Andrew Keen writes:

Everything is confidence. Everyone is now writing about how Obama should learn from FDR or JFK about how to make America believe in itself again. But the President-elect doesn't have to delve so far back into history for his inspiration. Obama has a contemporary from whom he can learn much. There's this inspirational guy in Europe who can be a role model to Obama about how to become a great president.

Barry meet Harry.

By Tim Walker in Manassas, Virginia

He was tired and emotional, and so – after an hour or more of hotel lobby covers from his support band, the Youthful Spirits – were his supporters. But for the 85,000 or so people who turned up to the Prince William Fairgrounds in Manassas, Virginia, last night, this was a final chance to see Barack Obama before his fate, and America's, is decided today.

By Larry Ryan

Perhaps all those Obama supportors fretting about a last minute McCain surge can rest a little easier.  The mastermind behind Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004, Karl Rove, a man who may have had one or two truth based issues when it comes to Republican spin in the past, is predicting a clear victory for Barack Obama tonight.

In an electoral college map prediction posted on his website yesterday, "Rove & Co", gives the race to Obama by a margin of 338-200 electoral college votes.

By Tim Walker

Halloween is an important date in the US calendar, and nowhere more so than in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where every year on 31 October, 80,000 people descend on the town’s (population: 54,000) main drag, Franklin Street, to drink, carouse, and parade their silly costumes.

North Carolina has been a solidly Republican state since 1976, but this year is a battleground for the presidential candidates. Chapel Hill is a college town, and on campus, say students, the mood is Obama-friendly. Assuming that dressing up as a political grotesque is not necessarily intended as flattery, and taking a straw poll of the costumes on show, they would appear to be correct.

As usual, we've been looking into the wrong end of the telescope. While Americans have been worrying about their military impact on the Arab world, they've missed the real story - the arrival of the Arab street in American politics. At least that's the view of Fouad Ajami, the conservative Arab scholar at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies. In "Obama and the Politics of Crowds", Ajami argues that the great change in the politics of this year's election is the role of the great crowds, the tens of thousands of expectant people who have been flocking to the Obama rallies all over America.

Everywhere I go in America, people are dreaming about President Barack Obama. At Birmingham airport in Alabama, I see a smartly dressed middle aged African-American woman so immersed in a glossy book about Obama that she doesn't pick up her phone which rings insistently. On a plane from Baltimore to Columbus Ohio, there are four big guys -- two white, two black -- all in "Yes We Can" t-shirts.

On a gloriously warm late October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, all I can hear are fragments of conversations about the latest poll numbers in Virginia and Florida. There is iconography of Obama everywhere. On a train from New York City to Washington DC, I sit next to a woman who tells me that Powell will be Secretary of State. America is teetering on the verge of history. We are all holding our breath. Everywhere the questions are the same. Who are you voting for? Can He lose? An eight year nightmare finally over.... can you believe it?

By Tim Walker

On the south side of Union Square, here in New York City, there are stalls selling a mountain of Barack Obama merchandise. In the spirit of Obama's campaign, the vendors are a mixture of weathered street salesmen and art students, youthful white hipsters and grizzled black Barack n'rollers. In the Virgin Megastore across the street you can even buy plastic dolls of the Democratic candidate. 

A couple of days ago I selected a pair of "ironic" election-based T-shirts for friends who'd demanded them. One shows Obama calmly meditating within the spiritual "O" of his initial, another says simply "Obama '08", but has the graphic design and deliberately distressed look of a Seventies basketball strip. One chum who's here to soak up the election alongside me has been wearing his current favourite, a clunking fist inscribed with the words "Obama Said Knock You Out!" (This, by the way, is a reference to a 1990 hip-hop track by LL Cool J, called "Mama Said Knock You Out". If you get the clever pop cultural reference, the T-shirt is deeply hilarous, I promise…)

Obama makes his powerful "closing argument" with voters.