Tearful Obama Ends Campaign in Iowa

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

DES MOINES, Iowa ' At one point even feeling the need to wipe a tear from his eye, President Obama ended his presidential campaign Monday night with an emotional appeal to voters in the state that started it all, asking Iowans to help him finish what he started four years ago.

'We have made real progress over these last four years,' the president told an estimated crowd of 20,000 standing outside in the bitter cold. 'But Iowa we are here tonight because we have more work to do. We are not done yet on this journey. We have more road to travel.'

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Just steps away from the campaign office set up for his improbable victory in the 2008 Iowa Caucuses, a nostalgic Obama told Iowans they taught him 'to bet on hope.'

'To all of you who have lived and breathed the hard work of change, I want to thank you. You took this campaign and you made it your own,' he said as he wiped away a tear streaming from his left eye. Obama concluded the final event of his self-proclaimed 'last campaign' by retelling the story of Edith Childs, the South Carolina woman who coined his 'fired up, ready to go' rallying cry. It's the same anecdote he told in the final rally of his 2008 campaign.

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'That shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room. And if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change a world,' Obama said as he fought through a hoarse voice at his third rally of the day in as many states. The president said that he'd tried to arrange for Childs to attend this final rally, but she told him she still believed he could win North Carolina on Tuesday, and she was going to knock on doors to help get out the vote.

'Iowa, in 2008 your voice changed the world. And Edith Childs asked me to ask you that if you're willing to still stand with me tomorrow' If you're willing to make sure we finish what we started, she's pretty sure we'll win Iowa. She's pretty sure we'll win this election ,' he continued to cheers and applause.

'She just had one question for you. Are you fired up?,' he asked as the crowd chanted back 'ready to go!' 'Iowa, tomorrow let's remind the world just why the United States of America is the greatest nation on earth.'

Survivors Speak on Sandy Ship Sinking

Crew members from the HMS Bounty, who were rescued as the tall ship sank of the coast of North Carolina last week, are speaking for the first time about their experience as they weathered Hurricane Sandy and the loss of two of their crew mates.

The dramatic sinking of the Bounty and harrowing rescue of its crew last Monday created some of the most enduring images during Hurricane Sandy. In an ABC News exclusive, the ship's 14 surviving crew members are opening up about their rescue after they tried to weather the storm.

They described the chaos as they abandoned ship and the Bounty was slammed by a giant wave. The 14 survivors, still together a week after the disaster, are still chiefly concerned with honoring those who didn't make it -- their captain, Robin Wallbridge, and deckhand Claudine Christian.

For first mate John Svendsen the call to abandon ship was one of the toughest he'd ever made.

"We determined a safe time when we knew the ship would still be stable and we could get everyone on deck and change our focus from saving the ship to saving every life," said Svendsen, who credits Capt. Wallbridge's endless drills and preparation for the 14 lives that were saved.

But the ship's leadership lost all control once a giant wave broadsided the ship, knocking some of the crew -- already in their survival suits -- into the roiling sea.

"It was [like a] washing machine in an earthquake ' while going down a giant slide," crewmember Laura Groves told ABC News.

The crew says their unexpected adventure began on October 25, as the ship set sail from Connecticut. Captain Wallbridge wrote on Facebook that with Hurricane Sandy on the move, "a ship is safer at sea than in port." But three days into the voyage, the crew found themselves in the middle of the ferocious storm, with heaving waves three stories high.

"The weather was so bad and we had so little control," said Douglas Faunt.

"It took every ounce of my strength to focus through to survive," said first mate Svendsen.

Winds were tearing at the crew at 70 mph, and by the fourth day the ship, which was constructed for the 1962 film "Mutiny on the Bounty" and later featured in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," had been taking on water for 24 hours.

Crew members on the Bounty had trained for rough weather countless times, they said.

"We been through two other hurricanes," Daniel Cleveland said. "We were literally launching the life rafts, and she went over."

The ship was thrown on its side, tossing crew members into the waves. They wore red survival suits designed to help them float.

"At that moment I couldn't be sure who the red suits were around me," Cleveland said.

Hours after being thrown into the water and clambering into the life rafts, they began to hear the beating rotors of Coast Guard helicopters. But they were far from safe, with the weather uncertain and one of the most daring Coast Guard rescues in memory underway.

"When the helicopters showed up, I think everyone in the life raft just started hooting and hollering," Cleveland said.

Suddenly a Coast Guard rescue swimmer launched himself from a chopper and swam toward them -- popping his head into their raft and heaving himself in.

Obama, Romney Battle for Mantle of 'Change'

Voters go to the polls today to decide a dead even race between President Obama and Mitt Romney'two candidates for the nation's highest office, battling for ownership of the mantle of "change."

Obama, as an insurgent and historic candidate in 2008, used soaring rhetoric of hope and change to convince a jaded and economically insecure nation that its best days were ahead. But it remains to be seen tonight whether the durability of his message and his appeal will survive for a second term or was seen by voters as little more than flowering rhetoric.

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there," Obama said on election night 2008.

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Four years later, it is that same message that Romney has adopted on the trail, promising to foster the economic growth he says Obama has failed to deliver as president.

"President Obama promised change, but he could not deliver it. I promise change, and I have a record of achieving it," Romney states in what has become a key part of his closing argument in the final days of the campaign.

After a 19-month long campaign, the two men are statistically tied in nearly every major poll in the final days, including the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Obama's reelection predicament is as much a product of the harsh reality of the country's rapid fall into economic recession in Obama's first year in office, as it is a reflection of the reality of partisan gridlock that characterized Obama's first term in office and has tarnished his 2008 promise to change the way Washington works.

Despite coming to the White House cushioned by a near 60-vote super majority in the Senate and a 78-vote majority in the House of Representatives, Obama faced opposition nearly immediately when he sought approval for a $787 billion stimulus package.

As president, the man who campaigned on bringing the country together, who pledged to "heal the divides that have held back our great progress," trudged week after week to the halls of Congress in the first weeks of his presidency'courting votes from resistant Republicans who opposed the bill's massive price tag and many of its component parts. In the end, not a single Republican would back the bill.

And so it went, bill after bill. First the failure of comprehensive climate change legislation, then the difficult passage of the health care bill which became law on March 23, 2010 after a year of acrimonious debate, again without the help of a single Republican vote.

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The health care legislation also touched off historic backlash in the form of the "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party movement, which first exploded at congressional town hall meetings across the country, and eventually drove Republicans to a majority in the House and shrank the Democratic Senate majority to 51 votes on an anti-tax, deficit reduction platform.

It is as the leader of this political party that Mitt Romney, a Republican governor from the Democratic state of Massachusetts, emerged.

To do it, he would need to amass a political apparatus early that could endure a long and bruising Republican primary, and raise enough money to compete against Obama's demonstrated ability to raise nearly $800 million.

Fla. County to Extend Early Voting

A judge extended early voting hours in one Florida county on Sunday after the state Democratic Party sued in an effort to give people more time at the polls.

Some voters had faced waits several hours long on Saturday, the last scheduled day of early voting. The judge ruled on a lawsuit filed late Saturday in Orange County after an early voting site was shut down for several hours. The Winter Park library was evacuated when a suspicious package ' a cooler ' was found outside. It was later detonated by a local bomb squad.

Bill Cowles, the Orange County elections supervisor, said that voters who show up on Sunday will be asked to use a provisional ballot. The extra hours will be offered at only the Winter Park library.

A Republican Party spokesman said the party was not challenging the decision. Brian Burgess said state law requires provisional ballots to be used whenever a court orders an extension of voting hours.

The Democratic state party also filed a federal lawsuit Sunday morning seeking more voting time in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Voting in Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County didn't wrap up until early Sunday morning because voters standing in line when the polls closed were allowed to vote.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and other Democrats asked Gov. Rick Scott this past week to use his emergency powers to extend early voting. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature last year cut the number of days available for early voting from a maximum of 14 days to eight days.

Scott and state election officials, however, turned down the extension requests. Secretary of State Ken Detzner maintained that there was not a true emergency that justified the extension. Chris Cate, a spokesman for Detzner, said that the state did not plan to appeal the decision to reopen the Winter Park location.

The federal lawsuit says counties should offer absentee ballot voting at local election offices if early voting cannot be extended. Both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties said they planned to do that.

"I decided to open because we are allowed to do so," said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher.

Bucher noted that voting in her county did not wrap up until 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Her office started accepting absentee ballots at 9 a.m.

Christina White, deputy supervisor with Miami-Dade County, said the county also decided to accept absentee ballots for four hours on Sunday at its main office.

"We are hoping that (the Democratic Party) is happy with that," White said.

Broward County is also allowing voters to pick up absentee ballots on Sunday, but only if they made an appointment in advance.

Absentee ballot voting differs from early voting in that voters must fill out their ballot, place it an envelope and then sign it. The ballot envelopes are opened later and then fed into voting machines.

During early voting, voters place their ballots directly into the voting machines.

The Orange County lawsuit asked that early voting be extended at Winter Park and that the court ask local television and radio stations to let voters know about it.

The lawsuit included sworn statements from several voters who said they waited in line for hours and were turned away because voting was suspended at the site. A volunteer with the campaign of President Barack Obama said that the crowd of voters dwindled from 300 to just 40 after voting was halted.

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Nor'easter Following in Superstorm Sandy's Path

Commuters streaming into New York City on Monday endured long waits and crowded trains, giving the recovering transit system a stress test a week after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the eastern third of the country, with New York and New Jersey bearing the brunt of the destruction.

Trains were so crowded Monday on the Long Island Rail Road that dozens of people missed their trains. With PATH trains between New Jersey and Manhattan still out, lines for the ferry in Jersey City quickly stretched to several hundred people by daybreak.

One commuter in line pleaded into his cellphone, "Can I please work from home? This is outrageous," but many more took the complicated commute as just another challenge after a difficult week.

"There's not much we can do. We'll get there whatever time we can, and our jobs have to understand. It's better late than absent," said Louis Holmes of Bayonne, as he waited to board a ferry in Jersey City to his job as a security guard at Manhattan's Sept. 11 memorial site.

The good news in New York City was that, unlike last week, service on key subway lines connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn under the East River had been restored. But officials warned that other water-logged tunnels still weren't ready for Monday's rush hour and that fewer-than-normal trains were running ' a recipe for a difficult commute.

On Long Island, Janice Gholson could not get off her train from Ronkonkoma and Wyandanch because of overcrowding, and ended up overshooting her stop.

"I've never taken the train before. There were people blocking the doorway so I got stuck on the train," she said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the subway to work Monday. He was joined by many of the students returning to class in the nation's largest school system. About 90 percent of the 1,700 schools reopened for the first time since Sandy hit last Monday, the mayor said.

At Public School 2 in Chinatown, the playground was once again full of the sounds of children laughing and shouting as they played basketball before school started. Samantha Martin, a fifth-grader at P.S. 75 on the Upper West Side, made it to school from the Bronx with time to spare on the subway.

"It was packed but I'm happy. Home is boring!" Martin said.

The longer commute times were actually a lesser problem for many families who left homes and apartments that have been without power for almost a week. In Westchester County, Liliana Matos said dropping her boys off at Colonial School in Pelham gave her a chance to "call Con Ed and get on their backs" about the loss of power. For the last three days, they have been staying at a hotel because the house is too cold.

In Jersey City, investment advisor Barbara Colucci, was traveling from a house without power and the family's car was low on fuel because of persistent gasoline shortages.

"I can't wait until the PATH and light rail are up and running again, but first I'd like power in my house quite honestly," she said. "We're sleeping on air mattresses but we have heat so we can't complain but I'd like to get back to a bed ' it's been awhile ' and back to a regular commute."

Repair crews have been laboring around-the-clock in response to the worst natural disaster in the transit system's 108-year history, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota said Sunday.

Obama, Romney Deliver Closing Arguments

The candidates will spend the final 24 hours of this long presidential race bouncing around the country, rallying supporters at 14 scheduled events across nine battleground states.

President Obama is set to hit urban centers in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa, with Bruce Springsteen tagging along as his opening act. Jay-Z is scheduled to join the campaign at a mid-afternoon gathering in the Buckeye State.

Like the president, Mitt Romney will make one last play for Ohio, arriving in Columbus four hours after Obama leaves for Iowa. It will be the Republican's third stop in a day that sees him track north from Florida -- where the wait to register an early vote this weekend lasted as long as six hours -- to Virginia, ending the night with one last rally in New Hampshire.

If the Romney ticket doesn't win enough votes to unseat President Obama on Tuesday night, it won't be because Paul Ryan was a lazy campaigner. The vice presidential candidate will make five stops Monday, in five different states, covering four time zones. He closes out the election season back home, with a late night rally in Milwaukee, Wis.

While the candidates push their supporters to the polls and smile for the cameras in what they expect to be packed arenas, parks, and airplane hangars ' at least seven of the events will be hosted at airports - there have been some rumblings from Republicans, GOP strategist Karl Rove among them, that Romney's campaign might have been dealt an insurmountable blow by Superstorm Sandy.

"The hurricane is what broke Romney's [post-debate] momentum," former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said on CNN Sunday morning. "Any day that the news media is not talking about jobs and the economy, taxes and spending, deficit and debt, 'Obamacare' and energy, is a good day for Barack Obama."

The Romney campaign, though, insists it is traveling steadily along a well-charted course to victory on Tuesday.

"I don't look at what happened with the storm and how it affected so many people through a political lens," Romney adviser Kevin Madden said Sunday. "We are focused on what we can do to make sure that the enthusiasm that we have seen in states that it's part of helping our get out the vote efforts in all these key battlegrounds and then just focusing on the message. So I wouldn't entertain the same notion that those folks did."

And in Cleveland Sunday, Romney made one last argument for dismissing President Obama from office after a single term.

"He promised to do so very much, but, frankly, he fell so very short," Romney said. "He promised to be a post-partisan president, but he's been most partisan; he's been divisive, blaming, attacking, dividing. And by the way, it's not only Republicans that he refused to listen to; he also refused to listen to independent voices."

Obama seems to have taken on a more fatalistic approach, telling 14,000 supporters in New Hampshire Sunday that the election was in their hands, joking that he'd be little more than a "prop" the rest of the way.

"It's now up to you," he said, former President Bill Clinton once more on hand to warm up the chilly crowd. "That's how a Democracy works, right? That ultimately, it's up to you. You have the power. You are shaping the decisions for this country for decades to come. Right now. In the next two days."

But that doesn't mean the Democrats are done trying to convince voters how to exercise that power. ABC News obtained a set of talking points distributed by the party to surrogates for their last round of chatter with the press.

Among the lines you can expect to hear today: "We know and trust President Obama. We know what he believes, where he stands, and that he's willing to make tough decisions even when they're not politically convenient. We know he'll fight for middle-class families every single day, as hard as he knows how."

They've also been asked to deliver one last round of attacks on the Republican challenger.

According to the memo, "Gov. Romney has been using his talents as a salesman to dress up the same policies that failed our country and crashed our economy, and offers them up as change."

Marathon Canceled Too Late for Many

Fresh off his flight from San Francisco Friday afternoon, Leland Kim had just picked up his numbered marathon bib and registration packet at the Javits Center and was headed to the ING New York City Marathon Expo.

Then he got a text message from a friend: "We're so sorry the marathon got canceled."

Confused, Kim asked someone working at the expo about it, and was told the marathon was still going on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been saying so all week. And Kim had already spoken to runners who'd come from New Zealand, Argentina, Russia and Ireland.

But Sharon McNary, a seasoned runner from Pasadena, Calif. , soon saw people at the Javits expo walking with their heads bowed, talking into cell phones and texting as rumors of a cancellation circulated.

Although no official email came from the New York Road Runners, the official organizers of the race, those at the expo soon realized the rumors were true. Presenters folded up their booths and went home, said McNary.

"There were a few people who were expressing their anger pretty loudly, but for the most part, I think people understood that the timing was just not right for it," McNary said.

Earlier this week, Kim and his partner kept their eyes on the news as they watched superstorm Sandy unfold, wondering whether their eight months of training for their first marathon would be for naught.

The 26.2-mile race seemed unfathomable last winter, when a 3-mile run was exhausting. But this week, with the finish line in sight, they listened to Bloomberg say over and over again that the race was on. Even Friday morning, when they left for the airport, they were certain they would be running together through New York's five boroughs.

And then that text message from a friend came.

"I felt like it was kind of taken away from us at the last minute," Kim said. "I would have understood if, shortly after the hurricane, it was canceled. ' We definitely saw the devastation, and we definitely were concerned for the people that were affected by this not only in New York but in other parts of the East Coast."

He did not get an official cancellation email from the New York Road Runners until Saturday at 11:51 a.m., more than 12 hours after the mayor and race CEO Mary Wittenberg announced the race was off.

Robert Brink, a marathoner from Manhattan who was still without power, said he still hadn't gotten the official cancellation notice.

"I can't believe they still haven't sent out emails as far as I can tell," Brink said. "Especially for foreigners. I'm sure there's probably going to be some people who are flying out here who still think it's on."

The New York Road Runners did not immediately respond to a request from ABCNews.com for comment, but its email's auto reply still begins with "Thank you for your message. We are in full execution mode for the 2012 ING New York City Marathon."

Brink said he feels bad for out-of-state runners who went through the "roller coaster" of canceling and rescheduling flights as the storm moved up the Atlantic coast. Because the race was still on, they had to find a way to New York despite the frozen air traffic, only to find out that the race had been canceled once they arrived.

"I totally understand it should have been canceled because it's not right if there's people hurting," he said. "But my first reaction was, look, you made the call to go through with it. At this point, assuming no one's going to die by holding it, you just kind of have to live with that choice."