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There's No Place Like HomeThe mood in Hyde Park—and what it says about Obama.

By Meghan O'RourkePosted Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, at 6:08 PM ET

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Today, of course, there's a feeling that action is kicking into gear. At 7:30 this morning, Hyde Park had a hushed and formal feeling and the calm quiet of barely contained excitement. Couples with baby strollers walked together from the poll stations down leaf-strewn streets; the air was unseasonably warm, almost mildewy. Outside Barack Obama's house—an imposing mansion, in the grand Hyde Park tradition, at Hyde Park Boulevard and Greenwood—stood eight or so cops (most wearing bulletproof vests) guiding pedestrians away from the house and down another street.

Barack and Michelle were voting with their daughters at the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School a few blocks away. I wandered over. Landscaping trucks lined the streets, and workers were busy clearing away ivy and leaves, as if to make way for new growth. The Obamas had just left the school when I arrived. But the line to vote still stretched out the door, and cameramen were interviewing voters. Off to the right, a group of kids were laughing and playing. One asked a teacher, "Do we have to go to school today?"

Over at Medici, a local coffee shop and bakery Obama used to frequent, I bought a coffee and a chocolate croissant; the cashiers were bustling around, and one said crossly to another: "I can't do that today; I'm going to vote." On the back of the cashiers' shirts it said: "OBAMA EATS HERE." I asked one when she'd last seen him.

"Not since February," she said. "But Michelle and the kids eat brunch here every Sunday—and it's Secret Service everywhere." She rolled her eyes. I asked if she'd had time to vote yet, and she said: "I'm voting when I get off at 2. I've never been so frantic to vote. If I have to wait in line until tomorrow morning, I will."

Outside, the windows in both the stately homes and the apartment buildings here are cluttered with Obama-Biden signs and the word "HOPE." Along one of the boulevards, not far from where a man sells incense out of the back of his car, you can find all sorts of bootlegged Obama swag, and in the storefronts are badly screened T-shirts of Obama looking ghostlike and pockmarked. There are no T-shirts with Milton Friedman's face on them, though one store here sells a University of Chicago shirt that reads, "Where Fun Comes to Die." Tonight, if Obama wins, surely fun will be alive in the streets for at least one night.