Barack Obama, General Election

OBAMA FOR USA. While Barack Obama projected youth and change, John McCain, the Republican nominee who turned 72 during the campaign, was running on his distinguished biography and experience. A former P.O.W. in Vietnam, the Arizona senator was admired for his straight talk and independent stands on contentious issues, such as torture of detainees, campaign finance and immigration reform. And he should have enjoyed one tremendous advantage.

After a decisive win in New Hampshire, he wrapped up his party's nomination in early March, leaving Mr. Obama and Mrs.Clinton to slug it out over a long, divisive spring. But Mr. McCain found himself tethered to an unpopular incumbent president,and an even more unpopular war. Mr. McCain not only supported the war in Iraq, he insisted the United States was winning the war. Mr. Obama, of course, had promised to end the war.

But national security was not the dominant issue in this election. All spring and summer, the economy had faltered. By the fall, the bursting of the housing bubble had become a four-alarm financial crisis, requiring an emergency federal bailout of the country's leading financial institutions. The political environment for Republicans went from challenging to downright sour.

The only strategy that seemed to make a win possible under such circumstances was to go heavily negative against Obama, but McCain was reluctant.

In late July, Mr. Obama toured Iraq, the Middle East and Europe on a trip intended to make him appear presidential, but the trip also showcased him as a political rock star.

The McCain campaign pounced. After Mr. Obama appeared before a huge crowd in Berlin, the McCain team began airing an attack ad portraying him as "the biggest celebrity in the world," juxtaposing the Berlin speech with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Money helped insulate the Obama campaign from the attacks. The candidate had made a fateful decision to forgo $84 million in federal election funds for the general election in order to raise donations outside of the limits of the Watergate-era campaign finance strictures. The campaign ended up raising $750 million, more than George W. Bush and John Kerry combined had raised in 2004 and hundreds of millions more than McCain. One of McCain's signature issues was campaign finance reform and he railed against Obama's hypocrisy for going back on his early campaign pledge to live within the federal limits. But voters didn't seem to care, and while McCain struggled to fund a national advertising campaign, Obama had buckets of money.

Clinton's supporters continued to press her vice-presidential claims leading up to the Democratic convention in Denver. Obama had promised his supporters that he would announce his selection in a mass e-mail (which had the dividend of giving the campaign millions more contacts for getting out the vote in November). The pick was not Clinton but another one of the Democrats Obama had vanquished in the primaries, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. He was a safe choice who brought decades of experience in foreign affairs, helping to parry McCain's attacks that Obama was too light on national security.

The Democratic convention featured the soap opera of whether the Clintons would fully embrace Obama and Biden in Denver. Bill Clinton could still explode in rage over the way he and his wife had been portrayed during the primaries. But in Denver, he gave a gracious endorsement that betrayed no lingering ill will. Hillary Clinton, too, gave a warm speech and rushed to the floor of the convention hall to make Obama's nomination unanimous on the eve of his acceptance speech.

For the final night of the convention, the campaign had decided to move everyone, delegates and all, to Mile High Stadium, where 80,000 people, some waiting in line for nearly a day, celebrated the new Democratic ticket. The stage, draped with flags and lined with Greek columns, was meant to evoke the White House but some found the whole thing over the top.

"With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States," Obama began, the culmination of a marathon political carnival that bore little resemblance to any convention finale that had come before. The speech was being delivered on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and Obama movingly referred to the throngs who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear "a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream."

McCain seemed to gain ground after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. His choice of a young female governor, Sarah Palin of Alaska, energized the conservative G.O.P. base. But the Obama strategist David Axelrod and others deemed the choice a disaster because it undermined McCain's major campaign theme, experience. Palin had been in office only a few years and before becoming Alaska's governor she was the mayor of a tiny town, Wasilla, and was a self-described Hockey Mom. After rejoicing over her strong convention acceptance speech, in which she relentlessly attacked and mocked Obama, the McCain campaign kept her closeted from the national media. Then, after overcoaching her, interviews with the network anchors were scheduled. Her performance during an interview with Katie Couric, in which she stumbled repeatedly over relatively simple questions and spoke in almost comic non sequiturs, went viral on YouTube and became fodder for a barrage of brutally comic skits on "Saturday Night Live." A $150,000-plus spending spree on clothes financed by the Republican National Committee tarnished her image even more.

Once the campaign turned to party against party, the dynamics changed. Unlike in the primaries, where Obama and Clinton had agreed on more issues than not, Obama and McCain had extremely divergent worldviews.

Their most profound differences were over the war in Iraq. McCain still spoke of "victory" and opposed setting dates for extracting American troops. Obama was an early opponent of the war in Iraq, and he presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. He also warned that until the Pentagon began pulling troops out of Iraq, there would not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He blamed President Bush for taking his focus off defeating Al Qaeda and becoming distracted by Iraq.

They differed over government's proper role in people's lives. McCain was an economic conservative who railed against wasteful government spending and appropriations called earmarks. In his convention speech in Denver, Obama said: "Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads, and science and technology." He favored raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation.

Both candidates denounced torture and were committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But Obama went further and promised to identify and correct the Bush administration's abuse of executive power. McCain promised improved protections for detainees, but he had helped the White House push through the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a court hearing and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions.

They differed sharply on the kinds of justices they would appoint to the Supreme Court. Obama favored abortion rights, McCain opposed them, and McCain promised to continue the court's tilt to the right.

In this campaign, McCain abandoned his earlier, moderate positions on climate change and immigration reform. Obama presented himself as an environmental protector who would strictly control the emissions of greenhouse gases. He endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean technologies.

Right before the first debate, the economy cratered. Lehman Brothers collapsed, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum on which candidate could best address the nation's economic challenges.

Speaking at an almost empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla., on Sept. 15, McCain was trying to show concern for the prospect of hardship but also optimism about the country's resilience. "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," he said, words that some believed doomed his candidacy.

At the McCain campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., at almost the same moment that morning, McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, looked stricken when his war room alerted him to the comment. Within 30 minutes, he was headed for a flight to Florida to join McCain as they began a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to recover.

McCain's inartful phrase about the economy that day, and the responses of the two campaigns, fundamentally altered the dynamic of the race. But the episode also highlighted a deeper difference: the McCain campaign team often seemed to make missteps and lurch from moment to moment in search of a consistent strategy and message, while the disciplined and nimble Obama team marched through a presidential contest of historic intensity learning to exploit opponents' weaknesses and making remarkably few stumbles.

From there, McCain staggered forward. He announced he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington to help solve the financial crisis, suggesting he might skip the first debate. Then, after he arrived in Washington, Republicans balked at approving the bailout plan. When McCain could not mediate the impasse, the debate was suddenly back on.

After this wild ride, Obama's calm performance in their first debate made him appear presidential. While McCain jabbed at him during the debate, he did not look at Obama once during the 90-minute debate, despite rules that encouraged them to speak directly to each other.

The second and third debates were really no better. McCain tediously repeated the phrase "My friends," as the overture to his answers and, in the third, he endlessly invoked Joe the Plumber, a middle-class Everyman who McCain insisted would see his taxes balloon under Obama's economic plan. In various polls, Obama was deemed the winner of all three debates. Well-prepared and commanding, if not exciting, he had come across as a plausible president.

The negative tone of the McCain campaign and the murmurings about Obama being a Muslim had a powerful impact on one disgusted Republican, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. During an appearance on "Meet the Press" in late October, Powell broke with his party and endorsed Obama.

With plenty of money still flowing into the campaign during the final month, Obama bought a half-hour of national television time for a glossy infomercial. A smashing ratings success, the commercial proved to be more popular than even the final game of the World Series — or the previous season's finale of "American Idol."

Now all the campaign needed to worry about was overconfidence.