Obama Takes "Backyard" Campaign Tour to Virginia
Two years ago, Barack Obama secured his election when Virginia voted Democratic in a presidential race for the first time in 44 years.
He will find the mood a bit different when he returns to bellwether Virginia's capital city Wednesday to rally dispirited Democrats ahead of the Nov. 2 midterm election.
"I don't think anybody's very happy with the way things are," Laurie Huizenga said as she watched her 13-year-old daughter, Tess, play tennis at the neighborhood recreation center where Mr. Obama will hold a "backyard conversation."
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"The Democrats thought Obama would come in there and fix the economy" and that did not happen, said Huizenga, who lives in Richmond's wooded, middle class Southampton.
It's not as if Virginia hasn't already signaled strongly that things have changed since the Democratic triumph of 2008.
Not only was Mr. Obama the first Democrat to carry the state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Democrat Mark R. Warner won his U.S. Senate seat in a landslide and Democrats took three U.S. House seats from the GOP, claiming six of the state's 11 House seats.
Last year, however, Republican Bob McDonnell was elected governor in a romp, sweeping two other Republicans into statewide office with him and gaining seats in the House of Delegates for the first time since the 2001 election.
This year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats are trying to save second terms for vulnerable Virginia freshman Congressmen Tom Perriello and Glenn Nye, both targets of well-funded Republican challengers.
Charles Pendergrass, 73, a retired dentist who lives four doors away from the site of Mr. Obama's visit, said he considered himself an independent voter two years ago, but this year thinks of himself as a Republican.
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Pendergrass said Democrats find themselves in disfavor with most neighbors his age because of the economy, the financial bailouts and spending that has swollen the federal debt.
"Most of my friends will feel that way, but there are a lot of younger voters out in this neighborhood who do like Obama," Pendergrass said. "After he was elected, we had to see what he could do, and what he's done is pile up a lot of debt on the United States."
Ryan Freeman brought his three small children to the Southampton Recreation Association around sunset Tuesday to see where the president would be a day later. Like many who inhabit the tidy brick homes in the rolling hills near the James River, he usually votes Republican.
Mr. Obama, he said, is a big spender "who certainly lives up to the Democratic stereotype," he said, but the problem is really larger than any one man, even the commander in chief.
"The president ought to represent the need for a change in the culture," Freeman said. "It's a culture of greed, and that's what got us into this."
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama had a similar backyard event in Albuquerque, New Mexico, followed by a speech later that night at the University of Wisconsin. Recalling his glory days on the 2008 campaign trail, Mr. Obama rallied an massive and raucous crowd of some 20,000 people that stretched a mile long at the school. The speech was beamed to 100 college campuses nationwide, reports CBS News chief White House correspondent Chip Reid.