CHILLICOTHE, Ohio, Nov. 3. 2008
A Hard-Fought Battle In Hard-Hit Ohio
Washington Post: Decisive State In 2004 Is Economically Battered And Electorally Coveted
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Play CBS Video Video Obama On His Aunt Katie Couric speaks with Barack Obama about reports that his Aunt from Kenya is living in the U.S. illegally.
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Video Fight To The Finish John McCain is still confident that he will be victorious on Nov. 4th and is making stops in critical swing states like Ohio and Pa. Chip Reid is with the campaign.
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Video Keeping The Momentum With only two days before the election, Barack Obama is hoping to keep the momentum going by focusing on the issues and playing it safe. Dean Reynolds has more.
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CBS Evening News Where They Stand The CBS Evening News provides an in-depth look at the issues facing the 44th president.
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With the presidential campaigns pressing to get out the vote in the race's final hours, no state is being more fiercely contested than Ohio, which provided President Bush with his decisive margin of victory four years ago.
Both tickets sought to rally their supporters Sunday, with Sen. Barack Obama holding events in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee, closed out the race's last weekend with events in Canton and other cities across the state.
Both sides expect a close finish, something of a paradox in a struggling state in a year in which the poor economy is driving support for Obama and other Democrats. Ohio lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs this decade and its median income has dropped by 3 percent, yet polls show Obama with no more than a narrow lead in a state that Sen. John F. Kerry lost to Bush by two points.
That may be because the weak economy has driven away younger and college-educated residents who lean Democratic, because abortion remains a potent issue and because an African American candidate with an unusual name remains a tough sell in some corners. But voters also say the poor economy has not swung more voters to Obama precisely because the state has been down for so long -- many have come to see the woes as systemic, and not easily blamed on a particular party.
Obama has mounted an ambitious effort to correct the mistakes of Kerry's campaign, which boosted turnout in cities but lost the state by ceding exurban counties and rural areas. Obama has scattered dozens of offices and scores of paid organizers across central, southern and western Ohio, hoping to find enough pockets of support to put him over the top.
The Republicans aim to counter that approach with the formidable network of volunteers and reliable GOP voters built by strategist Karl Rove, which has been enhanced by high-tech telephone systems that allow supporters to place more calls than in the past. In the party's strongest areas, the exurbs of Cincinnati and Columbus, offices are packed with veterans of 2004 -- nearly all women, many of them antiabortion activists wearing lipstick pins in honor of Palin.
Elsewhere, though, are signs that Democrats have the organizational edge. In polling in Ohio, more voters report being contacted by Obama's campaign, which has 89 offices to Sen. John McCain's 46. With its operation organized into 24 regions and hundreds of "neighborhood teams," the Democrats are better prepared than in 2004 to absorb out-of-state volunteers.
Here in Chillicothe, in a county in south-central Ohio that Bush won by 10 points in 2004, Republicans have focused mainly on distributing yard signs, a much bigger priority for McCain statewide than it is for Obama. Unlike in 2004, Republicans in Chillicothe have made do without a paid organizer and did little canvassing until this past weekend.
"We're talking to more people by letting them walk through our door than by canvassing," said Bill Jenkins, a retired corrections officer who is helping to lead the campaign in town. "If they're coming through the door, we know it's going to be a good conversation, as opposed to going door to door and having people say, 'Get off my porch.'
The Democrats have been more active. To close the gap, Tammy Simkins has spent weeks recruiting volunteers, knocking on doors and calling voters, her eye fixed on the number of votes she has been told her territory must produce: 1,482.Ways To Win
Calculate your own path to the presidency with our Electoral Vote prediction map.
She took heart that the Obama operation had been so much more organized than the McCain one based just up Main Street. But then came word last week that Palin was visiting. Residents rushed the GOP office for tickets, providing a treasure trove of new voter names, and a crowd jammed downtown the next day to cheer Palin.
"I'm anxious," conceded Simkins, 39, a mother who recently returned to college. "We need to make sure we get all our voters to the polls."
* * *
In 2004, Kerry carried Ohio's large and medium-size cities, the industrial Mahoning Valley around Youngstown, and the northern edge of Appalachian Ohio. Bush carried exurbs, most of Appalachia and the rest of rural Ohio.
This year, the Republicans are targeting the Mahoning Valley, where Obama was crushed in the state's Democratic primary. Democrats typically win more than 60 percent of the vote there, and the Obama campaign says the region is holding strong, thanks partly to the efforts of organized labor. But McCain and Palin have visited repeatedly, and even as polls nationally show Obama faring better with white working-class voters than Kerry did, valley Republicans say they are winning supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as rank-and-file union members. They have given out more than 1,000 "Democrats for McCain" signs in Trumbull County alone.
"I'm struck by the uneasiness people express about Obama," said Mahoning County GOP Chairman Mark Munroe. "He doesn't seem to fit real well with my Midwesterners here."
In Columbus, one of several cities where Obama is counting on big support from both white and black voters, Franklin County Commissioner Marilyn Brown said she has been unsettled by questions about Obama's trustworthiness when she speaks to fellow Jewish voters. But in general, Brown is upbeat. The Obama operation, she said, is better run than Kerry's, which relied on an outside group for turnout help that by law could not be coordinated with the campaign.
Most encouraging for the campaign are the numbers from early voting. Of the 30,000 people who cast early ballots through Oct. 26 in Franklin County, 15,000 were Democrats and 1,260 were Republicans, with the rest unaffiliated. Democrats have returned absentee ballots at twice the rate of Republicans.
"It's a little frightening to me," Brown said. "You have to believe that the Republican Party, having been so well organized in '04, will have something coming, but I don't know what they're doing. I just can't believe they can make up this much ground."
Top McCain staff members in Ohio dismiss Obama's early-voting lead, saying the Democrats have simply been getting their most reliable voters to the polls, while Republicans have been targeting only sporadic voters for early voting.
Obama's biggest push has come far from the cities. In Appalachian Ohio, he is being aided by Gov. Ted Strickland, who hails from the region and has put his statewide network behind Obama, an asset Democrats lacked in 2004.
Polls suggest, though, that the Obama campaign is having the most success improving on Kerry's margins in central, western and southwestern Ohio, where it is trying to capitalize on discontent among independents who voted for Bush in 2004. In Warren County, an exurb between Dayton and Cincinnati, Bush won with 72 percent in 2004. That year, the Democrats' office was open 10 hours per week; now it's open 10 per day, with more than 300 volunteers available.
Read more of the latest news from the campaign in Ohio from CBS News and around the Web
The campaign hopes to increase the Democrats' share in Warren from 27 percent to 35 percent. It is counting on voters like John Frame, 45, who supported Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole but has been disillusioned by Bush and sees Obama as a "different kind of Democrat." Tapping the Wall Street Journal next to his plate at a Bob Evans restaurant, Frame said that people like him, who stay informed and play by the rules, have been let down by a Republican Party that devalued knowledge and accountability.
By Alec MacGillis
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
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Add a Comment See all 269 Comments
- ..And their ain''t nuthin'' but steers, and queers in Texa$......
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Tomorrow will be a dark day for America. Obama supporters will either protest by rioting and burning or they''''ll celebrate by rioting and burning.
Posted by One_Texan - Reply to this comment
- When it came to New Hampshire, Mr. McCain, I would like to tell you I am sorry for your loss.......But I would be lying " I AM SO HAPPY CELEBRATING " HEY JOE, JOE, JOE THE PLUMBER WHERE ARE YOU????????
I am sending you this link for your entertainment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUc62jD-G0o
Have fun you pathetic loser, by the way you could get a better girl for running mate on Vegas for less money - Reply to this comment
- America is fed up with all the scandals from Republican crooks, liars, perverts, lawbreakers, and used-car salesmen hucksters that have trashed this country over the last eight years:
Bill Frist
Randy "Duke" Cunningham
Jack Abramoff
Tom DeLay
Mark Foley
Larry Craig
Ted Haggard
Bob Ney
Trent Lott
Ted Stevens
Alberto Gonzales
Donald Rumsfled
Karl Rove
Scooter Libby
*** Cheney
George Bush
Lying about reasons for going to war with Iraq (Uranium,
false claims about Iraq''s supposed weapons of mass destruction.)
Torture in Abu Ghraib.
The treasonous exposure of a CIA agent by White House officials.(Plamegate)
Letting Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora
Halliburton%u2019s overcharging and outright fraud for services in Iraq
Lack of body armor for troops
Enron
Katrina
Illegal wiretapping
Political influence peddling
S.e.x scandals
Troopergate
Travel fraud
Election tampering
Ballooning federal debt
Economy in a tailspin
And these are just for starters%u2026
Enough is enough, America is ready for change! - Reply to this comment
- Ohio is full of suckers -the Bush vote got them serfdom & many are too brainwashed to see it.
- Reply to this comment
- Obama has said he will bankrupt the coal generated power plants and hence the coal industry. http://media.newsbusters.org/stories/hidden-audio-obama-tells-sf-chronicle-he-will-bankrupt-coal-industry.html?q=blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/11/02/
hidden-audio-obama-tells-sf-chronicle-he-will-bankrupt-coal-industry
- Reply to this comment
- REMEMBER OBAMA WILL BANKRUPT COAL .From Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother''s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
From Dreams of My Father: "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother''s race."
From Dreams of My Father: "There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."
From Dreams of My Father: ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
From Dreams of My Father: "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn''t speak to my own. It was into my father''s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I''d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela."
From Audacity of Hope: "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." - Reply to this comment
- America is fed up with all the scandals from Republican crooks, liars, perverts, lawbreakers, and used-car salesmen hucksters that have trashed this country over the last eight years:
Bill Frist
Randy "Duke" Cunningham
Jack Abramoff
Tom DeLay
Mark Foley
Larry Craig
Ted Haggard
Bob Ney
Trent Lott
Alberto Gonzales
Donald Runsfled
Scooter Libby
*** Cheney
George Bush
Lying about reasons for going to war with Iraq (Uranium, false claims about Iraq''s supposed weapons of mass destruction.)
Torture in Abu Ghraib.
The treasonous exposure of a CIA agent by White House officials. (Plamegate)
Halliburton%u2019s overcharging and outright fraud for services in Iraq
Enron
Katrina
Illegal wiretapping
Political influence peddling
*** scandals
Election tampering
Ballooning federal debt
Economy in a tailspin
And these are just for starters%u2026
Enough is enough, America is ready for change! - Reply to this comment
- Causes and Consequences of the Global Economic Crisis
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Genesis_of_the_Credit_and_Economic_Crisis
Causes and Historical Perspectives
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0&feature=related
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLLlZQJQrFY
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RZVw3no2A4&feature=related
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1vSqF9Hm7A
Consequences
In every generation, every decade, recent history is replete with the consequences of politicians and other authority figures who prey on suffering, selling hope to those who would listen while peddling influence to those who would pay, advocating accountability but abdicating responsibility while casting blame, and promising unity but creating division, employing violence - be it verbal, emotional, psychological or physical - to set one party against another to further a cause. The result is always the same, however well-intended the cause. People are divided. Humanity suffers. - Reply to this comment
- Wow! Joe the Plumber gets a free pass? He no longer has to pay taxes or pay traffic tickets!
http://www.nbc24.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=216450 - Reply to this comment
- kansas1946- NOw kansas1946 if we didn''t have affirmative action the obama would have never been able to go to harvard didn''t you know that,. He will be increasing it. The only furture we got with him is bad real bad.
- Reply to this comment
- McCain is an idiot if he thinks he is going to pull America out of the greatest economic crisis facing us since the great depression by controlling spending! You have to spend money and invest in the middle class to stimulate the economy and grow jobs.
Enough already! Wake up America! Vote Obama/Biden ''''08
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Posted by socrates100 at 07:27 PM : Nov 03, 2008
I am sure glad you don''t take care of my budget, you must have been through the obama school that tells you to spend more to save money. Well I am sure this works in someones dream but never has in my budget or my companies budget and quite sure it won''t with our ecomony. We need to rein in spending of worthless stuff like obama''s ACORN, money going to other countries that have no control over it and it mostly goes to the leaders not the people it is meant to. So bottom line if spending is increased and taxes raised, finanical 101 tells you we will see a long down turn and much more jobs lost. If we control spending reduce taxes the down turn will be shorter. Any time in history that taxes was reduced the income of the goverment went up. When taxes were increased goverment income decreased. History tells - Reply to this comment
- The only good I can see in an obamanation win is
good bye affirmative action
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Posted by popstom12 at 06:42 PM : Nov 03, 2008
+ report abuse
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Then you are very short sighted. Fortunately, we live in a democracy and any president we elect is only going to be there a maximum of eight years. So if your candidate loses tomorrow, then you won''t have to suffer more than eight years. If we could survive Bush, we can survive McCain or Obama. We are still all Americans at the end of the day. - Reply to this comment
- Don''''t forget to vote everyone!!!
It is your right and your duty!
And to avoid the past crowding at the polling places the new regulations this year are:
Voting Day for Republicans is tomorrow.
Voting Day for Democrats is Wednesday.
Get out and vote bright and early those days.
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Posted by michaelt302 at 07:57 PM : Nov 03, 2008
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LOL. Nice try. - Reply to this comment
- McCain is an idiot if he thinks he is going to pull America out of the greatest economic crisis facing us since the great depression by controlling spending! You have to spend money and invest in the middle class to stimulate the economy and grow jobs.
His redistribution argument is also ridiculous... Exon just posted its 3 straight quarter of record profits in the billions. None of this is trickling down to the middle class. Bush/Cheney/McCain have redistributed wealth in America over the past 8 year to the top 1% of income earners. The middle class continues to shrink as a result of their disastrous economic policy.
Go ahead McCain supporters. Review the debates, his stump speeches ..... how many references to the middle class have you heard?
Enough already! Wake up America! Vote Obama/Biden ''08 - Reply to this comment
- The only good I can see in an obamanation win is
good bye affirmative action - Reply to this comment
- The SF Chronicle didn;t publish the quote in the article only the audio has it- another example of the press covering up for Obama.
http://media.newsbusters.org/stories
/hidden-audio-obama-tells-sf-chronicle-h
e-will-bankrupt-coal-industry.html?q=blo
gs/p-j-gladnick/2008/11/02/
hidden-audi
o-obama-tells-sf-chronicle-he-will-bankr
upt-coal-industry
Hidden Audio: Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry
November 2, 2008 - 07:26 ET
Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview. The result? Nothing.
"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it''''''''''''''''s just that it will bankrupt them because they''''''''''''''''re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that''''''''''''''''s being emitted.
That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.
The only thing I''''''''''''''''ve said with respect to coal, I haven''''''''''''''''t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.
It''''''''''''''''s just that it will bankrupt them." - Reply to this comment
- melnnyc- Alaskans get part of the oil profits back- that is good government. You got a problem with citizens getting their fare share? It isn;t coming out of your pocket.
- Reply to this comment
- "I think it''''''''s a sympathy tactic to get the undecided voters to turn his way. Well, for me it''''''''s not going to work. This guy and his campaign will try and say anything to persuade the American people to vote for him. I''''''''ve had enough of Osama"
She planned her death to get votes? When did your Heart turn to ice? I''m very sorry for you. Oh, and Osama?
Is it in your brain not to call people with views different than yours names? - Reply to this comment
- i have feeling the nation will be shocked when obama loses tuesday,,,
- Reply to this comment
- Phuuk u you pile of *******
- Reply to this comment
