaign’s decision not to add another charter wasn’t because it didn’t want to spend the money. While enormously expensive, charters are ultimately billed to news organizations.

I suspect Team Obama skipped the charter because, at this point, it doesn’t need the press to be there to write about them. Heck, at this point, it barely needs the press at all.

For all the talk of the Bush administration’s contempt for the media, and its attempts to work around the “filter” of the MSM, it’s the Obama campaign that’s all but perfected the smooth integration of the public into a message-distribution machine. From its incredible, promoting-from-without volunteer ground game to its cellphone-list-calling ventures, many of Obama’s most ambitious aides have used “earned media” (what political professionals call media you don’t pay for) as almost an afterthought.

Thus McCain’s second plane, as lucky as I feel to be on it (snarky video below notwithstanding), seems less like a luxury than another sign that the Republicans have been lapped, tactics-wise — if not according to mileage specifically.

Writing from Chicago on Sen. Barack Obama’s social network, MyBo, Amy Hamblin reports that supporters have posted a whopping 200,000 events, with volunteers steadily “blowing past one milestone after another.”  The pace of event organization has dramatically accelerated, Hamblin noted, since the campaign only passed the 150,000th event-mark about three weeks ago.

“People are stepping up every day and taking leadership in this campaign, hosting phonebanks and canvasses,” Hamblin wrote in a blog post, reporting that supporters also launched more than “27,000 MyBO groups.”

Many observers focus on the Obama campaign’s candidate rallies and large crowds, but the parallel grassroots events are a critical part of the ground game, especially in states that the candidate rarely visits.

(wdcpix)

It is a narrative two years in the making. The story of an eloquent, young man going up against one of the strongest political forces the Democratic Party has ever fielded — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the link to the party’s heyday in the 1990s — and beating her. In doing so, he attracted millions of people to his cause.

It is also the story of a young man confronting another popular, experienced politician — a war hero who promised to unite the country but whose rhetoric and tactics often seemed designed to divide it.

And it is the improbable story of the rise of a young man whose message of hope and change resonated with the yearnings of a country reeling from collapse of the housing bubble. And now it is time for the narrative to draw to a close.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

With Sen. Barack Obama’s 30-minute commercial last night, the junior senator from Illinois began his closing moment — up to this point, the most crucial of his political life. What we heard was a reflection of how he has run his campaign — showing the American people through personal stories; the problems they face, and then offering up reasonable solutions. What he did on television — sure to be mocked by the McCain campaign — was to assure the American people that they could believe not only his individual story but in the future of their national story.

This should come as no surprise. As he did during the long, drawn-out Democratic primary — methodically, steadily gaining delegates while deflecting attacks — Obama has moved with deliberation in the closing days of the campaign.

As dynamic as Obama is regarded in the popular imagination, what has gotten him here today — 15 points ahead of Sen. John McCain in the latest Pew Research Center poll — is an ability to see, with almost academic precision, how to achieve one goal, and then another.

“You can’t wake up this week and say, ‘Oh my, the election’s close,’” said David Willhelm, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager. “What goes into this week has been a year in the making. Nothing happens by magic.”

Wilhelm, who is an informal adviser to the Obama campaign, continued, “Change has been the mantra from Day One, and it will be the mantra this week. The basic narrative has been consistent since he entered this race.”

Despite Obama’s lead in national polls, as high as six percentage points in an average of 10 surveys, the outcome of the election could change. If we have learned anything from history, what a candidate does during the last days of a campaign can carry incalculable weight. Ask President Jimmy Carter about 1980.

To close the deal, Obama and his campaign must, in some ways, work opposite of one another.

The campaign’s ground forces, the likes of which this country has never seen, must make sure that the millions they helped register actually get to the polls. They have to continue knocking on doors to ensure that complacency doesn’t set in. Obama’s workers, paid and voluntary, have not traveled all this way to come up short.

As for Obama himself, he must maintain his steady, cool demeanor, which, ironically, was once viewed as a political liability. But now it has come to symbolize the candidate’s sure hand in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst for CBS. “If you look back, there have been so few incidents where he’s been drawn off message, or resorts to getting involved with the attack of the day. He responds — but he does so in a rational, not emotional, way.

“He’s almost boring,” Myers continued. “He never takes the bait. He never gets into a good side fight for a couple of days. Think how many times Clinton got off course. Think how many times McCain makes news because he has to get something off his chest. Obama never does that.”

Obama’s self-discipline has percolated to the lowest levels of his campaign. Save for the occasional wacky comment from running mate Sen. Joe Biden, the Obama campaign has been almost uncanny in its ability to stay on target and never lose sight of the goal. To those in the media, myself included, such control has been maddening.

But it has worked — and it needs to keep working in the final days. It isn’t that the media adore Obama. It just happens that we’ve covered perhaps the most well-run Democratic campaign perhaps since Lyndon B. Johnson swept into office in 1964.

To be sure, the tactical mistakes of his primary and general-election opponents have greatly served his political march to the White House. Running against Hillary Clinton, Obama and his strategists went about their separate businesses, while Clinton, who did not find her true voice and oomph until late in the season, oversaw a disorganized campaign and a strategy that paid little-to-no attention to caucus states, all of which Obama won.

McCain’s mistakes have been no less costly. Since he became the GOP nominee in September, the Arizona senator has relied on what’s amounted to parlor tricks and snarky quotes to demonize his opponent as an “elitist-terrorist buddy-socialist-redistributor” — none of which has seemed to stick, if the polls are to be believed.

More to the point, McCain began his campaign without a coherent economic vision, which has hurt him in the midst of the financial crisis. Despite months of campaigning, he will, in all probability, end the campaign without one as well.

The outlines of the campaign’s concluding week were evident in the final presidential debate. McCain flailed and ranted about Joe the Plumber. Obama came off as near-presidential. Now the young senator from Illinois has to maintain that stance while the Republican Party throws whatever it has left against the very idea of him taking the White House.

“He needs to keep reassuring people he can do the job,” said Tony Coelho, the former House majority whip, who served as general manager of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. “He does this with his demeanor, his calmness, by providing a contrast with McCain — who’s changing what he’s talking about every other day, who doesn’t seem to have a focus or message. He needs to keep pressing on home and focus on the need for change.

“If he does this, he’ll win this thing by a very big margin,” said Coelho. “But he’s also got to be very careful that he doesn’t have people saying he’s measuring drapes in the Oval Office, or isn’t working as hard. That could cause him problems at the end. But he’s been so steady. He’s been such a real workhorse this whole race. I don’t expect him to make a mistake. He doesn’t get rattled, and he simply works hard.”

The Obama campaign has been planning for the final week — as it seems to have planned for everything — for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the campaign, from the beginning, had laid out a strategy that took into account any hiccup, any change in the climate here and abroad. When suddenly pressed by the financial meltdown and the economic downturn, for example, Obama acted as if he had a folder marked “economic reckoning” in his file, and had been studying it for months. That would be the folder coming before the one reading, “If they compare you to Lenin,” a reference to former Rep. Tom DeLay’s smear on”Hardball with Chris Matthews” this week.

“Here’s the thing,” said Democratic Party strategist Liz Chadderon. “Don’t take the foot off the pedal. You don’t need a knock-out punch, you don’t need to run-up the score. But you do have to finish strong.”

Obama — as even some Republicans admit — is an exceptional politician with an incredible personal story. But now he has a chance to elevate his story, to make it worthy of history.

Throughout this presidential campaign, seasoned political analysts have marveled to me at the depth and reach of the Obama organization, conceived and orchestrated by David Axelrod and David Plouffe. A win Tuesday might well redefine America’s political landscape.

Obama began this narrative with an incredible beginning, which was surpassed by an unthinkable middle. All the young man has left to do is finish.

The Obama campaign stoked the interstate rivalry by using an online scoreboard to keep track of the score. By Sunday night, the Ohio field staff had won narrowly, with more than 385,000 door knocks:

By the time it was all over, however, the trash-talking had gotten pretty intense.

Team Ohio began jovially, uploading a taunting cartoon video promising tons of voter contacts.

Pennsylvania returned fire with star power — a video message from Nittany Lions star Lydell Sargeant, who tweaked his opponents for wasting time on videos, including the tag line “Pennsylvania: More Doors, Less Cartoons.” It did not end there.

Ohio went bigger than football — tapping Michelle Obama for a video riposte.

Obama celebrates PSU.

That’s hard to top, but Pennslyvania did with a trash-talking message from Barack Obama himself. “She knows better!” he says in the video, though unlike Michelle’s video, his was a mash-up.

While it was all in good fun, the state field operations are deadly serious.  The Obama campaign has an unusually open, empowerment organizing philosophy that encourages volunteers to feel like they are part of something much larger than their daily voter-contact goals.  That exciting, even touchy-feely vibe — from “we are the ones” rhetoric to fun contests like the door-knock contest — is anchored by a mastery of targeting and GOTV fundamentals that rivals any field operation in modern history. In other words, it’s one part Michael Whouley, one part Marshall Ganz. And it’s working.

A Barack Obama barn painting in Ottawa County, Ohio. (flickr)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A few days back, I was in the basement of the statehouse standing on a large map of Ohio, complete with its 88 counties, etched in the floor’s marble. I walked southwest and stood on Butler, a conservative red-meat county where I was born and my parents still live. It was home, or at least a representation of it. But looking over the remainder of Ohio seemed like staring at a foreign land, whose terrain, interests, habits and ways of life could be as far removed from life in Butler County as Zaire.

To really understand Ohio, you need a far-reaching anthropological knowledge that few possess. Sometimes, people “get it.” This would most certainly include the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, now engaged in an all-out assault to win the state’s 20 electoral votes.

Obama’s forces have hunkered down in every part of Ohio, including the more conservative southwest and southeast regions. That’s not what Sen. John Kerry’s team did four years ago when it focused on only the state’s three largest cities — Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus. Today, in areas where Democratic volunteers haven’t been seen by voters in a generation, the party has field offices with paid staffers numbering in the hundreds. Two weekends ago, Obama volunteers knocked on the doors of 340,846 homes. The farthest distance separating Obama field offices is 38 miles. It is an unprecedented effort to win over a highly unconventional state.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

To some, this Ohio campaign looks like a microcosm of Obama’s 50-state strategy. In truth, though, it is a strategy taken from the playbook of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, whose 2006 victory ended 15 years of Republican rule. Strickland, whose campaign manager Aaron Pickrell now heads the Obama effort here, deployed an all-inclusive 88-county strategy, as did Democrat Sherrod Brown, who won a U.S. Senate seat that year.

A series of state scandals involving GOP officials helped the Democrats — including “coingate,” in which millions of dollars from the state workers’ compensation fund were invested in rare coins. Of the $50 million invested by GOP officials, only $12 million was ever accounted for. Meanwhile, Gov. Bob Taft, scion of a celebrated Republican dynasty, was convicted while in office of not disclosing gifts from lobbyists. By the end of his term, Taft was the most unpopular governor in Ohio history, according to polls.

“Brown and Strickland ran a true statewide campaign and won, and we’re following that plan,” said Obama’s Ohio deputy communications director Tom Reynolds, who was sitting in a former church in Columbus that has been converted into the Democratic Party headquarters.

Yet Brown’s and Strickland’s statewide approach most likely will not translate into a landslide win for Obama in Ohio. While Obama leads Sen. John McCain by a slim margin, all indications are that this election will be as close as the previous two presidential contests. That’s because there are districts that will not elect a Democrat. Trust me on this. If Obama can get even a toehold in a Republican district or, at the very least, contain his margin of defeat in it, he simply has a better chance in a race that promises to be tight.

“We’ve got people running the campaign … who helped Strickland crack the code in this state,” said David Wilhelm, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “They understood you’ve got to campaign everywhere. … Strickland ran a campaign that talked about bread-and-butter issues where he spoke plainly to everyone. Sherrod ran on this idea of economic populism that is central to his image as a public servant.”

The Obama team has also adopted some of the tactics used by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,  who crushed him in the primary here.

“They’ve learned a lot from Hillary’s campaign,” Wilhelm, an informal adviser to the Obama campaign, acknowledged. “In order to win Ohio, you have to campaign in little patches and be willing to do tours of the Ohio River Valley. You can’t skip that. They’ve learned those lessons well.”

Both Al Gore and Kerry had sought to increase turnout in such traditional Democratic strongholds as Cleveland. What was missing — particularly by Kerry — was any effort to campaign in culturally conservative areas, where George W. Bush won by margins of 2 to 1.

“The biggest mistake that national Democrats make when they look at Ohio … is that Hamilton, Cuyahoga and Franklin counties account for less than 30 percent of the general election voters,” Wilhelm said. “You tell that to somebody in Washington, and they say, ‘What are you talking about? Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland –  that’s the state.’ Well, it’s not the state, and it’s not even close to being the state.”

As state Rep. Ted Celeste, brother of the former Democratic governor, told me recently: “If you look at the map, one of the things you see are the number of medium- and small-sized towns. Kerry just simply did not do a good job in counties where Bush absolutely destroyed us — the smaller counties.”

It’s one thing to use someone else’s playbook. It’s another thing to execute it. Last Thursday when I sat down with Ohio Democratic consultant Greg Haas, who ran the state campaign for Clinton in 1992, he disputed the similarities between Obama’s and Strickland’s campaigns.

Haas pointed out — correctly — the effect, or lack thereof, of having a Democratic governor in office while running for president in Ohio. While Republican George Voinovich was governor in the 1990s, Clinton won Ohio twice.  With the Democrat Celeste in office in 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won, respectively.

“The way Ted Strickland won is not the way Barack Obama will win,” Haas told me, recalling Strickland’s race against the African-American Ken Blackwell, who had become the state GOP’s darling.

“First of all,” Haas said, “race is the opposite factor here. In the small town where I grew up, where I’m from, I was stunned about how many people would say to me when I was back there, ‘I’m voting for one of your guys for the first time ever. I’m not voting for that black guy.’ And these were fundamentalist Christians, and as far as they were concerned, Ted Strickland was a baby killer.”

But Haas went on to say,”You cannot win Ohio by turnout alone. You have to run a battle on two fronts. You have to make sure you get your vote out — but you also have to convert.

“And conversion is not necessarily getting a Republican to turn over, or getting independents,” Haas continued. “It’s also running strong enough in Republican areas that you don’t motivate them to turn out. We make the assumption that every Republican votes, because so many of them do. But we’re talking about the difference between 78 percent turnout and 81 percent of the Republicans. Take that three percent away — obviously you have a significant factor in the race. For the average Republican who votes almost every single time … the day [may get] crowded, and all sorts of things are going on on Election Day. Do you feel like you just got to get out there and vote? Or, well, do you say, ‘It’s not so bad. I’ve got to go to the grocery store. My one vote’s not going to matter.’”

Gov. Ted Strickland (flickr)

While Haas takes issue with drawing parallels between Strickland and Obama, he marvels at the tactical approach the Obama campaign has taken. This includes correcting the big tactical flaw in Kerry’s Ohio campaign: He did not advertise on general broadcast radio, while Bush paid for a mighty presence on the AM dial.

This might seem trivial. But the fact is that a large chunk of voters get most of their news over the radio. These are the men and women living in the exurbs and outer rings of Ohio cities, people who travel 45 minutes to get to the office, then make the same long trek home at night. Like not putting people on the ground in GOP counties and towns, what Kerry essentially did was cede the airwaves and news cycle to Bush. In 2008, try driving in Ohio for 10 minutes without hearing an Obama ad.

“The Kerry campaign in 2004 on the ground did one of the best jobs to date,” Haas said. “It did a much better job than we did in ’92. But their problem was the Republicans did a fantastic job, and the air strike, air campaign from the national folks was flawed. What the Obama folks are doing is second to none. It is exponentially greater than any Democrat or Republican campaign has done before. They have over 500 employees, and they’ve been on the ground since June. They’ve got paid organizers in Zanesville, Ohio…”

When I interrupted by pointing out the field office in my hometown, Haas continued, “Yeah, exactly. I was a field director for Celeste in ’82. We sent in a volunteer organizer into Butler County for the final three weeks of the campaign. And no one had done that before. And we won the county — by the way. The fact is, we’ve got  level of activity on the Obama campaign that the McCain campaign cannot match.”

Should Obama win the election, it will be because his campaign sees Ohio as I did in the statehouse basement. Rather than see it as the monolithic land mass that changes color every time CNN national correspondent John King touches it, Obama’s team knows the state is more of a quilt — with each patch requiring careful tending.

Strickland and Brown knew this, and they might have shown Obama the tactics. They might have given him the path. Now he must make their terrain his own.

Obama’s senior strategists held a national news conference by telephone today, bullishly arguing that the campaign is on offense and surging in red states, while Sen. John McCain is scampering to Pennsylvania for an unlikely “pathway to victory,” as campaign manager David Plouffe put it.

Field guru Jon Carson, ticking through numbers on early voting, contended that Obama is building an early lead with new, first-time voters. In Colorado, he said one of five Democrats voting by mail have never previously voted in a general election, auguring a surge of new support.  In Nevada, early-voting data suggest an edge for Democrats, he added, where 40% of Obama’s early-vote support is from new or sporadic voters (who only vote in presidential years), while  30% of the GOP’s early-voting bloc are from new or sporadic voters.

Obama’s edge among new voters is based not only on his appeal, the aides noted, but also his persistent outreach.  Counting only live conversations as voter contacts — not voicemails or robocalls — the campaign touted its large footprint in the field:

1.3 million contacts with Florida voters since Labor Day

1.5 million contacts in Ohio since Labor Day

Currently averaging 400,000 contacts a day across the country

On pace to make 1.2 contacts this weekend in battleground states alone

Finally, the strategists emphasized that Obama’s large rallies are the ultimate organizing tool.  Citing the two events that drew 175,000 people in Missouri last week, the campaign noted that within one day of those events, the state’s field operation swiftly filled 35% of its volunteer shifts.

During Q&A, Plouffe largely demurred on strategic questions from reporters — including an inquiry about Obama’s “closing argument” from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell — while stressing his operation’s field prowess. (Another reporter asked, seriously, whether the campaign would win Florida.)

Plouffe did pivot from a strategic question to argue that at this juncture, newly converted Obama supporters may be more pivotal than undecideds because new Obama supporters seem “sticky” and look solid for mobilization.  If newly identified supporters are soft, by contrast, field operatives worry that they will end up mobilizing people who ultimately back the opponent. (That was part of Howard Dean’s Iowa collapse in 2004.)

“If anything, enthusiasm for Obama is increasing as the election draws near,” he added, because late-breaking voters are embracing the Democratic nominee.