Candidates Make Final Dash as Race Winds Down

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Former President Bill Clinton appeared with President Barack Obama at a campaign event in Concord, N.H., on Sunday.

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Mitt Romney entered the final 48 hours of campaigning on Sunday with bravado tinged with urgent warnings to their supporters that the hard-fought race for the White House remained razor close.

The rivals started the day with rallies in the two competitive states where the presidential campaigns begin every four years and where the fates of their political futures could be decided this year at the last minute: Iowa and New Hampshire.

Joined by former President Bill Clinton in the shadow of the New Hampshire State House in Concord, Mr. Obama vowed to continue his efforts to improve a recovering economy and expressed the confidence of an incumbent that voters in the battleground states would give him the chance to try.

But he also betrayed the nervousness of a first-term president whose hopes for another four years — and the opportunity to continue shaping his legacy — hinges on a half-dozen states that could go either way on Tuesday.

“I am not ready to give up the fight, and I hope you aren’t, either, New Hampshire,” Mr. Obama said at a rally that attracted thousands of people, his voice already growing hoarse at the start of a long day of campaigning. “We have come too far to turn back now. We have come too far to let our hearts grow faint.”

“We will win New Hampshire,” he concluded. “We will win this election. We will finish what we started. We will renew those bonds that do not break.”

Mr. Romney spoke moments earlier in Des Moines, also expressing the certainty of success and telling about 4,400 supporters that the clock had nearly run out on the president’s time in office. He promised a new era of economic hope for families who are struggling.

“Instead of building bridges, he’s made the divide between our parties wider,” Mr. Romney said. “Let me tell you why it is he’s fallen so far short of what he’s promised: it’s because he cared more about a liberal agenda than he did about repairing the economy.”

Mr. Romney is racing from swing state to swing state with the intensity of a candidate who recognizes that he is trailing in the polls — if only slightly — behind Mr. Obama in many of the states he must win to accumulate the 270 electoral votes he needs to become president.

“We thank you; we ask you to stay with it. All the way, all the way to our victory on Tuesday night,” Mr. Romney told the crowd, urging it to work hard in the last hours. “It’s possible that you may have some friends or maybe even family members who haven’t made up their mind yet who to vote for.”

The two candidates have scheduled a flurry of rallies in the next two days to drum up the kind of enthusiasm that they hope will be evident at polling places on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama drew a crowd estimated at 14,000 people who gathered for an outdoor rally below the gleaming dome of New Hampshire’s capitol. It was bright and chilly, recalling any number of days that he and other candidates had walked the streets of Concord to win the nation’s first primary every four years.

Not far from where Mr. Obama spoke was a reminder of how New Hampshire almost dashed his dreams in 2008. On a line of granite stones in front of the State Library are chiseled the names of the winners of past primaries, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose victory in 2008 halted, for a time, Mr. Obama’s surge after he had won the Iowa caucuses.

The president was to move on to Florida and Ohio on Sunday before making final stops in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa on Monday. Mr. Obama is expected to head home to Chicago on Tuesday to watch returns from his campaign headquarters.

Mr. Romney’s schedule on Monday resembles the president’s as he heads to the handful of states that could determine the results on Tuesday. Mr. Romney plans events in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire on Monday after visiting Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia on Sunday.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Concord, N.H., and Ashley Parker from Des Moines.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Lucas plans 'little personal films' in future

NEW YORK (AP) — George Lucas is done with "Star Wars," but not with filmmaking.

The "Star Wars" creator says he's looking forward to making his "own little personal films" that he doubts will be for the theater crowd.

Lucas spoke Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 Gala, days after announcing the sale of his storied Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. The deal would allow for more "Star Wars" films.

Lucas was "very sad" let Lucasfilm go but excited about his educational foundation, which will benefit from the sale. He also plans to make more movies. His last one was this year's "Red Tails," about the Tuskegee Airmen, but he said he barely got it in theaters. He said the movies he's working on now "will never get into theaters."

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Well: The Mental Fallout of the Hurricane

In the small Connecticut town where I grew up, the tornado of 1979 remains the storm, a freak tornado packing 86-mile-per-hour winds that churned through the streets, killing three people, injuring hundreds and destroying several hundred homes and businesses, including many in my neighborhood.

I was 15 at the time, at home alone looking after my 10-year-old sister and 5-year-old brother. For months afterward, like others caught in the surprise storm, we struggled with memories of that afternoon. During the first few days, I kept reliving the moments huddled with my siblings in the corner; later, I had recurring nightmares and became paralyzed with fear whenever I heard a clap of thunder.

Even today, I tend to worry more than most whenever the sky looks odd or when the weather suddenly turns muggy and dark, the slightest hint of what my sister and I have come to call “tornado weather.”

For almost three decades now, health care experts have been studying the psychological effects of natural disasters and have found that disasters as varied as the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Andrew (1992) and Hugo (1989) left significant, disabling and lasting psychological scars in their wake. While individuals with pre-existing mental health issues were at particular risk, everyone was vulnerable. In New Orleans a month after Hurricane Katrina, for example, 17 percent of residents reported symptoms consistent with serious mental illness, compared with 10 percent of those who lived in surrounding areas and only 1 to 3 percent in the general population.

Most commonly and most immediately, the survivors suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms like recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, a hair-trigger temper and an emotional “numbing,” much of which could be considered normal in the first couple of months after a disaster. “It’s a pretty natural thing to have nightmares after living through a natural disaster,” said Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the effect of natural disasters on the mental health of survivors. “It would almost be abnormal if you didn’t.”

Over time, when those symptoms abated, survivors were able to move on. When they didn’t, or when other mood disorders like anxiety and depression appeared, mental health issues quickly became a leading cause of disability for survivors, further hampering other efforts at recovery.

But the research has also revealed that we can mitigate the psychological fallout, even after the disaster has occurred. Studies from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have shown that what communities, governments and even elected officials do in the weeks, months and years that follow can have a significant effect on how individuals fare psychologically.

For example, among Hurricane Katrina survivors, there were striking differences in the rates of mental health disorders, depending on how people felt about the difficulties they had finding food and shelter. Survivors who continued to face such adversity because of the government’s slow response had significantly higher rates of mental health problems.

“There’s no question that the best thing the federal, state and municipal governments can do to protect against psychopathology in these kinds of situations is to restore the day-to-day functioning that keeps everyone healthy,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, lead author of the study and chairman of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

For now, experts are predicting that the psychological fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be less severe than that from Hurricane Katrina. But their optimistic predictions rest in part on the response thus far of government officials and the larger community.

“People pull together at times like this,” Dr. Kessler noted. “To the extent that those affected by Sandy can build on this sense of community and get back to normal, it could be an opportunity for people to grow and even develop a sense of accomplishment because of what they’ve been through.”

What I remember today as clearly as the blinding whiteness of the tornado winds that enveloped our house and the terror that gripped my siblings and me back in 1979 are the state and local officials and rescue workers who appeared almost immediately, the churches and community organizations that organized shelters and fund-raisers, and the neighbors, sleeves rolled up, who cleared debris and cooked for one another.

When the new homes finally began to emerge from the rubble the following spring, it wasn’t the cookie-cutter skyline of raised ranches and colonials that was restored. Instead, the neighborhood became a showplace of modest but quirky family abodes — a brown, modern geometric house on one corner, a yellow, partly subterranean one a few doors down.

From a devastating storm, my neighbors had managed to build new dreams.

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A Storm-Battered Supply Chain Threatens Holiday Shopping

The economic effects of Hurricane Sandy are reverberating beyond areas hit by the storm as businesses warn customers of delays, try to get merchandise out of closed ports and face canceled orders.

In addition to shutting down shipping terminals and submerging warehouses, the storm also tangled up deliveries because of downed power lines, closed roads and scarce gasoline in parts of New York and New Jersey.

The supply chain is backing up at a crucial time, just as retailers normally bring their final shipments into stores for the holiday shopping season, which retailers depend on for annual profitability.

“Things are slowing down,” said Chris Merritt, vice president for retail supply chain solutions at the trucking company Ryder. “This whole part of the supply chain is clogged up.”

FedEx, for example, has rented fuel tankers to supply its delivery trucks as commercial gas stations run dry. Ryder has been hunting down rental trucks to add capacity. CSX, the major railroad company, was continuing to advise customers to expect delays of at least 72 hours on shipments. And retailers ranging from Amazon to Diane von Furstenberg have told customers to expect delays on shipments.

Many economists expect the storm to shave up to half a percentage point from growth in the fourth quarter. That is a big reduction, with growth estimated to reach an annual rate of 1 to 2 percent before the storm, and the economy facing other significant headwinds, including fiscal uncertainty in Washington.

While economic losses from the storm are expected to be significantly lower than those from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this storm’s impact has been intensified because the Northeast is densely populated.

The region is responsible for about $3 trillion in output, or roughly 20 percent of the country’s total gross domestic product, said Gregory Daco, a senior economist with IHS Global Insight. “Part of what was lost will be delayed, but part is lost forever,” Mr. Daco said.

Last week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reported that all of its major marine terminals were closed by the storm. While parts of the system have started to reopen, delays persist. The New York area’s port system is the largest on the East Coast, and the third largest in the nation. Last year, it handled $208 billion in cargo.

As a result of the closings, delays may ripple through the holiday season, according to Paul Tsui, chairman of the Hong Kong Association of Freight Forwarding and Logistics. As of Sunday, almost all rail service from the ports was suspended, terminals were damaged and much of the ports’ equipment was being reviewed to see if it still worked.

Several customers with facilities in the New York area told him “their warehouses are totally damaged, and presume the merchandise inside will have to be reported lost to insurance companies,” Mr. Tsui said.

“We are now coming into the cutoff for seasonal orders for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays,” he added, and companies that missed shipment deadlines must either send products by expensive air freight, pay a penalty to retailers for late shipments or face canceled orders.

Mr. Merritt of Ryder said he expected that some items that have already been advertised for sales on the day after Thanksgiving — traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year — would not get to stores in time.

The delays are hitting smaller merchants like Robert Van Sickle particularly hard.

His pet supply company, Polka Dog Bakery, was relying on a shipment of cardboard tubes from China with a merry design, intended to hold popular holiday dog treats. The products represent about 15 percent of sales at the company. But the New York Container Terminal in Staten Island, where the tubes arrived shortly before the storm, was devastated, and Mr. Van Sickle’s freight forwarder has been unable to track down the containers.

It is too late to reorder the tubes from China in time for the holidays, and Mr. Van Sickle has tens of thousands of baked dog treats piled up at his Boston headquarters. Insurance will cover the cost of the cardboard tubes, but not the finished products, and those payments will not come close to making up for lost revenue.

Last week, he was forced to call customers like L.L. Bean and tell them he probably could not fulfill their orders. “Without this product, we’re in trouble,” Mr. Van Sickle said. “I am a business owner and this is pretty much my year.”

In Cape May, N.J., Rich Layton’s six-week-old start-up, Layton Sports Cards, was supposed to be shipping sports card orders all week. But his apartment partially flooded, his Allentown distributor could not find clear roads to get to him, and U.P.S. held his other deliveries during the storm.

“It’s thousands of dollars worth of cards that people were already paying for,” Mr. Layton said.

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Obama and Romney Zero In on Battleground States

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama boarded Air Force One on Saturday to campaign in four states. They included Iowa, where he and Mitt Romney both planned to visit Dubuque.

MILWAUKEE — President Obama and Mitt Romney entered their final weekend of campaigning on Saturday facing a stubborn landscape of competitive states that right to the end are producing equal shares of hope and fear amid conflicting signals about the outcome.

The president, fighting to avoid being turned out of office four years after a rousing and historic victory, sought to shore up his standing in Midwestern states that had backed him enthusiastically last time. He assumed a defensive posture in Iowa and here in Wisconsin, two states where his advisers had openly scoffed at his rival’s chances only a few months ago.

Mr. Romney, in the closing days of his second quest for the White House, worked to harness the enthusiasm running through the Republican Party to overcome the challenges he confronts in building an Electoral College majority. He fought to secure critical states like Florida and Virginia without allowing others to slip away.

But after hundreds of millions of dollars in television commercials, months of campaigning and three widely viewed debates, the race was locked in the same dynamic that has defined it from the start: Mr. Obama, burdened by four years of economic struggle and partisan animosity but still an inspiration to his party, holding the slightest of edges in Ohio and other swing states, and Mr. Romney, bearer of the hopes of conservatives and voters convinced the nation is on the wrong path, fighting to overtake him.

The last defining question was whether Mr. Romney’s support had hit a ceiling — blunted by Mr. Obama’s opportunity to show leadership in the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — or whether he was on the verge of unseating a president in a dramatic finale.

Supporters, donors and advisers to Mr. Romney, in battleground states and at the campaign headquarters in Boston, said in conversations over the last two days that they had hoped to be closing the campaign in a stronger position, with clear leads in at least some of the battleground states. Now, several of them said, their optimism comes from the uncertainty in the closing hours of a contest, rather than any affirmative command of the race.

Mr. Obama raced through four states on Saturday as he tried to build enthusiasm among Democrats, appearing after a performance here by the singer Katy Perry to urgently tell a crowd of thousands, “We have come too far to turn back now; we have come too far to let our hearts grow weary.” Mr. Romney sought to tap into disappointment and discontent among voters as he rallied supporters, telling a rally in Portsmouth, N.H.: “He’s offering excuses. I’m offering a plan. I can’t wait to get started.”

The outlook expressed by both campaigns belied the tight nature of the contest in at least seven states. In their respective headquarters, advisers made convincing cases for why their candidate had the clearer path to 270 electoral votes, but when pressed they admitted to sleepless nights about a result that was expected to come down to only a sliver of the electorate.

The pursuit of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes drew the most attention, with the candidates scheduling multiple stops there before Tuesday, but the rest of the landscape was also highly volatile. Mr. Obama had the edge in Nevada and Mr. Romney in North Carolina, strategists agreed, while Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin were far closer.

Here in Wisconsin, Mr. Romney rallied voters on Friday as his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, a native son, fought to rewrite the historical trends of a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

The president, who carried Wisconsin by 14 percentage points in 2008, arrived here in Milwaukee on Saturday afternoon. His campaign advisers thought the contest here was narrow enough to send him back to the state on Monday for a rally with an even bigger music star, Bruce Springsteen.

“It’s always tantalizingly close for Republicans, and I assume that’s where we are at with this one,” said James E. Doyle, a former Democratic governor of Wisconsin, who was among the early supporters of Mr. Obama.

The defeat this year of an attempt to recall Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, left behind a well-trained contingent of voters that Mr. Romney and his team will try to return to the polls. State laws that allow same-day registration in Wisconsin and in Iowa were seen by advisers to the Obama campaign as an advantage in their efforts to turn out younger voters.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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George Lucas' filmmaking rooted in rebellion

LOS ANGELES (AP) — There's no mistaking the similarities. A childhood on a dusty farm, a love of fast vehicles, a rebel who battles an overpowering empire — George Lucas is the hero he created, Luke Skywalker.

His filmmaking outpost, Skywalker Ranch, is so far removed from the Hollywood moviemaking machine he once despised, that it may as well be on the forest moon of Endor.

That's why this week's announcement that Lucas is selling the "Star Wars" franchise and the entire Lucasfilm business to The Walt Disney Co. for more than $4 billion is like a laser blast from outer space.

Lucas built his film operation in Marin County near San Francisco largely to avoid the meddling of Los Angeles-based studios. His aim was to finish the "Star Wars" series— his way.

Today the enterprise has far surpassed the 68-year-old filmmaker's original goals. The ranch covers 6,100 acres and houses one of the industry's most acclaimed visual effects companies, Industrial Light & Magic. Lucasfilm, with its headquarters now in San Francisco proper, has ventured into books, video games, merchandise, special effects and marketing. Just as Anakin Skywalker became the villain Darth Vader, Lucas —once the outsider— had grown to become the leader of an empire.

"What I was trying to do was stay independent so that I could make the movies I wanted to make," Lucas says in the 2004 documentary "Empire of Dreams." ''But now I've found myself being the head of a corporation ... I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid."

After the blockbuster sale announcement Tuesday, Lucas expressed a desire to give away much of his fortune, donate to educational causes and return to the experimental filmmaking of his youth. Still, the move stunned those who've followed him. He'd contemplated retirement for years and said he'd never make another "Star Wars" film.

Dale Pollock, the author of the 1999 biography "Skywalking," said Lucas disdained the Disney culture in interviews he gave in the 1980s, even though he admired the company's founder. "He felt the corporate 'Disneyization' had destroyed the spirit of Walt," Pollock said.

Lucas said through a spokeswoman on Saturday that he never said such a thing. But his anti-corporate streak is renowned. In the Lucasfilm-sanctioned documentary "Empire of Dreams", Lucas says on camera that he is "not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry."

Growing up in the central California town of Modesto, the independent streak was strong in young Lucas. The family lived on a walnut ranch and Lucas' father owned a stationery store. But, like his fictional protege Luke, George had no interest in taking over the family business. Lucas and his father fought when George made it clear that he'd rather go to college to study art than follow in his father's footsteps.

Lucas loved fast cars, and dreamed that racing them would be his ticket out. A near-fatal car crash the day before his high school graduation convinced him otherwise.

"I decided I'd better settle down and go to school," he told sci-fi magazine Starlog in 1981.

As a film student at the University of Southern California, he experimented with "cinema verite," a provocative form of documentary, and "tone poems" that visualized a piece of music or other artistic work.

The style is reflected in some of the short films he made at USC: "1:42:08" focused on the sound of a Lotus race car's engine driving at full speed and "Anyone Who Lived in a Pretty How Town," inspired by an e.e. Cummings poem. In later interviews, Lucas described his early films as "visual exercises."

Lucas' intellectual explorations led to an interest in anthropology, especially the work of American mythologist Joseph Campbell, who studied the common thread linking the myths of disparate cultures. This inspired Lucas to explore archetypal storylines that resonated across the ages and around the world.

Lucas' epic battle with the movie industry began after Warner Bros. forced him to make unwanted changes to an early film, "THX 1138." Later, Universal Pictures insisted on revisions to "American Graffiti" that Lucas felt impinged on his creative freedom. The experience led Lucas to insist on having total control of all his work, just like Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney in their heyday.

"In order to get my vision out there, I really needed to learn how to manipulate the system because the system is designed to tear you down and destroy everything you are doing," Lucas said in an interview with Charlie Rose.

He shopped his outline for "Star Wars" to several studios before finding a friend in Alan Ladd Jr., an executive at 20th Century Fox. Despite budget and deadline overruns, and pressure from the studio, the movie was a huge success when it was released in 1977. It grossed $798 million in theaters worldwide and caused Fox's stock price at the time to double.

In one of the wisest business moves in Hollywood history, Lucas cut a deal with distributor Fox before the film's release so that he could retain ownership of the sequels and rights for merchandise. He figured in the 1970s that might mean peddling a few T-shirts and posters to fans to help market the movie. Over the decades, merchandising has formed the bedrock of his multi-billion-dollar enterprise, resulting in a bonanza for Lucas from action figures, toys, spinoff books and other products.

Industrial Light & Magic, the unit he started in a makeshift space in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, moved to the ranch in northern California and lent its prowess to other movies. It broke ground using computers, motion-controlled cameras, models and masks. Its reach is breathtaking, notably among the biggest science fiction movies of the 1980s: "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial," ''Poltergeist," ''Back to the Future," ''Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark," ''Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and more.

"Between him and (Steven) Spielberg, they changed how movies got made," said Matt Atchity, editor-in-chief of movie review website Rotten Tomatoes.

These days, the talent at ILM has spread around the globe, and many former employees have become top executives at other special effects companies, said Chris DeFaria, executive vice president of digital production at Warner Bros.

"You meet anybody who's a significant executive or artist at a company, they've spent their time at ILM or got their start there. That's probably one of George's greatest gifts to the business," DeFaria said.

Lucas helped make the tools that were needed for his films. ILM developed the world's first computerized film editing and music mixing technology, revolutionizing what had been a cut-and-splice affair. Pixar, the imaging computer he founded as a division of Lucasfilm, became a world-famous animated movie company. Apple's Steve Jobs bought and later sold it to Disney in 2006.

But the goliath Lucas created began to weigh on him. Fans-turned-critics felt the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy he directed fell short of the first films. Others believed his revisions to the re-released classics undid some of what made the first movies great.

Giving up his role at the head of Lucasfilm may shield him from the fury of rebellious fans and critics. He said in a video released by Disney that the sale would allow him to "do other things, things in philanthropy and doing more experimental kind of films."

"I couldn't really drag my company into that."

Still, Lucas is not planning on going to a galaxy far, far away.

Speaking on Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 event in New York, Lucas said: "It's 40 years of work and it's been my life, but I'm ready to move on to bigger and better things. I have a foundation, an educational foundation. I do a lot of work with education, and I'm very excited about doing that."

This week he assured the incoming president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy that he'd be around to advise her on future "Star Wars" movies —just like the apparition of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi helps Luke through his adventures.

"They're finishing the hologram now," he told Kennedy. "Don't worry."

___

Liedtke reported from San Francisco. Global Entertainment Editor Nekesa Mumbi Moody in New York contributed to this story.

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Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

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In Election-Night Party Planning, Flexibility Is a Must

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Frank Roskowski, director of technical services at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, says it's difficult to determine the contours of an election-night party.

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

A sign points to an early-voting site in Las Vegas, a city well suited to election parties because many of its ballrooms can expand or contract to accommodate victory or loss.

WHEN empty, the Bristlecone ballroom at the Aria Resort and Casino here is 57,000 square feet of beige carpeting and fluorescent lights. But two years ago, it was briefly the overstuffed epicenter of American politics.

This is where Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, held his election-night party after prevailing in a race that many had predicted he would lose. To Democrats, this was a site for triumph and relief; for Republicans, it was one for disappointment and loss.

For Frank Roskowski, it was something else entirely. “It was carnage. It was goofy,” he said, grinning as he surveyed the room last week.

Mr. Roskowski, whom everyone calls Mustache Frank, is Aria’s director of technical services, and he is reminiscing about the chaos and bustle of Nov. 2, 2010. Democrats lost a bunch of races across the country, not to mention control of the House of Representatives, and in the days before the votes were tallied it looked possible that Mr. Reid would be a casualty. Twenty-two television crews were jockeying for position in the Bristlecone, starting at 4 a.m.

“The TV trucks all were fighting because the thing is, they have to run cable to a connection point,” Mr. Roskowski recalls. “So the guy in the truck, if he gets here early, he only has to run 100 feet. If he’s late, he’s got to run 500. At 3 in the morning, they’re out there, I’m out there, my guys are out there and these TV guys are like: ‘Hey, you want doughnuts? You want beer? 50 bucks?’ I’m like: ‘Whoa. Here’s what was sent to me. You’re here, you’re here, you’re here.”

As a feat of event planning, there is nothing quite like an election-night party. At most festivities that call for banquet halls and cocktails, there is little doubt about the basic contours of the main event. If it’s a wedding, two people are married and the union is celebrated. Organize a conference, and a crowd will mingle and drink. But an election-night party could be an evening of triumph or fiasco, a celebration or a wake. It’s like a trip to the hospital that might culminate with a fatal diagnosis or a healthy baby.

Both tragedy and triumph must be accommodated. It’s fine for politicians to say, “When I’m elected” or “When I’m re-elected,” but the election-night party planner toils in the realm of the possible, not the fondly wished for. If you anticipate an enormous, victory-hailing crowd and you lose, you are looking at not just a defeated candidate but also a tableau that accentuates all the empty space where supporters were supposed to revel. So, what to do? Order a few thousand balloons but don’t fill them until the polls close? Hide the confetti until the victory is certified?

What is far more essential, it turns out, is a room that can be shrunk or enlarged, quickly. Which is why Las Vegas is arguably the greatest election-night city in the country. Expandable banquet rooms are a specialty here, and turning a space that fits 100 into a space that fits 2,000 — and vice versa — is a feat that can be pulled off in places like the Bristlecone ballroom in a matter of minutes. The trick is air walls, huge movable slabs that slide back and forth like pocket doors.

Ultimately, on election night in 2010 here, the space in front of all the television cameras fit a mere 150 people. That was a tiny fraction of the entire room, and it left a tundra of emptiness out of view of all those cameras. But priority No. 1 was making the room look packed.

“When you tuned in at home,” Mr. Roskowski says, “it looked body-to-body tight.”

THE worlds of electioneering and catering will again intersect on Tuesday, as candidates await the public’s verdicts in settings of their choosing. For catering, it is often an evening of modest profit — a typical event with a couple of hundred people will cost $50,000, depending on the quality and quantity of food and drink. For the campaigns, devising these get-togethers can seem both fraught and irrelevant at the same time. Yes, all the stagecraft and planning matter. But what is the point of worrying about the finish line when the race is in the last sprint? Many campaigns contacted for this article would not discuss their plans, or they kept the discussion to a bare minimum.

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