As the presidential campaign reaches its final hours, one decision by Barack Obama, and John McCain's lament about it, is dominating the discourse and the competition.

That is Obama's practical determination to abandon his earlier willingness to accept federal financing for the general-election campaign and forego further fundraising of his own, provided McCain would agree to do likewise.

McCain took him up on the offer when it appeared he might not be able to raise appreciably more on his own than the $84 million provided by Uncle Sam. A massive fundraising effort attempting to match Obama's take would itself have greatly burdened McCain's own campaign.

But Obama reneged on the deal, on the questionable grounds that accepting it would only wind up giving McCain a money advantage anyway. Republican Party and independent special-interest groups, he argued, would raise huge amounts through the new funding devices circumventing the finance laws in previous recent campaigns.

That contention has not been borne out. Such groups were slow in getting underway as Obama's own prodigious fund-raising machine swept up unprecedented amounts of campaign contributions. In September alone, his campaign took in an astounding $150 million, or nearly twice what McCain was getting from Uncle Sam for the whole fall campaign.

The result has been a tidal wave of Obama television and radio advertising that culminated in his television "roadblock" of last Wednesday night, in which he bought time on all but one of the major networks and some cable outlets for his 30-minute "infomercial."

With Obama eloquently reiterating the major aspects of his agenda for the future, interspersed with folksy interviews with and narratives about selected voters supporting him, he was able essentially to force-feed the electorate that night.

Beyond the television saturation, Obama's huge money advantage enabled his strategists to build and dispatch an unprecedented army of paid and volunteer foot soldiers into a host of campaign offices in most states, notably including traditionally Republican strongholds.

The financially strapped McCain campaign was obliged either to play defense in states that ordinarily would be safe for the Republican, or hope traditional GOP support would hold up on Election Day. The latter was not the best bet for a candidate like McCain, who has never been a favorite among the party's most conservative base, and who brags of being a maverick despite his 90 percent support of George W. Bush over the last eight years.

As the Obama campaign is pouring on the coals in the final hours of the campaign in an effort to bring reality to the polls that indicate a strong victory for him on Tuesday, McCain has had to make hard choices.

His campaign is unleashing an 11th-hour barrage of television ads in key battleground states, at the price of limiting the usual Republican get-out-the-vote effort that figured so prominently in the Bush victories of 2000 and 2004.

With polls suggesting Obama leads in most battleground states and some once-safe Republican states as well, the McCain campaign's hopes appear to ride on the undetermined undecided vote. McCain and running mate Sarah Palin continue to hammer at Obama as unprepared to be president, especially in wartime and a time of financial crisis.

Meanwhile, the largely unspoken factor of race remains a question mark in the equation. Most voters say they will not deny Obama their ballots because he is an African-American. But the dependability of that insistence won't be proved until the ballots are counted.

In retrospect, it was unfortunate Obama decided not to join McCain in accepting the federal financing, creating a level playing field in terms of campaign resources. But part of presidential politics is the rallying of public support, and money-raising is one way of demonstrating it, as long as the Supreme Court holds that giving to candidates is a constitutional exercise of free speech.

Until this year, money has almost always given the Republican nominee a wide advantage. It's only now that it has benefited a Democratic nominee of extraordinary public appeal that the GOP is unhappy about the influence of money.


Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. Reach him at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.