STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - On Saturday night, Barack Obama went bowling for the first time in 30 years.
Part of his new effort to get closer to working-class voters, the presidential candidate grabbed a bite at Altoona's Original Texas Hotdogs, then strapped on a pair of size 13 1/2 shoes at Pleasant Valley lanes, to cheers from patrons. He never loosened his tie and the bowling wasn't pretty - basketball's his game - but from a public-relations standpoint, it was a ten-strike.
"Sen. Barack Obama makes a surprise visit to Altoona today," the local CBS TV station announced during the NCAA basketball playoffs.
Connecting with ordinary people and their everyday concerns is part of Obama's strategy for confronting perhaps the biggest remaining hurdle in his fight with Hillary Clinton: white, blue-collar Democrats. Their votes were key to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in neighboring Ohio this month, and they've been decidedly cool to Obama's candidacy.
You can watch Barack Obama bowling here on YouTube:
Okay, so the Obama campaign is trying to remake Barack Obama into a regular guy--wolfing down hot dogs and bowling with the blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania, hoping to court votes from the real regular guys. Candidates are constantly trying to remake their images in order to solicit votes. In fact, the most important thing for a candidate to do is to go out and talk with ordinary Americans--eat the hot dogs, drink the beer and bowl with them. This type of campaigning allows the candidate to learn, firsthand, what issues Americans are concerned about, and what they want their president to do about the issues. So I'm not surprised that the Obama campaign has shifted its focus into making Obama a "regular guy." Continuing with the Baltimore Sun article:
To promote his regular-guy themes, Obama is midway through a six-day bus tour that is taking him from one end of the commonwealth to the other, his longest campaign swing in a single state this year.
Rolling across the steep hills and narrow valleys of the western Pennsylvania countryside, his bus does not advertise its presence. There is not so much as an Obama bumper sticker, much less a campaign banner, on the outside of the rented luxury liner, named for Harry Truman by a Nashville firm that caters to celebrities.
The unmarked bus and somewhat stealthy nature of his campaign swing - many stops aren't announced in advance - also reflect the highly nuanced Obama effort in this state. He is trying to lay the groundwork for a Pennsylvania comeback, while keeping expectations in check, something his campaign has been less effective in doing than Clinton's.
Obama calls himself the underdog and says "we may not be able to win" the state but "we're going to work as hard as we can."
Already, on his "road to change" tour, he's dropped into sports bars, to sip a local brew, and mingled with steelworkers at plants outside Pittsburgh and in Johnstown. He's also made himself available for interviews with many, if not most, of the state's local TV and radio stations and daily papers, while spending millions more than Clinton on an intensive ad campaign.
In one sense, this is a rather unorthodox strategy that the Obama campaign is conducting in Pennsylvania. It is not just courting the blue-collar Pennsylvania workers here, but it is shifting the campaign back to a simpler, almost retro-1950s time of candidates making campaign stops via trains and buses. This type of stealth campaigning allows Obama to stop into small towns and show everyday Americans his personality and his political views that have not been pre-packaged by media consultants, commercials, or planned campaign rallies. Will it cut into Hillary Clinton's lead in Pennsylvania? Perhaps. According to the Baltimore Sun, this type of campaign swing may not be able to generate an Obama victory in Pennsylvania, but it may generate a closer primary election finish than what the polls are showing. And a close second-place Obama finish in Pennsylvania will not help Hillary Clinton in picking up delegates in order to cut Obama's lead with the delegate count.
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