After 20 months of campaigning, it all comes down to these final days. What each candidate does now will decide this election. With 12 days to go, there's a distinct sense of the election shifting into its final phase, as the grand rhetoric of the national race gives way to an intense focus on the handful of states that will make the real difference on November 4.

In over a dozen battleground states, each candidate need help reaching voters who are still on the fence, as well as helping mobilizing our existing supporters. Turnout is crucial -- even if someone supports Democrats or Republicans, they still need to make sure they get out to the polls.

A CBS/New York Times poll puts Obama's lead at 52%-39% among likely voters. Perhaps more intriguing than the 13-point headline lead, though, is Obama's strength among several groups that voted for George Bush in 2004. He's ahead of McCain among married women, suburbanites, white Catholics and those earning more than $50,000 a year. He's even "competitive", the Times argues, among white men. A Democrat hasn't won the white male vote since 1972.

As the first billion-dollar election has rumbled on, Mr Obama has tapped more than four million donors, mostly for small amounts. After the primaries, Mr Obama controversially abandoned his commitment to the public funding of elections and the cap on spending that goes with it, freeing him to raise whatever he could. That decision was vindicated in spades in September, when he pulled in a staggering $150million. As the election enters the most critical period, Mr Obama is outspending John McCain by three to one on advertising in swing states.

Probably the most important blunder in McCains was On Sept 15 where, as the Wall Street crisis gathered steam, John McCain, reading from a prepared text, stated that "the fundamentals of the economy are sound". The assertion, often used previously by US government officials to prevent a dramatic loss of confidence during times of uncertainty, made Mr McCain look out of touch with what was happening in the American heartland and unable to address the economic crisis. The same day, his campaign ran an advert stating that "our economy is in crisis".

These mixed messages was disastrous and it took weeks for McCain to recover his footing on economic matters as he lurched from one proposal to another without seeming to have an overall framework. Having briefly edged ahead in the national polls in early September, Mr McCain's ratings slipped steadily by 10 points. If he does lose on Nov 4, historians will look back on Sept the 15 as the day he brought about his own defeat.

What was the turning point for Sarah Palin was, In her first major interview as vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin told ABC’s Charlie Gibson that she had some “insight” into Russia because "they are our next-door neighbours, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska."

What is ironic for Obama is the fact that biggest event of Barack Obama's campaign did not come in Florida or Ohio, Missouri or Colorado, or any of the other stopoffs on the swing state merry-go-round, it was an appearance in Berlin in July on the European and Middle Eastern tour. 200,000 Berliners, who had hit the streets for JFK and Reagan in decades past, went bananas for what most people regarded as a pretty dull speech. If Europe could vote, Mr Obama would not just be elected president by a landslide, he might be chosen to run the EU and the Vatican, too. But the grandiloquent episode went down rather less well among the working classes of Appalachia, who felt he should have spent the summer trawling for votes on Main Street, Armpit Hole, USA instead. His Biggest in US so far is actually in a Small Red State with over 100,000 turn out for Obama in Missouri.

One can only extrapolate that this election may well be the turning point for the direction the free world is taking in tackling the huge economical challenges facing the world. Whilst the rest of the free world is managed mostly by conservative governments, US is going to show that in the next 4 years the progressive left will be in total control of the most powerful nation in the world. This is achived by The possibility of a victory by Senator Barack Obama combined with significant Congressional gains by his party could give Democrats extraordinary muscle to pursue an ambitious agenda on health care, taxes, union rights, energy and national security.