This is it. The home stretch, the final furlong, the last days of what has been the longest presidential election in US history. It started back at the beginning of 2007, and has just continued at blistering pace since.
It's been a campaign of notable firsts and notorious firsts. It's been a campaign that's seen more possible candidates than any other previously, and the possibility that we are on the verge of the country's first ever black president. But what will this campaign be remembered for?
One thing this campaign will be remembered for was the sheer length of it. Most campaigns are like a marathon. This one was more like an Ironman Triathlon. First you had the pre-primaries, which lasted about a year. 19 different competitors stepped up to represent their party, either Democratic or Republican.
Then you had the primary season. This too seemed to last longer than usual, particularly on the Democratic side, with the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama going right to the end. That particular primary fight will live long in the memory. Even the Republican fight went on months longer than usual, and was quite a contest, until John McCain won out. And despite the fact that he had 3 months plus of being the only dog in the big fight, it seemed that he failed quite miserbaly to take advantage of that, and it seems that that failure could cost him the presidency.
In fact, you could say that since McCain secured his party's nomination, the whole campaign has gone from bad, to worst! The failure to adequately campaign whilst Clinton and Obama battled against each other pointed the way to the failures that would haunt him throughout his campaign. His appointment of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate was a mistake too. Palin took too much attention away from John McCain. She became known as the "Lipstick Pitbull", a phrase coined by a Murdoch newspaper in the UK! Add to this the controversy over her fashion bill being paid for by the GOP, and the recent reports about Palin going rogue, off message, and you have many reasons why Palin was a bad choice.
And then you can add in all the usual stuff, like Joe, the plumber, who wasn't, but was a tax cheat; add in the state of the economy, which completely undermined McCain's plan to major on scaring people into submission, which Bush successfully did in 2004. And I think you can understand why Obama is the one seemingly on the verge of a historic victory.
But the polls have been wrong before. In the UK in 1992, the polls were famously predicting a massive Labour victory and in the end the Conservatives won out, but not by much. And of course, there was 2000 when everybody was expecting Al Gore to be the next president, and we all know what happened there. The seemingly impossible has happened before. So, we mustn't count John McCain out just yet.