This is what David Plouffe calls the campaign's amazing ground game with its 800+ offices, 2000 paid staff and tens of thousands of volunteers.

3 Points in the polls is what is is expected to deliver - in lots of key states...and nationally

This has been written about extensively at 538.com in their "On the Road" series, by Mark Nickolaus and myself.

The Republicans have repeatedly downplayed and denigrated the Obama ground game that won the primaries for him and has expanded so dramatically for the general election.

"Are they a mile wide and an inch deep?" asked Trey Walker, the McCain campaign's mid-Atlantic campaign manager, whose territory includes Virginia. "We'll find out on Election Day."

Michael Barone, the conservative columnnist and former pollster has been the cheerleader of these delusions that the youth driven ground game can't deliver:

The Obama campaign, in contrast, seems to be depending on youthful volunteers who seem unlikely to have such connections. Ambinder notes that, over the summer, the Obama organization concentrated on attracting more volunteers and only in September started concentrating on metrics of voter contacts. A disciplined approach, certainly. But how effective are all those volunteers? Are they as effective as those stocking-capped Perfect Stormers of the Howard Dean campaign in Iowa in January 2004? You saw those orange stocking caps swarming all over Des Moines, but they didn't end up producing many caucus votes.

Michael you obviously have not been to any Obama offices to see them teeming with people like me working there with our gray hair and experience, not a bunch of young idealistic kids.

Lets not forget that when McCain - our vaunted military expert - needed reinforcements in NC he could only find 10 staff to send there. Obama on the other hand made tactical adjustments a month a go moving 85 experienced staffers from GA to states where they were needed more and sent teams from ND and MT into MN and WI to shore up the teams already there and offset new McCain ad spending in those states. Having a trained army that you can move as needed is military tactics 101 and Obama showed his strategy allowed him to counter and overwhelm McCain's tactics on multiple fronts.

What the 538 boys have found as they have driven through the battleground states of CO,MO,NV,NM,IN,IA and OH chronicling their experiences is that the Obama offices are like busy, organized beehives 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week. The McCain offices were seldom open at all on weekends and during the week were weakly staffed and often not open. Advantage Obama!

From Time today here is what the Republican State Chairman had to say the other day to his office and volunteers:

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points -- for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true -- though that distorted reference to Obama's controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won't salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don't even know where Senator Obama was really born."

Great leadership . lies and fear mongering from a state chairman whose team is outmanned and outworked as they .

And as I sit here writing this post my now home team Atlanta Falcons field goal team just kicked the game winner with one second left to beat my old home team Chicago Bears by 2 at the buzzer...

If it is close on Nov. 4th anywhere in the nation the Chicago driven Obama team's field goal unit will make all the difference in state after state as well leading to at worst the winning electoral vote and at best the landlside that will allow Obama the ability to govern unfettered by a recalcitrant Republican minority as he works to get this nation back on track.

PS - Obama just opened his 3rd office in the Omaha NE 2 district because they needed more space for all their volunteer activities as he competes even there for the 1 electoral vote that would elect him if we had a 269-269 tie. But McCain had Sarah Palin fly in for a few hours for a fundraiser last weekend....