Obama taking campaign to Republican turf
WASHINGTON: Barack Obama's general-election plan calls for broadening the electoral map by challenging John McCain in typically Republican states from North Carolina to Missouri to Montana as Obama seeks to take advantage of voter turnout operations built in nearly 50 states in the long Democratic nomination battle, aides said.
On Monday, Senator Obama will travel to North Carolina - a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years - to start a two-week tour of speeches, town hall forums and other appearances intended to highlight differences with Senator McCain on the economy.
From there, Obama will head to Missouri, which last voted for a Democrat for president in 1996. His first campaign swing after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee last week was to Virginia, which last voted Democratic in 1964.
With Hillary Rodham Clinton now having formally bowed out of the Democratic nomination race and thrown her support to him, Obama wants to define the faltering economy as the paramount issue facing the country, a task probably made easier by ever-rising gasoline prices and the sharp rise in unemployment the government reported Friday. McCain, by contrast, has been emphasizing national security more than any other issue and has made it clear that he would like to fight the election primarily on that ground.
The two men are also contemplating their future choices of running mates, and as they do so, the notion of an Obama-Clinton ticket was powerfully endorsed Sunday by two senior Democrats: Senator Diane Feinstein of California, at whose home in Washington the two met privately on Thursday, and Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who was a leading Clinton supporter before urging her last week to quit the race.
"I've looked at every other possible candidate - no one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings: 18 million people committed to where she's going," Feinstein said on ABC. "If you really want a winning ticket, this is it."
Rangel, asked on CBS whether Obama should pick Clinton as his running mate, was effusive.
"I think it is an absolutely unbeatable ticket, and I think it would be terrific for the country," he said. "That combination, I think, is just revolutionary."
Obama has moved in recent days to transform his primary organization into a general election machine, hiring staff members, sending organizers into important states and preparing a television advertisement campaign to present his views and his biography to millions of Americans who followed the primaries from a distance.
In one telling example, he is moving to hire Aaron Pickrell, the chief political strategist for Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, who helped steer Clinton to victory in that state's primary, to run his effort against McCain there. In another, aides said, Obama has tapped Dan Carroll, an opposition researcher who gained fame digging up information on opponents' records for Bill Clinton in 1992, to help gather information about McCain. That is the latest evidence that, for all the talk on both sides about a new kind of politics, the general election campaign is likely to be bloody.
Obama's campaign is considering hiring Patti Solis Doyle, who was Clinton's campaign manager until a shake-up in February, the first of what Obama's aides said would be a number of hires from the Clinton campaign.
To counter persistent rumors and mischaracterizations about his background, Obama's advisers said they would begin using television advertising and speeches in a biographical campaign to present his story on his terms. But they suggested that their research had found that voters were not that well acquainted with McCain, either, signaling that the next few months would see the two campaigns scrambling to define the rival candidate.
"Even though Senator McCain has been on the scene for three decades, there are a lot of people who don't know a lot about him and there are a lot of people who don't know about us," said David Axelrod, Obama's senior strategist. Both campaigns are about to begin filling in the gaps.
Obama has sought in recent weeks to deal pre-emptively with issues that shadowed him in the primary and on which McCain has already challenged him. At a speech to Jewish leaders in Washington, he markedly toughened his statements about how he would deal with Iran after he was criticized for his pledge to meet with its leader; he now almost always wears a U.S. flag pin on his lapel after Republicans sought to raise questions about his patriotism by pointing to the absence of one.
Although the lengthy, contentious Democratic primary fight against Clinton exposed vulnerabilities in Obama that the Republicans will no doubt seek to exploit, it also allowed him to build a nearly nationwide network of volunteers and professional organizers.
Early assertions by presidential campaigns that they intend to expand the playing field are often little more than feints intended to force opponents to spend time and money defending states that they should have locked up, but Obama's fund-raising success gives him more flexibility than most to campaign in more places.
Obama's aides said some states where they intend to campaign - like Georgia, Missouri, Montana and North Carolina - might ultimately be too red to turn blue, that is, too reliably Republican to embrace a Democrat. But the result of making an effort in such places could force McCain to spend money or send him to campaign in what should be safe ground, rather than using those resources in battleground states like Ohio.
Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, said that the primary contest had left the campaign with strong get-out-the-vote operations in Republican states that were small enough that better-than-usual turnout could make a difference in the general election. Among those he pointed to was Alaska, which last voted for a Democrat in 1964.
Plouffe also pointed to Oregon and Washington, states that have traditionally been competitive and where Obama defeated Clinton, as places in which the campaign could have significant advantages.
Still, the Republican Party has a history of out-hustling and out-organizing the Democratic Party in national elections. The question is whether the more organically grown game plans that carried Obama to victory in Democratic primaries and caucuses can match the well-oiled organizations Republicans have put together.
McCain's advisers dismissed the Obama campaign claims as bluster. "We're confident about our ability to win those states," said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to McCain.
And Obama is not alone in trying to fight on what is historically unfriendly territory. A central part of McCain's strategy is an effort to pick up Democratic voters unhappy with the outcome of the primary and to compete for states that have recently voted Democratic, like Pennsylvania, where Obama was soundly beaten by Clinton, and Michigan, where Obama did not compete in the primary.
Media strategists in both parties said that Obama's campaign would have enough money to run a break-all-records advertising campaign. A national campaign on broadcast television, which has traditionally been prohibitively expensive for presidential campaigns, could make sense in this case.
Obama's 17-day economic tour, which starts Monday, comes as polls suggest acute public anxiety about the economy, fueled by a new wave of bad news, including a surge in the unemployment rate and a record rise in the cost of oil.
The economic push is intended to highlight the distinctions between Democratic and Republican proposals on health care, jobs, energy prices, education and taxes.
Jim Rutenberg and Brian Knowlton contributed reporting.
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