The New York Times wrote:McCain Fights to Keep Crucial Blue State in Play
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JEFF ZELENY
Published: October 21, 2008
MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — People are scratching their heads: Why is Senator John McCain here?
Senator Barack Obama has a double-digit lead in recent Pennsylvania polls. Senator John Kerry beat President Bush here in 2004. The previous three Democratic presidential candidates won, too. And this year there are 1.2 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state.
But in these frantic last weeks of the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain has lavished time and money on this now deep-blue state — he made three stops here on Tuesday — as if his political life depended on it. And, from his campaign’s point of view, it does.
“We need to win Pennsylvania on Nov. 4, and with your help — with your help — we’re going to win!” Mr. McCain shouted to the crowd in his first appearance of the day, at a manufacturing plant in Bensalem, north of Philadelphia, where he said that Mr. Obama would raise their taxes and was too untested to handle an international crisis.
Mr. McCain’s strategists insisted that the state and its 21 electoral votes were within reach and crucial to what they acknowledge is an increasingly narrow path to victory.
They say that their own polls show Mr. McCain only seven or eight percentage points behind Mr. Obama. (The state polls that show Mr. Obama with a double-digit lead, all conducted in recent weeks, include surveys by Marist, Quinnipiac, Rasmussen, SurveyUSA and The Allentown Morning Call.)
Mr. McCain’s strategists argue that their candidate has a dual appeal: to the pro-gun working-class voters in the western coal country, many of whom supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary, and to independents and moderates in the swing counties around Philadelphia.
“When we look at our numbers, we think we’re competitive here,” Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, told reporters in Harrisburg on Tuesday. He added, “We would like to get as many Clinton supporters as we can.”
Another reason for Mr. McCain’s focus on Pennsylvania may be the shrinking electoral map, as Mr. Obama’s dominance leaves Mr. McCain with fewer and fewer competitive states to campaign in, and the need to avoid another embarrassing concession like Michigan, which the campaign abandoned early this month.
Conceding Pennsylvania two weeks before the election would be too much an admission of failure, said G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, where Mr. McCain appeared before a raucous rally of 7,000 people with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, in September.
“I think it psychologically devastates the entire national campaign if they decide they’re going to pull up stakes and walk away,” Mr. Madonna said.
One of McCain’s senior strategists, Charles Black, said that the campaign had fared better in Pennsylvania than in any other blue state in recent months, and that Mr. McCain was a different candidate than President Bush, who waged a long and expensive battle here four years ago. “Bush came close here, but he did badly in the Philadelphia suburbs,” Mr. Black said,
arguing that Mr. McCain’s old “maverick” label would have greater appeal in those suburbs, even though Mr. McCain has run a traditional Republican general election campaign.
Philadelphia is one of the only major cities in the country where Mr. McCain’s advertising campaign is anywhere near as voluminous as that of Mr. Obama’s. But even there, he lags nonetheless. On Tuesday, Mr. McCain effectively reduced his advertising campaigns in five other states — Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin — in what Democrats suspected was an effort to divert resources to a more robust advertising effort here (though the savings from those moves had yet to show up in the state as of Tuesday night).
Mr. McCain’s advisers have contended that they do not expect white voters to reject Mr. Obama, of Illinois, simply because he is black. When Mike DuHaime, the campaign’s political director, was asked in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday what effect he thought race would play in Pennsylvania, he replied, “I hope there is none.”
Mr. DuHaime rejected comments made last week by a Pennsylvania Democrat, Representative John P. Murtha, who told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, speaking of his home base, that “there is no question that Western Pennsylvania is a racist area.”
Mr. McCain referenced Mr. Murtha’s comments in his third stop of the day, at Robert Morris University here, when he said, “I think you may have noticed that Senator Obama’s supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately.” As the crowd booed, Mr. McCain became tangled up in the rest of his remarks. “And you know, I couldn’t agree with them more,” he said, to silence, and then wandered around in a verbal thicket before finally managing to say, “I could not disagree with those critics more; this is a great part of America.”
Mr. Obama, who was in Florida on Tuesday, had no immediate plans to return to Pennsylvania in coming days, perhaps the most telling sign that his strategists were comfortable with his position there. But Democratic officials in the state said they had been urging the Obama campaign to send the senator back there at least once more before Election Day to shore up support.
An aggressive ground game for Mr. Obama, meanwhile, is under way in all corners of Pennsylvania, where hundreds of campaign workers and tens of thousands of volunteers were manning 80 field offices in what Democrats described as the largest organizational effort in state history.
Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said the voter registration edge was about twice as much as the party enjoyed in the 2004 presidential race. But even with that edge, he said, history suggested that the state would remain close until the final moment. Lyndon B. Johnson was the only Democratic presidential candidate in 50 years to capture more than 51 percent of the vote.
“I’m always cautious about Pennsylvania, but there seems to be something different about this whole effort,” Mr. Casey said in an interview on Tuesday. “The dynamic has changed dramatically, not just around the country, but in particular in Pennsylvania, because of the confluence of the economic situation.”
After spending last weekend reaching out to undecided voters on a Casey family bus tour across the state, Mr. Casey said the skepticism among older voters toward Mr. Obama had started to fall away after they saw the two candidates side by side at the debates.
“There were some people, a certain percentage of undecided voters, who had not seen them both on the same stage,” Mr. Casey said. “It definitely moved some older voters into his column.”
Still, Democratic officials in the state said they did not believe that Pennsylvania was absolutely locked up for Mr. Obama. Party leaders are not relying on polling, in case voters are not telling pollsters the truth, but rather on neighbor-to-neighbor efforts to identify supporters.
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Moon Township, Pa., and Jeff Zeleny from Lake Worth, Fla. Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting from Washington.
What kind of asinine shit is this? This is McCain-Feingold at it's best. You're only allowed to give $2700... unless you have some way of figuring out a way to give it through some arcane legal backdoor. (There's a little footnote at the bottom of the letter that the McCain-Palin Victory 2008 is an RNC operation, for anyone interested.)
