And then there is this article on campaigning in West Virginia. Obama plans to spend $5 million in West Virginia in the final two weeks to flip this state.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14707.htmlPolls tighten in W.Va. as race takes back seatLOGAN, W.Va. — West Virginia's Democratic leaders on Saturday embarked on a winding, eight-county bus tour through the south of the state, and in one small mining town after another, they sold Barack Obama to small crowds of Democrats with remarkable directness.
"He is black" was the first thing Kenny Perdue, the state's AFL-CIO president, said. "The gentleman that's in the White House and John McCain — they're white men. And I'm absolutely ashamed of what George W. Bush has done to this country."
The president of the United Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, spoke after Perdue in a parking lot set in the flat plateau below the remains of a strip-mined mountain.
"I'd rather have a black friend than a white enemy," he said. State Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey spoke too. Casey, 57, grew up Irish Catholic in Charleston, and he said the bus was following John F. Kennedy's bus route in the 1960 Democratic primary.
"There's a lot of people out there think you're a bunch of inbred, redneck racists," he told a couple dozen people wearing union hats and jackets. "They say you won't vote for a man who's black."
"The rest of the country thought when Kennedy ran we were a bunch of ignorant, inbred religious bigots," he said. "They were wrong, and we made Kennedy president."
As a local judicial candidate spoke in Logan, two of the politicians wandered off to marvel at the scene taking place behind them. There, a polite, black former Marine, Mitchell Cook, was handing blue Obama bumper stickers and yard signs to drivers pulling into the mall and was even attaching the bumper stickers himself to some of the pickups and battered two-doors.
"Twenty, 30 years ago, if you had a black man stopping cars, handing out signs right here, he would have been shot," said state Auditor Glen Gainer. "Now they're stopping, asking him to put on stickers."
West Virginia isn't exactly a battleground state. After Obama was shellacked here by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary — the southern coal counties voted for her by margins as high as 8-to-1 — both his campaign and John McCain's assumed he'd lose it.
And with good reason: West Virginia represents a cross-section of the voters who have been hardest for Obama to reach. It's among the oldest, whitest and least-educated states in America. It was the place where reporters found white Democrats who freely use the N-word and swore they'd never vote for Obama.
But maybe the campaigns and the press misread the depth of prejudice in West Virginia. Or maybe, since the May primary, something has changed here.
The state is also a historic Democratic stronghold, if one where Democrats sometimes put the words "NRA member" beneath their names on campaign signs. And four recent public polls suggested the race here has closed from a double-digit McCain lead to a slender one.
(much more at link)