a) consider if there are any kinds of venues (hotel ballrooms, blocks of hotel rooms, public spaces) in Washington D.C. that require a deposit that is not fully refundable;
b) see if the Obama campaign has secured any of these sites for inaugural parties which will be taking place in only 10 weeks' time and paid cash they wont get back.
I doubt unless they had utmost confidence of a blowout victory would they risk losing deposits or big chunks of deposits in securing such sites.
If they are playing a wait until the results are in, i.e. they wont book these venues until after November 5, that would perhaps show you that internally they have doubts, and that the rest of this is just media BS, disinformation, feigning Sun-tzu strength when actually, weak, etc.
Just a thought. They are not very good poker players I might add. I pay close attention to all verbal and non verbal cues when they have senior talking heads on. When Joe the Plumber hit, they were shitting in their pants on national TV, so I KNEW their internals where showing that this balded headed buy was taking their numbers south.
Joe the plumber will probably be the next Newt Gingrich, working hand-in-hand with future President Palin to clean up the festering swamp that is our capitol.