Obama Family Moments: Barack and Michelle Obama with daughers Malia Ann and Sasha.

Click here or on the photo below to see more photos

Obama fever grips Kenya: Minibuses festooned with Obama’s image ply Kenya’s roads (Fox News)

NAIROBI, KENYA – Senator Barrack Obama’s relatives have congregated at Nyangoma Kogelo village and will remain together until after Tuesday’s US presidential elections.

They have set aside a bull to slaughter in celebration should the Illinois senator whose father was Kenyan win, according to family spokesperson Mr Malik Abongo. – Daily Nation

Worshippers in Kisumu, in the heartland of Obama’s Kenyan family, on Sunday prayed for the Democrat senator’s victory in the November 4 presidential poll.

Sarah Palin, the vice presidential candidate on the rival Republican ticket, famously received a blessing earlier this year in Alaska from a visiting Kenyan pastor who claims special powers against witchcraft.

But two days before the crucial vote, Obama received the less controversial backing of thousands of church-goers in Kisumu and the surrounding region, where his 86-year-old grandmother still lives.

At Kisumu’s Baptist Church, dozens of Christian faithful sang and prayed for Obama, who has become the East African nation’s favorite son and whose White House bid has triggered a wave of enthusiasm and seen support groups crop up all over Kenya.

Raising their hands in the air, grimacing worshipers weaved their prayers into a chorus over keyboard tunes belting through a home-made woofer.

“We put Barack Obama in your hands. It is you who chooses leaders, help him in the elections so that he can win,” prayed Reverend Samson Otieno, likening the contest between Obama and Republican candidate John McCain to the biblical duel between David and Goliath.

“We will give you thanks and praise when he wins,” Otieno said.

“I am praying the will of God be done so that people do not despise Africans,” said Olivia Achieng, sweat pearling on her forehead, after an energetic prayer for her favourite candidate.

Other special prayer sessions were scheduled across the western Kenyan region in the final run-up to Tuesday’s vote. – AFP

By JOHN HARWOOD
The New York Times

If Tuesday’s election were confined to white America, polls show, Senator Barack Obama would lose.

And yet Mr. Obama’s strength across racial lines lies at the heart of his lead in the polls over Senator John McCain heading into Election Day. Remarkably, Mr. Obama, the first black major party presidential nominee, trails among whites by less than Democratic nominees normally do.

America’s political parties grew decisively polarized by race after 1964, the year President Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation that his Republican presidential opponent, Barry Goldwater, opposed. Since then, election pollsters estimate, Democratic nominees have averaged 39 percent of the white vote. In last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll, Mr. Obama drew 44 percent support among whites — a higher proportion than Bill Clinton captured in his general election victories.

Analysts ascribe that success to changing racial attitudes, Mr. Obama’s deftness, Republican missteps and the economic crisis. Whatever the cause, when combined with his two-to-one edge among Hispanics and his 10-to-1 edge among blacks, it has given him a national election-eve lead.

The race is not over, and Election Day could bring surprises. And Mr. McCain is capturing a majority of the white vote, according to these same polls. Yet population shifts have made racial and ethnic diversity an unavoidable fact of American life. When Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, whites made up 86 percent of the electorate; by 2004, they had dropped to 77 percent.

With that backdrop, some observers say racial attitudes have diminished as an independent force, fading into the broader fabric of cultural concerns that shape voters’ choices like religion, abortion and gun control.

“Anybody who votes against Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, the Republicans would have gotten on another cultural issue,” said David Saunders, a consultant in Virginia who advises Democratic candidates on attracting white rural and working-class voters.

The presidential historian Michael Beschloss credits Mr. Obama with reprising the approach adopted by John F. Kennedy in his 1960 breakthrough as the first Roman Catholic to win the presidency. “He was running to be president of all the people, not president of a faction,” Mr. Beschloss said.

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll documents Mr. Obama’s success in making that case. Asked whether an Obama presidency would favor the interests of blacks over other Americans, 8 in 10 whites said it would not.

For Democratic strategists who have spent their careers laboring to regain white voters’ allegiance, that alone is a striking achievement. In the mid-1980s, research by the pollster Stan Greenberg in Macomb County, Mich., concluded that middle-class whites resented the “raw deal” they received from a political debate in which Democrats appeared focused on racial minorities and the poor.

Like Mr. Greenberg’s client Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. Obama has emphasized broad-gauged assistance for the middle class. “He’s managed to campaign in ways that may not have changed their world view but have allowed them to put those feelings aside,” Mr. Greenberg said. He added with a note of bemusement, “Maybe he has crossed over into Tiger Woods territory.”

Frustrated Republicans see Mr. Obama’s steady performances on the stump and in debates as only part of the explanation for his surprising level of white support. Just as responsible, some argue, is that President Bush’s unpopularity in threatening economic times has veered close to Herbert Hoover territory. “You’ve got to give Obama an awful lot of credit for his likability,” said Tom Slade, a former Florida Republican Party chairman, who abandoned his own Democratic allegiance in 1964 in the early phase of white conservatives’ political migration. More important, he said, “We have done a miserable job of managing the affairs of government.”

In the early 1990s, the political reporter Peter Brown wrote “Minority Party,” a book exploring the pitfalls of the Democrats’ identification with the interests of African-Americans. He credited Mr. Obama with providing “a comfort zone” for white voters, but pointed to the major boost he received this fall from the financial crisis on the watch of a Republican president.

“The most important color is green,” said Mr. Brown, now assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “When Lehman Brothers went under, this thing changed dramatically. People are just terrified about their financial futures.”

In the spring, some Democratic strategists feared Mr. Obama might be crippled in states where he lost working-class white primary voters decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In Ohio, carried by Mr. Bush in 2000 and 2004, polls now show Mr. Obama is competitive; in Pennsylvania, a top target for Mr. McCain, he is ahead in the polls.

With a message muting racial concerns, Mr. Obama didn’t begin his presidential bid with overwhelming strength among blacks; that came only after he defeated Mrs. Clinton in the white-dominated Iowa caucuses. “Ironically, the biggest difficulty about race for Obama was the doubts among African-Americans about his ability to succeed in the nominating process,” said Tad Devine, a top strategist for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

“It’s amazing to me — almost unreal,” Representative John Lewis of Georgia said. Earlier this fall Mr. Lewis, the civil rights movement veteran, accused Mr. McCain’s campaign of “sowing the seeds of hatred” in a way that was reminiscent of George Wallace during the 1960s, an attack that the Republican nominee called “brazen and baseless” and that Mr. Obama distanced himself from.

More recently, Mr. Lewis added, the campaign has made him “sort of sad” since leaders of that movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson, cannot witness Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

PRINCETON, NJ — Voters’ presidential preferences remain favorable to a Barack Obama win on Tuesday, with 51% of traditional likely voters supporting the Democratic nominee for president, and 43% backing John McCain. An additional 1% say they support some other candidate, leaving 5% undecided.

Today’s Gallup Poll Daily tracking results are from interviews conducted nationwide from Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 30-Nov. 1.

The traditional likely voter model producing an eight percentage point lead for Obama takes into account voters’ participation in previous presidential elections as well as their interest in and intention to vote in the 2008 election.

An expanded likely voter model uses only voters’ interest and self-professed likelihood to vote in the current election. On this basis, Obama leads by nine points — 52% to 43% — also with 1% supporting some other candidate and 5% undecided. The expanded model assumes that voter turnout may follow different patterns this year than historically, such as with greater participation by new or infrequent voters.

The expanded likely voter results are not much different from those based on all registered voters. Among the entire sample of eligible voters, Obama leads by 11 points, 52% to 41%. Another 1% name a different candidate while 7% are undecided.

Obama’s lead over McCain among all registered voters has been stable, at or above eight points for each of the past five days. Over the same time period, his lead among traditional likely voters has experienced more variation, highlighting the importance of turnout at this stage of the race in determining whether the election ends up being close, or whether Obama could win by a comfortable margin. — Lydia Saad

By NEDRA PICKLER and LIZ SIDOTI

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Barack Obama and John McCain uncorked massive get-out-the-vote operations in more than a dozen battleground states Sunday, millions of telephone calls, mailings and door-knockings in a frenzied, fitting climax to a record-shattering $1 billion campaign. Together, they’ll spend about $8 per presidential vote.

With just two days to go, most national polls show Obama ahead of McCain. State surveys suggest the Democrat’s path to the requisite 270 electoral votes — and perhaps far beyond — is much easier to navigate than McCain’s.

Obama exuded confidence. “The last couple of days, I’ve been just feeling good,” he told 80,000 gathered to hear him — and singer Bruce Springsteen — in Cleveland. “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.”

In Peterborough, N.H., McCain held his final town hall-style event in the state that put him on the national map in 2000 and launched his GOP primary comeback eight years later. “I come to the people of New Hampshire to ask them to let me go on one more mission,” said McCain, who is looking for an upset victory against Obama.

Polls show the six closest states are Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio. All were won by Bush and made competitive by Obama’s record-shattering fundraising. The campaigns also are running aggressive ground games elsewhere, including Iowa, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado and Virginia.

All that’s left now for the candidates is make sure people vote Tuesday — if they haven’t already.

Indeed, Election Day is becoming a misnomer. About 27 million absentee and early votes were cast in 30 states as of Saturday night, more than ever. Democrats outnumbered Republicans in pre-Election Day voting in key states.

That has Democrats — and even some Republicans — privately questioning whether McCain can overtake Obama, even if GOP loyalists turn out in droves on Tuesday. Obama may already have too big of a head start in critical states like Nevada and Iowa, which Bush won four years ago.

As the campaign closes, voters were being inundated with a crush of television ads and automated phone calls.

In a new TV ad, Obama highlighted Vice President Dick Cheney’s support for McCain. The ad features Cheney, an extremely unpopular figure among the general public, at an event Saturday in Wyoming, saying: “I’m delighted to support John McCain.”

Not to be outdone, the Republican National Committee rolled out battleground phone calls that include Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism of Obama during the Democratic primary. She is heard saying: “In the White House, there is no time for speeches and on-the-job training. Sen. McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, and Sen. Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002.” A Clinton spokeswoman said she disapproves of the ad.

Another phone call to Pennsylvania and Ohio voters takes Obama’s words about coal-burning technology out of context and claims he will “bankrupt the coal industry.”

The Pennsylvania GOP also unveiled a TV ad featuring Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, declaring “God damn America!” in a sermon.

Obama and McCain campaigned on each other’s turf Sunday. Obama was in Ohio, a bellwether state Bush won four years ago and where polls show Obama tied or winning. McCain visited Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, states won by Democrat John Kerry in 2004. He trails in both.

McCain and the RNC dramatically ramped up their spending in the campaign’s final days and now are matching Obama ad for ad, if not exceeding him, in key battleground markets in states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

After months of planning, the Republican Party launched the last stage of its vaunted “72-hour program,” when volunteers descend on competitive states for the final stretch. Democrats unleashed their “persuasion army” of backers scouring their own backyards to encourage people to back Obama in the campaign’s waning hours.

Obama’s campaign reported that Saturday was its largest volunteer day, with more volunteers showing up to work the phones and walk neighborhood precincts than ever before in the campaign. Said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, “Our volunteers are completely engaged.”

McCain’s crew says theirs are, too.

“There’s no doubt that we’ve got an uphill battle,” said Rich Beeson, the RNC’s political director. But, “We still have a lot of voters that we can and will turn out.”

The RNC reported making 5.4 million voter contacts last week, compared with 1.9 million in the same week in 2004, and it says its volume has steadily increased since October began. Overall, it says 26 million voters have been contacted by volunteers over four months. On Saturday alone, the RNC said, an estimated 3 million voters were contacted by phone or in person.

McCain planned visits to media markets that hit battlegrounds Florida, Virginia, Indiana, New Mexico, and Nevada on Monday. A repeat trip to Pennsylvania also was slated before McCain returns home to Arizona.

Obama planned visits to Florida, North Carolina and Virginia on Monday and a quick stop in Indiana Tuesday morning. He told reporters he would hold a news conference on Wednesday. Later, Obama spokeswoman Linda Douglass walked back Obama’s plans, saying he’ll meet the press before the end of the week, but “don’t count on Wednesday.”
___

The Huffington Post. Liz Sidoti reported from Washington. Associated Press Writer Beth Fouhy contributed to this report.

By Andrew Rawnsley
The Observer, London, UK

People do lie to pollsters. Pollsters can screw up their measures of voting intention. Voting intentions can change in the frenetic last furlong before election day. The man himself constantly cautions the crowds at his final rallies to take nothing for granted. But the world now expects that the world will get what it wants: President Barack Obama.

Just because this is increasingly anticipated, we should not discount how sensational that outcome will be. It will be an extraordinary victory for a novice senator born outside the continental United States who grew up with an absentee father and a peripatetic mother. To make it additionally astonishing, he is also a liberal, a northerner and a college professor – three categories long assumed to be unelectable as commander-in-chief. Oh, and did I mention that the pigmentation of his skin is not quite the same as that of George Washington and every President since?

What if the world has been dreaming and wakes up on Wednesday to find that it is President McCain? The air will soon be thick with those opining that it was always a fantasy to think that the White House could be won by a neophyte who came out of nowhere with the middle name of Hussein.

To the bitter end, John McCain will suggest that his rival is not qualified to sit in the Oval Office. And yet the gruelling business of an American presidential election is a qualification process in itself. It is many, many rollercoaster months since that victory in the Iowa primary when Obama started to confound the best laid grids of much more experienced rivals, to energise huge crowds and to mesmerise the world. Say what you don’t like about the length and the expense of the presidential race, it does have the great merit of being the most intense audition for the job.

You cannot entirely tell what a person will be like as President from the way he fought for the office, but it does offer useful pointers. It is one huge stress test of a candidate’s temperament, ideas, judgment, strategic capacity, organisational skills and resilience. Take the last first. Initially and then repeatedly dismissed as a fashionable fad, a celebrity confection, Obama has proved that he is durable. To get here, the rookie senator has out-campaigned both the Republicans and the Clintons, besting America’s two most formidable political machines by building from scratch an even better organisation of his own. At the climax, his campaign is so flush with donations that he can afford to buy 30 minutes of airtime in prime time across the networks while his opponent is running on empty and calling himself ‘the underdog’ to try to make a desperate virtue out of being behind.

Among the people enthused by Obama are other politicians, not least those watching in some awe from this side of the Atlantic. It is a convention that British leaders do not take public sides in American presidential races, especially for fear of finding that they have backed the wrong horse. This cannot mask the excitement among Labour people at the prospect of an Obama presidency. That we’d expect. Labour and the Democrats are sister parties. More remarkable is the large number of Tories for Obama. John McCain had many admirers among British Conservatives. He was the international guest of honour at their conference not so long ago. But if David Cameron had a vote, it would not go to the Republican.

The Tory leader can’t say this publicly, but he has revealed to colleagues that he hopes the Democrat will win. There’s the obvious and rather glib reason for this: an Obama victory would be a win for ‘change’ just as Cameron hopes to be. There’s the less superficial reason which is that the Tory leader was hugely impressed by the intelligence and judgment of the other man when they met in London a few weeks ago. David Cameron remarked to allies that he was especially struck by Obama’s self-composure at a time when the polls and the atmospherics were turning against him. ‘He was just so incredibly cool,’ the Tory leader told a friend.

They call it no drama, Obama. After two years under the searing spotlight of the most saturated media in the world, there has not been a single occasion when he has publicly lost self-control. Nor has his organisation lapsed in its self-discipline. It is a testimony to his ability to select and lead a team that his campaign has been so smooth in comparison with those of his rivals. There has been none of the internecine warfare which riddled the Clinton campaign and is now erupting within the McCain camp even before they know for certain that they’ve lost.

This has not meant that Obama’s road to the White House has been free of potholes, prangs and the occasional moment when some thought he might end up in the ditch. There was the uproar over his remarks, made at an event he did not expect to be reported, about voters who cling to guns and God out of bitterness with their lot. He’s also been taught that it is a bad idea to call a photo-op in a bowling alley if you are crap at bowling.

Then there was the furore over Jeremiah Wright and the pastor’s inflammatory ‘God damn America’ sermons. That was an incendiary moment which would have toasted a lesser candidate. It takes one of exceptional quality to turn crisis into opportunity which Obama did by responding with a brilliantly argued, compellingly personal and finely nuanced speech about race.

Grace under pressure has been a consistently striking feature of his campaign. It has also been one of the big contrasts with his opponent. John McCain was handicapped by the huge burden of being the Republican candidate after eight years of George W Bush, a weight that he could never entirely lift however much distance he tried to put between himself and the hugely unpopular incumbent.

Against that, we should not forget that Senator McCain also came to the contest with significant advantages over his opponent. The famous war hero, the grizzled and gutsy senate senior, a man long respected by people beyond his own party, on the face of it John McCain was the known quantity of the contest, the safe and sound choice for Americans at a time when they are fighting two wars abroad and there is an economic crisis at home.

McCain’s attack ads asked: ‘Do you really know Barack Obama?’ And yet it is to the Republican that the bigger question marks are now attached. In the debates between them and the campaign exchanges since, it is Obama who has come over as the nerveless, reassuring, sober, mature and authoritative one, the presidential one. It is John McCain, frantically switching tactics and snatching after headlines to try to get traction in the contest, who has come over as the impetuous, angry, adolescent, erratic one, the unpresidential one.

That was most epitomised by his reckless choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate having met the Alaskan governor just twice. Like a star going nova, she dazzled for a brief moment when she first exploded on the scene only to implode into a black hole of national ridicule after some excruciatingly and alarmingly bad performances in interviews.

This was the point when many British Conservatives lost faith in the American one. For them, as for many other people, it called into question what kind of calculation would animate a McCain presidency. The ability to dress a shot moose is not sufficient qualification to occupy the most powerful seat in the world. By putting Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency of a septuagenarian, John McCain was simply not being serious enough about the responsibilities of leadership.

The result is that it is the veteran senator from Arizona who looks like the riskier choice than the freshman senator from Illinois.

It is undeniable that Barack Obama’s promises are much bigger than his experience. One thing that particularly impresses me is that he knows what he doesn’t know. He has the confidence to acknowledge his deficits in experience and expertise by gathering around him a pretty stellar cast of advisers on both foreign and domestic policy. Of course, that does not in itself guarantee a successful time in the White House. A President also needs the capacity to understand the advice he is given and to choose between competing counsels. From what we have seen of Obama, he has that capacity. He is analytical, pragmatic, open-minded, considered and subtle – qualities all notable by their absence from the White House during the last eight years. Joe Klein puts it very well: ‘He seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision.’

Last, but far from least, Barack Obama has been true to himself. During 21 months of epic drama on this long road, he has never deviated from his essential vision and his core strategy. He ends the race as he began it, offering a positive prospectus of reconciliation, moderation and change.

Politicians in Britain and the world over will try to emulate him by borrowing his slogans, plagiarising his rhetoric, copying his fund-raising techniques and all the rest of it. Those are the small lessons of his success. The big lesson is that the politics of unity and hope can still beat those of division and fear. At least, the world is united in hoping so.