It has two parts: Part one is here and part two is there.

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I remember the precise moment when I became convinced that this presidential campaign was going to be the best I’d ever covered. It was Saturday afternoon, Dec. 8, 2007. I stood in the lobby of Hy-Vee Hall, the big convention center in Des Moines, watching an endless stream of men, women and children come down the escalators from the network of skywalks that link the downtown business blocks of Iowa’s capital. They were bundled in winter coats against the chilly temperatures, and the mood was festive — like a tailgate party for a football game. But the lure here was not a sporting contest; it was a political rally.

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What state did you vote in, how was the weather, how long/short were the lines, how easy was the process, and any other personal details you would like to add that you believe would be of interest to those reading.

When Sri Murtiningsi asked her third graders what they wanted to be when they grew up, the answers ranged from doctors to a pilot. One boy in the class raised his hand: Barack Obama said his dream was to be president of the United States.

Forty years later Murtiningsi – like the rest of the world – is watching closely as Americans prepare to head to the polls Tuesday.

“Barry was the only one who said he wanted to be president,” Murtiningsi said of Obama, who spent four years living in Indonesia as a child. “I hope his dream comes true.”

Many believe Obama’s international experience would go a long way in helping repair damage caused by the unpopular U.S.-led war in Iraq, with recent opinion polls from more than 70 nations favoring him a resounding three-to-one over Republican John McCain.

Newspapers across the globe came out in support of the Democratic candidate Monday.

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The networks have taken CIA-style precautions to insure Election Day runs smoothly. At 11 am Tuesday, three representatives from each of the six news organizations in the business of calling presidential elections ”” CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press ”” quarantine themselves at an undisclosed location to start poring over exit poll data supplied by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. “I can’t tell you any more than that it’s in the state of New York,” Gawiser says of the meeting place. (Other execs confirmed that the reps indeed meet in New York City). Blackberries and cell phones are confiscated, wireless technologies disabled, and minders accompany people to the bathroom. The protocols started after the 2004 presidential race, when early exit poll data indicating that John Kerry was ahead leaked across the Internet in the early afternoon. Now, the reps can’t talk to their newsrooms until 5 pm, when communication lines reopen so that the broadcast networks have enough time to prepare for their evening newscasts.

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Thank goodness for the Onion which helps us not take all this too serously. Read it all.

The strongest evidence for a tectonic shift in America’s religio-political landscape, however, comes from a Faith in Public Life survey published in October. This poll shows an astonishing turnaround among Hispanic Protestants: from 63%-37% for Bush in 2004 to 50%-34% for Obama in 2008.

But the most telling data point comes in another Faith in Public Life survey, published by Public Religion Research: Americans see Obama as more friendly to religion than McCain. While 49% said Obama was “religion-friendly,” only 45% thought that description fit his GOP opponent, who in some moments during this campaign has seemed at least as pained discussing his faith as John Kerry did four years ago.

When we look back at the 2008 presidential election, we will of course reckon with a handful of big stories about gender and race. But religion matters, too, and the big religion story is this: Democrats have effectively neutralized a political weapon that Republicans had wielded masterfully at least since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

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But the best thing that can be said for the system is that it is so democratic. In most countries party leaders are chosen by political insiders. In America rank-and-file party members (and some independents) get to choose””and this year they upset all political calculations by rejecting the inevitable Mrs Clinton on the left and choosing the maverick Mr McCain on the right.

Millions of people have been enthused by the campaigns on both sides. On October 26th 100,000 people in Denver, Colorado, endured cold weather and time-consuming security checks to see Mr Obama. Mr McCain and (particularly) Mrs Palin have also attracted boisterous crowds. More people than ever before have given money to one candidate or another””and unprecedented numbers will take part in get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. All the signs are that this will be the third presidential election in a row where turnout has gone up rather than down.

There are plenty of reasons to withhold the final cheer. The candidates spend too much time repeating their stump speeches and not enough wrestling with tough questions (the Obama campaign’s aloof way with the press is particularly inauspicious). But the biggest problem is perhaps that the process is too enthralling. Americans have spent the past two years in a state of obsession with their presidential campaign. Even important global events such as Russia’s invasion of Georgia have been seen through that prism.

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Hmm. But if this is the case why are so many of the pundits treating it as if it is such a done deal? I suffered through ABC’s This Week on satellite radio on the way home from morning worship, and all of those on the panel had Obama in the 300 plus numbers in the electoral college on Tuesday. Given how many twists and turns there have been, and given all the media mistakes in this area in the last several Presidential races, one would think people would be a bit more tentative. In any event, read it all.

[KIM] LAWTON: Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is one of the most prominent evangelical colleges in the country. Students here tell us they’re concerned about a broad spectrum of issues. Nineteen-year-old sophomore Emily Daher is active in politics and has been working to reduce the influence of money on the electoral process. She says she does believe abortion and gay marriage are important, but they aren’t the things she’s focusing on this election.

EMILY DAHER: There are so many issues that, as a Christian, I’m being called to help with as well. And I feel specifically in this election we have the war in Iraq, we have this economic situation, we have health care, we have all these issues that are really being pushed and really need help with.

LAWTON: Daher says she’s particularly concerned about the environment. In our survey, nearly 60 percent of young evangelicals said that combating global warming is extremely or very important to them, and nearly 80 percent supported an international treaty to end global warming.

Ms. DAHER: As a Christian, especially the environment is really important to me, because I was put on this earth in God’s creation to take care of the earth and be a steward to the earth. And if we don’t take care of it then we’re just letting this beautiful, wonderful creation from the Lord just go to waste.

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The 2008 presidential campaigns will end Nov. 4 when the nation votes. But they will have seen an unprecedented activity by one very small group of American leaders: Catholic bishops.

Most have shared the attitude of Bishop Larry Silva of Honolulu ”” that “one issue alone far outweighs all others: the right to life.”

In unusually strong language, bishops have denounced abortion and directed voters away from pro-abortion candidates ”” so much so that Americans United for Separation of Church and State has threatened to sue at least one bishop. According to USA Today, the group sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service accusing Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., of illegal partisanship for lambasting Obama’s support of abortion rights.

With the election just days away, the Register offers its own compilation of some of the strongest statements….

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As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a “real” problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression — the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

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The Post asked pollsters and others what could turn out to be a surprise on Election Day. Included are thoughts from Dick Morris, Eileen McGann, James Carville, Heather Wilson, Douglas Schoen, Ed Rogers, Mary Beth Cahill, Linda Chavez and Robert Shrum.

Here is one perspective from Ed Rogers:

By all accounts McCain is behind but closing in on Obama, who appears to be stronger in the electoral college than in the popular vote. It’s not pretty for McCain, but it’s not over. Three ingredients could be mixing to create an explosive comeback for McCain. No. 1: buyer’s remorse and resentment of the media forecast. Voters are being lectured that the election is over. This might cause them to have regrets about Obama and resent being told what they had already decided. No. 2: presumptuousness by the Obama camp. More than once they have shown a tendency to act like they have won, to assume that the Oval Office is already theirs. Voters resent this and may be itching to show their independence. No. 3: Obama fatigue and classic American support for the underdog. Voters notice the number of ads, phone calls and gushing accounts of the giant Obama machine. Maybe the good old US of A instinct to support the underdog is working to McCain’s benefit.

McCain has to draw to an inside straight to get 270 in the electoral college. The odds are against him, but that’s nothing new for John McCain. He will not quit. Never count him out.

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But many evangelicals, left and right, have been haunted by the belief that their movement failed at a critical moment in American history. As Donald Dayton put it in his 1976 study, “Evangelical Christianity rather consistently opposed currents of the 1960s that demanded social justice and civil rights.” The claim may be exaggerated. The great evangelist Billy Graham was remarkably progressive on matters of race, and major Southern denominations, such as the Baptists and Presbyterians, explicitly supported desegregation. But the weight of the charge is felt, even if the failure was generally more one of passivity than strident opposition. It is a sign of evangelicalism’s active conscience that it remains uneasy.

Hence the Promise Keepers movement of the ’90s, overwhelmingly an evangelical-right phenomenon, was not only a men’s movement but also a movement for racial reconciliation — a facet entirely missed by hysterical secular critics who were obsessed with its gender dimensions to the exclusion of all else. Hence even within theologically conservative denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America one finds strenuous efforts to build biracial congregations and support inner-city ministries and missions. Hence the effort by evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren, in the presidential forum held at his Saddleback Church on Aug. 16, to promote greater civility in the presidential campaign.

Unfortunately for Sen. Obama, the Saddleback forum turned out to be one of his least effective outings, and his stumbling and evasive remarks about abortion — the question of life’s beginning, he said, was “above my pay grade” — brought to a sharp point the dilemma faced in this election by all white evangelicals, left, right and center. It would have been one thing to overlook the record of a moderately pro-choice candidate for the sake of racial progress. But the starkness of Sen. Obama’s position forces upon evangelicals a profoundly unenviable choice.

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To most of my European friends, an inexplicable aspect of American culture is the quixotic persistence and social influence of religious fundamentalism. They cannot understand how Americans could seriously consider for the second highest office in the land a candidate who has worshipped all her adult life at churches where congregants believe the literal truth of every word in the Bible and practise “speaking in tongues”. Thanks to YouTube, we even know that Sarah Palin has been blessed to protect her against witchcraft.

According to opinion polls, about one third of Americans subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible – from the chatty serpent in the Garden of Eden to the bloody prophecies in Revelation. They constitute a large and disciplined minority – a primarily Protestant army of Christian soldiers, with a pre-Enlightenment mindset and disdain for secular values.

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As America’s government prepares to take a sudden and historic leftward turn, this might seem an odd moment to ponder what a conservative country it is.

On Wednesday morning, unless the political equivalent of a giant meteorite hits Earth before then, Democratic supporters in America, in happy union with almost the whole of the civilised world, will be singing hosannas to the new President-elect. They will expect the Obama proto-administration and the expanded Democratic caucus in Congress to press hard to implement quickly their agenda of wealth redistribution; a tougher and broader scope of government regulation; and an enthusiastic embrace of foreign policy multilateralism.

But the new rulers and their allies overseas would be well advised to tone down the rhetoric, play down expectations and rein in their wilder tendencies. The easiest mistake for the world to make would be to start believing the Left’s own propaganda: that a vote for Barack Obama and for a Democrat in Congress on Tuesday is a vote to transform the country into a kind of social democratic paradise.

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It’s an article of faith in U.S. politics that, when it comes to the popular vote at least, Catholics determine the winners in our presidential contests.

In fact, with the notable exception of George W. Bush eight years ago, no candidate in recent memory has entered the White House without securing a majority of the votes cast by Catholics, who now make up more than a fourth of the U.S. population….

That approach isn’t working for John McCain, particularly in Pennsylvania, where strategists in both parties seem to agree the Republican nominee’s chances will rise or fall.

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Few analysts outside the McCain campaign appear to share this view. And pollsters this time around will not make the mistake that the Gallup organization made 60 years ago — ending their polling more than a week before the election and missing a last-minute surge in support for Truman. Every day brings dozens of new state and national presidential polls, a trend that is expected to continue up to Election Day.

Still, there appears to be an undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and academics. One reason is the wide variation in Obama leads: Just yesterday, an array of polls showed the Democrat leading by as little as two points and as much as 15 points. The latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll showed the race holding steady, with Obama enjoying a lead of 52 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.

Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high. The campaign is banking on a good turnout among GOP partisans, whom McCain officials say they are working hard to attract to the polls.

“I have been wondering for weeks” whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the “unknown unknowns” about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don’t respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don’t want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the “voguish” Obama?

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While both presidential candidates enter the campaign’s final week promising to be the better fiscal steward, each has outlined tax and spending proposals that would make annual budget deficits worse, analysts say, with Senator John McCain likely to create a deeper hole than Senator Barack Obama would.

McCain, the Republican nominee, has proposed bigger tax cuts. He has also promised more in spending cuts, but he has not specified where most of them would come from. Even now that the financial crisis has given rise to one bailout package and prompted both candidates to call for billions more in stimulus spending, McCain has stuck by his promise to balance the budget by the end of his term, a pledge that fiscal analysts call unachievable.

Obama, his Democratic rival, has vowed to reduce the deficit and put it on a path to balance. He also promises an expensive effort to make health care insurance more widely available, a raft of other spending programs and tax cuts for most families and small businesses. He would raise taxes on the wealthiest households to help pay for his health care plans.

Neither presidential candidate has provided enough detail, especially about spending programs and what they would cut, for budget groups to put price tags on their agendas.

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In a recent study of the political behavior of white Catholics, the political scientist Stephen Mockabee, of the University of Cincinnati, controlling for such factors as age, income and education, discovered that the candidates’ position on abortion had no statistically significant effect on the Catholic presidential vote choice in 2004. How could this be? One way to understand it is that while older white Catholics are much more pro-life than younger ones, they tend to be far more loyal Democratic voters. “Post Vatican II” Catholics””those born after 1960””have trended Republican, but only 7 percent share their church’s position on abortion. When it came to the issues, what pushed white Catholics toward George Bush in 2004 was their support for capital punishment and their opposition to gay marriage; it was not John Kerry’s support for abortion rights.

This time around, it is not the Republicans who are working hard for the Catholic vote, but the Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s Catholic outreach was particularly effective during the primary season, putting together the networks of activists and the e-mail lists that enabled her to give Barack Obama more than a run for his money in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

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The pull of liberty is strong, but only for those who know it and treasure it. After decades of public education designed more to produce compliant subjects and beneficiaries than thinking, self-reliant citizens, there are precious few among us who can even articulate, let alone defend, the principles for which our founders bled and died. There are far more (and especially the well-meaning religious) who say, as Gandalf says of the One Ring, “Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.” In their pity and all too sincere desire to do good, they do not see the end of that road as Gandalf does: “With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.”

Is there hope? Yes. There is always hope. Whatever its imperfections and excesses and absurdities, liberty is always better than coercion. Sooner or later this always seems to become apparent. When it does, men and women ready to take a stand for liberty always seem to spring from the earth. Perhaps that moment is again near. If so, it will not be the last. There is no final battle for liberty in a fallen world. As Tolkien reminds us (again in the words of Gandalf), “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”

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Forasmuch as the Reformed Episcopal Church has affirmed the teaching of God’s Word that abortion is the taking of an unborn human life, and inasmuch as we have recognized the duty of all faithful Christians to work to protect the unborn and restrain the sin of abortion on demand, we hereby move that the General Council of the Reformed Episcopal Church direct the clergy and laity of the Reformed Episcopal Church to make a political candidate’s position on the Sanctity of Human Life the highest priority in discerning for whom to vote regardless of political party represented or office being sought.

At a time when more than 37 million Americans are in poverty, including many who are newly poor and paying keen attention, spiritual leaders are encouraging the young to vote and urging voters to select candidates who will fight poverty.

“I feel more momentum, energy and focus on poverty than I have in churches in three decades or more,” said Jim Wallis, chief executive officer of Sojourners social justice ministries in Washington.

“Partly, it’s a new generation. Baby boomers are becoming church leaders and speaking to a new generation that wants their lives to make a difference. It’s a new altar call, if you will,” he said.

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A quarter of America’s bishops have said that the most important issue for voters in the forthcoming presidential election is abortion – comments that may help boost the fortunes of Republican candidate John McCain.

Some 50 out of the nation’s 197 active bishops have published articles or given interviews during the run-up up to the election urging abortion as the key issue on which voters should decide which way to vote.

Senator McCain opposes the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, which legalised abortion in the US, but has refused – most recently, at last week’s final television debate between the presidential candidates – to impose an abortion-based “litmus test” on his Supreme Court nominees. The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, has repeatedly indicated his support for the 1973 ruling alongside a pledge to sign a proposed Freedom of Choice Act that would invalidate any state or local ordinance intended to “deny or interfere” with a woman’s choice to have an abortion.

Among the bishops who have intervened is Bishop Robert Hermann of St Louis who last Friday wrote: “the issue of life is the most basic issue and must be given priority over the issue of the economy, the issue of war or any other issue.” His comment came in a column for the archdiocesan newspaper that appeared hours before Mr Obama addressed 100,000 people in the heavily Catholic city.

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A Washington Post poll reported a 10-point lead for the Democratic presidential candidate in 13 key “swing” states 16 days before the election. That candidate was John Kerry. That election year was 2004.

When Election Day 2004 arrived, “exit poll” trends reported to the public before the real polls closed also indicated that Sen. Kerry would win the White House. When the real votes were counted, he lost by more than 3 million votes to President Bush, though it took a relatively slim, 118,775-vote triumph in Ohio for the incumbent to win the Electoral College and keep his job.

So despite Sen. Kerry’s apparent inside track to victory, he was not elected president. And despite the significant edge Barack Obama has held over John McCain in most recent polls, particularly in “swing” states, he hasn’t won the presidency yet.

That’s a critical lesson learned across party lines long before 2004.

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The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun ”” for the first time in my adult life ”” to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist….

…Nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current Presidential campaign. Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass – no, make that shameless support – they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press. I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather – not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake – but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

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Religious language trips off Barack Obama’s tongue as if he were a native of the Bible Belt.

From the moment he emerged on the national scene, he has spoken to believers in a language few Democrats have mastered: the language of the Bible and of a personal relationship with God.

Sometimes he shares his adult conversion story, describing how he knelt beneath the cross at his Chicago church: “I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me,” he says. “I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.”

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