DOWN TO THE WIRE

Osama bin Laden had given the Kerry campaign a good scare on Friday night. The tape of the Qaeda leader, creepily invoking polemical filmmaker Michael Moore, was played in the war room at Kerry headquarters in Washington. Pollster Mark Mellman noticed the quiet in the room and the color draining from people's faces. Was this the October Surprise? Was bin Laden going to get Bush re-elected by showing his fright mask on election eve?

Mellman saw a slight wobble in Kerry's polls overnight. He walked 45 minutes from his Georgetown home to headquarters downtown (he doesn't drive on the Sabbath) to present the potentially ominous results, but by Sunday Kerry had recovered. Perhaps voters had been numbed by the years of scratchy tapes smuggled out of Pakistan and the elevated threat levels. "Saturday Night Live" took out some of the sting by parodying the tape. In any case, by Sunday night the Kerry campaign was allowing itself to feel optimistic.

Kerry's last job on the last day of the campaign was basically to show up. There were no more strategic decisions to be made, no more staff squabbles to referee, no cell-phone calls to his ever-widening circle of advisers to make doubly sure he was making the right decision. And yet somehow Kerry was 45 minutes late to his first rally, scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. in Orlando. Kerry and Bush have opposite rhythms. Bush loves the mornings and feeds off crowds but tires noticeably as the day drags on. For Kerry, morning is not his best time, and he rarely seems to get a lift from the crowd--but he has a kind of dogged stamina. On this morning, the last of the campaign, President Bush had begun with a rally in Ohio at 7:30. Air Force One was taking off from Milwaukee airport (Bush's third event) just as Kerry was arriving there for his first major event of the day. The press corps just assumed that Kerry was late because he was on the phone, but they wondered: Whom did he really have to talk to at this point? What was there left to say?

And yet, when Kerry did take the stage, he was compelling. He was crisp and sharp, all the things he had never managed to be in the campaign. Later that night at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Kerry brought out an old line to get back at Bush. Citing Bush's "You can run but you can't hide" line, Kerry reminded the audience of Muhammad Ali's taunt to George Foreman: "George, is that all you got?" The crowd loved it.

At 9 p.m. in Cleveland, Kerry was introduced by Bruce Springsteen (referred to at an earlier rally by Kerry as "a sort of minstrel poet, if you will"). Teresa was at last reunited with her husband. Shielding her eyes from the klieg lights she hated, she spoke softly into the mike, but she, too, rose to the occasion with brief, gracious remarks. By this time Kerry was basking and beaming.

Kerry's sharpness did not come as a complete surprise to Alex. She thought that her father was addicted to focus. She didn't think he suffered from adult attention-deficit disorder, but she knew that he was better off free from distractions. She remembered that during a run-through before the second debate--his weakest performance--he had behaved like a little boy who refused to do his homework, teasingly throwing things at his daughter as his aides vainly tried to give him comments. Tonight Kerry had nothing left to do but show up and smile for the cameras.