Obama close to choosing his running mate

Obama's schedule calls for him to awaken on Tuesday in Orlando, Fla., and by the end of the day be in Raleigh, N.C. By Wednesday, he is scheduled to be in Virginia.

The Obama campaign has cautioned against reading anything into his schedule, saying it could be changed in an instant to accommodate the plan to introduce the running mate.

Aides said the announcement would come at the earliest on Wednesday morning, and no later than Friday.

Obama's advisers said they wanted to time the announcement to get maximum publicity going into the convention, after a stretch in which Obama was on vacation in Hawaii and McCain made good use of having the political stage largely to himself.

Democrats close to the process said the ability to turn up information through Web searches had made it easier for Obama's search team — Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general — to plumb the backgrounds of prospective running mates with relatively little notice. In addition, because so many of the prospective running mates were senators, they were required to file annual financial disclosure reports.

Holder and Kennedy have been working largely out of Holder's law firm in Washington, using lawyers in his firm and others — many of whom are veterans of the process from having worked for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 — to check the backgrounds of the potential candidates.

Obama was briefed frequently throughout the proceedings — receiving updates by telephone and e-mail — and came to Washington for a handful of meetings with a very small group of senior advisers in the law offices of Covington and Burling, where Holder is a partner. With the vetting concluded, there was no activity on Monday in the firm's suite of offices on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In contrast to previous selection processes, Obama has been largely spared the obligation of staging elaborate cloak-and-dagger processes to interview prospective running mates because he has been campaigning with them in close quarters, giving him a chance to get to know them.

The rampant speculation during the selection process encompassed many of the best-known names in the party, from Kerry and Gore, to Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.

The big choice for Obama, advisers said, was the extent to which he needed to choose someone who would fill perceived holes in his resume — lack of experience, particularly in foreign policy — versus a candidate who would reinforce his promise of change or one that might help him win a contested state.