The manager who takes it on chin for his boss

BARACK OBAMA’S Ohio campaign manager has neither shaved his face in a month nor has he shown up to the office without his Columbus Clippers baseball hat.

Aaron Pickrell associated Obama’s good performances in the Ohio polls in late September with his personal hygiene and wardrobe choices at that time, so he kept the look.

The final days of the campaign have been a mix of strategy and superstition for those most intimately involved. They fret over the precision of early voting numbers and polling but also take comfort in the unscientific rituals that have provided some sense of control in a wildly unpredictable political season.

“It’s disgusting, isn’t it?” Pickrell, 36, said about his look, which involves a hairy neck and nearly disguised facial features. “Here’s what happened. We went ahead in the polls, two polls in a row. I had been lazy for a week and hadn’t shaved and had been wearing my hat to work and after the second poll came out that had us up, I decided, well, something is going right here, I’m not going to mess with it and here I am.”

There are no reports yet to match operative James Carville’s 1992 decision not to change his underwear for an extended period of time when things were going well for Bill Clinton.

But chief strategist David Axelrod has been carrying the same pink quartz heart in his pants pocket for about three weeks. A woman he didn’t know approached him at an event and gave it to him.

“She seemed to have an aura about her,” Axelrod said. “We have been doing pretty well since then.”

Mark Lippert, a senior foreign policy adviser who travels with Obama, carries a massive rucksack every day. The Navy reservist used the desert-coloured, multi-pocketed backpack during a year’s deployment in Iraq, so he figures it might be powerful enough to deliver good luck in a presidential campaign, too.

Obama likes to say he’s superstitious, but he let himself speak on Sunday night about what many in his campaign ranks try not to think — let alone say out loud — for fear of jinxing it: He might be headed for victory.