In its final days, the long 2008 U.S. presidential campaign has gone back to basics, analysts said.
For Republican presidential nominee John McCain, it is reiterated that he is "an experienced leader, tested in crisis, who advocates the low-tax economic approach best able to spur a recovery".
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama counters that his agenda "embodies the change sought by a worried nation" and that his rival offers "only a continuation of the failed policies of President George W. Bush."
After all that has happened during the past year, and after all the petty controversies, endless television commercials and high-stakes debates, the voters will have to make a choice when they cast their ballots on the Election Day of Nov. 4.
With two days left, all of the available signs -- including the public opinion polls, the early voting numbers, and the official statistics confirming that the economy is contracting -- seem to be pointing to an Obama victory, the first in American history by a person of color.
Obama's strategists are so confident of their position that they have started running commercials in such core Republican states as Georgia, North Dakota and McCain's home of Arizona.
"The die is being cast as we speak," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters, referring to the early voting, "We have a lot of work to do, but we like where we are."
Meanwhile, his counterpart in the McCain campaign, Rick Davis, predicted a stirring, come-from-behind victory for a candidate who has been counted out before.
"The one thing that's clear," Davis said, "is that we've established some momentum."
Perhaps the most telling sign about the race at this point is that the campaigns are focusing primarily on states won by Bush in2004.
Among them are Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Virginia.
The only major "blue state" being contested is Pennsylvania, which the Democrats carried in the last four presidential elections.
On the Election Day, much will depend on who turns out and in what numbers.
Bill McInturff, McCain's pollster, said he expected as many as 135,000,000 votes to be cast, which would be up 10 percent from 2004.
Plouffe said turnout would be even higher.
One lingering concern for Obama supporters is that their candidate might fall victim to the so-called "Bradley effect," named after Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles.
In 1982, Bradley, an African-American Democrat, lost the race for governor of California to a white Republican after leading in the final polls.
The explanation then was that some white voters who opposed Bradley for racial reasons had lied to pollsters rather than voice socially inappropriate views.
And in other elections during the 1980s, black candidates fared worse on Election Day than in the polls.
But there's been no recent evidence of the Bradley phenomenon, which some analysts say might have been overblown in the first place.
There was no hidden vote against former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., a black Democrat, during his defeat by a white Republican in a racially charged 2006 Tennessee Senate race.
Source:Xinhua
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