JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Barack Obama took to the arena stage here at 11:15 a.m. Monday, 37 hours and 45 minutes before the last polls close on his nearly two-year campaign for the presidency.

Obama was far, by just about any measure, from where he was when the first gun sounded on the primary season: an underdog junior senator trying to become the first black presidential candidate.

The Democrat from Illinois is still a junior senator, but that is about the only holdover from the first campaign stops in Iowa.

He now is the first black presidential candidate and is hardly an underdog going into Election Day.

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HASTINGS, Fla. — Back then they were football players or grocery store clerks or girls so pretty their boyfriends — now their husbands — are still at their sides.

On Saturday a few hundred graduates of Hastings High School were back, looking over their old school and looking for old friends.

Scores of people, some with the aid of canes or wheelchairs, came through the double doors of Hastings High and into the blue-and-white decorated auditorium for a school reunion.

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As a congressman extolled his father’s courage and honor in the parking lot of a Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge, 16-month-old Gareth Tutten sat in his grandfather’s arms, content playing with his mustached face and rimmed glasses.

Four-year-old Catherine Tutten also seemed to have few cares, other than her stuffed puppy dog. She spun about in a yellow sundress, waving to the old people around her with a bright smile.

Their mother, though, knew what they didn’t: Daddy’s not coming home.

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For two families, there are still no answers to a question that is, in the same breath, so simple yet so life-shattering: Why?

Why was Rachel Higgins, a 33-year-old mother working two jobs so she could afford to do mission work in the Philippines, driving the wrong way on Interstate 95 early Thursday morning?

Why didn’t she see the “Do not enter” signs on the exit ramp? Or, if she turned around in the median, why would she do that?

Why was no one involved in the crash wearing a seat belt?

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