We’re in Gary, Indiana where Obama’s delivering his closing argument to a crowd of 40,000. Four days until the election and the strain is clearly getting to the Illinois senator who uncharacteristically snapped at reporters waiting for him in front of his home this afternoon. The running narrative is Obama is cool where McCain is [...]

COLUMBUS, OHIO–The McCain campaign brought all the pomp it could muster to its final rally here Friday: A Hank Williams Jr. warm up act, a fake barn backdrop, several crates of fresh apples for scenery, a “Victory in Ohio” sign that stretched at least 100 feet, a grand entrance on the Straight Talk Express, and [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: I recently spent some time in Hamilton County, which includes and surrounds Cincinnati in Ohio’s southwest corner, for our battleground county series in the magazine. Hamilton has always been reliably Republican — the urban population is relatively small and the suburbs are either socially conservative (working-class Catholics) or fiscally conservative (affluent [...]

In an email, my friend Steve Twomey deconstructs that Sarah Palin sentence for the rest of us: Sarah Palin believes it violates her First Amendment rights if you criticize her for criticizing Obama.

Sarah Palin this morning during a radio interview, via ABC: If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions [...]

The Obama campaign has told the Washington Times, the New York Post and the Dallas Morning News that there will not be room for them to travel on the plane in the last 72 hours of the campaign. Though all three papers have recently endorsed John McCain, an Obama aide points out that they still [...]

How many other people are in this kind of situation and don’t even know it? Michael Kinsley, a validly registered voter in Seattle who also suffers from Parkinson’s disease, discovers that his vote almost didn’t count, because the signature on his absentee ballot didn’t match his voter registration: Michael Kinsley founded Slate, edited the LA [...]

You’ve probably heard a lot about possible voter fraud on Tuesday, as there as been a lot of potential for voter fraud. But few (including the Rs, who are MORE CONCERNED THAN EVER) seem inclined to tell voters how, exactly, to do something about it. It is, unfortunately, a little more complicated than yelling and [...]

The Washington Post profiled prolific press correspondent (as in, someone who corresponds with the press) Mark Salter today, shedding a little bit of light on the grumpiest of the McCain campaign’s seven dwarves. Salter, for all his guff and frequent invocation of expletives, remains a favorite of those covering the campaign. This is in part [...]