BY THE time John McCain got to his election party in Phoenix, Arizona, last night, the "McNasty" of the past few months had been replaced by "McNice".
Over the past few days friends and advisers had been regaled with anecdotes from the good old days, and McCain even made a self-deprecating appearance on Saturday Night Live.
The fighter was still there, and the negative TV commercials - endorsed by the candidate or not - continued to air, but it seemed that in his heart he knew the game was up.
After his final campaign events during election day, McCain was to appear at an election night "event" - the word "celebration" was avoided - at the Biltmore hotel's Frank Lloyd Wright ballroom, where he would be joined by his running mate, Sarah Palin, who cast her vote in Alaska yesterday morning.
In a departure from the normal election night ritual of a speech to a room of cheering or tearful supporters, McCain was scheduled to make his remarks before a closed group of advisers and close supporters in the hotel's garden.
At midnight on Monday, at the final campaign rally of an exhausting, near two-year quest for the presidency, McCain told the crowd in Prescott, Arizona, that the most important thing was to "get out the vote".
"It's been a long journey and we've got one more day," he told the crowd of a few thousand gathered in the city's historic central plaza. "We're closing in the polls. All we've got to do is get out the vote." After the rally, McCain, his wife Cindy and an entourage travelled to Phoenix, where the McCains have an apartment.
But he was up early, telling breakfast television that he was happy with his underdog status. "Look, I know I'm still the underdog, I understand that," McCain said.
"You can't imagine, you can't imagine the excitement of an individual to be this close to the most important position in the world, and I'll enjoy it, enjoy it. I'll never forget it as long as I live."
At 9am a small crowd greeted him with cries of "Go John! Go!" as he voted at the city's Albright United Methodist church, before visiting the swing states of Colorado and New Mexico.
On Monday, in his dash across seven states, he had visited Nevada, the third of the western states that threatens to move out of the Republican column. Even McCain's grip on his home state of Arizona has appeared tenuous: the two final polls here gave McCain a lead of 1 per cent and 4 per cent, within the margin of error.
There was some good news for McCain, however, as the Arizona Republicendorsed his candidacy. That was tempered by Tucson's Arizona Daily Star, which decided that "the future needs new tools and new expertise".
In Prescott voting was slow yesterday morning, perhaps due to the numbers who had already filled in their ballots. "We've had 50 per cent early voting in this precinct," said a poll worker as he surveyed the near empty car park outside the polling station at Prescott's United Methodist church shortly after 7am. "In previous years we've had barely any."
Despite Prescott's image as a Republican stronghold, not all voters were backing McCain. "This time around I saw a need for change and for hope," said Robert Espitia, sounding a little like a campaign commercial. "In the previous two elections I didn't vote, and I was undecided this year at the beginning. Honest to God I hope they finally do something about healthcare and education."
The choice of Prescott as the final resting place of the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign was laden with significance. Prescott was the starting and ending point for the presidential campaign of one of the nation's most legendary Republicans, Arizona's Barry Goldwater.
He lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. McCain has made a point of ending all his campaigns in the town in tribute to Goldwater; he has never lost an electoral race in Arizona.
On Monday night, McCain quoted another renowned Arizona political figure, Democrat Mo Udall. Arizona, he said, repeating one of his favourite lines, is "the only state in America where mothers don't tell their children they can grow up to be president of the United States".
Tomorrow, he added, "I'm going to reverse that and be president of the United States."
Making his way home at 1am, Jack Hendricks had seen it all before, starting with a glimpse of FDR on the back of a railroad truck in 1933 when Hendricks was three years old.
"There weren't as many people there," he confided. The politicians of that age, he said, "were more trustworthy. You can distil it down to a few words," he concluded: "Whose half-truths do you want to believe?" - ( Guardian service)