Obama's Pennsylvania Offensive

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You knew it was going to happen. I’m only surprised it took so long. In Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain’s must-win blue state, local Republicans now are up with a TV ad linking Sen. Barack Obama to his former pastor, the corrosively race-based Rev. Jeremiah...

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Howard Fineman

The suburbs and towns that ring the central Pennsylvania city of Harrisburg have been deeply Republican since Lincoln was alive.

    But strange things are happening right now—things that bode well for Sen. Barack Obama and local Democrats in this swing state, microlevel things that help mitigate the fear that some Democrats have about a last-minute catastrophe in the national effort.

      The mayor of one especially affluent, hard-core Republican town quit the GOP and endorsed Obama. Driving along the banks of the Susquehanna, I saw many more Obama yard signs than Sen. John McCain ones.

     And for the first time in memory, there is a hot race for the state Senate seat here. Democrat Judy Hirsh, a novice who touts herself in her brochures as a “wife, mother and small business owner,” is making a strong bid against a longtime GOP incumbent.

     “He’s attacking me, which means I must be making progress,” Hirsh told me.

      McCain and the GOP have long seen Pennsylvania as a holy grail of the Electoral College. McCain has been here time and again, but does not seem to have much to show for it. Statewide polls show Obama with a solid double-digit lead.

     But more important to Obama are the local soundings. I am told that a new private poll in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area shows Obama up by nearly 20 points—a pretty astounding number. In Philadelphia, Obama is considered likely to pile up at least a 500,000-vote majority—the kind of “mo” he will need to compensate for weaker showings in more rural parts of the commonwealth.

      You knew that the Dems are feeling pretty good about their chances when they sent Bill Clinton to Harrisburg, as they did on Wednesday. He spoke to a large and enthusiastic crowd at John Harris High School before heading off to Florida to campaign with Obama.

     If Obama’s campaign strategists thought they were playing defense in Pennsylvania, they would have sent the former president to more traditionally Democratic terrain. Here, as elsewhere, the Obama campaign is operating on red turf, which means it remains on offense, no matter what the fluttering national poll numbers say.

     If McCain can’t win Pennsylvania, he’s going to have to win every red state left on the table to have a shot at victory.

      One piece of potentially bad news for Democrats: word around the state is that Rep. John Murtha, a veteran member of the U.S. House delegation and ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, could lose his seat west of here in Johnstown.

      I know that district—I covered Bobby Casey at a campaign picnic there a couple of years ago—and know why Murtha is in trouble. It is not because he came out against the war in Iraq in a forthright way; it is because he seemed to be trashing the Marines when he did it. He was wrong on at least some of his facts, as it turned out, and was probably wrong in the way he went about airing them.

      Murtha seemed to be shooting off his mouth, and they tend not to like that kind of thing in the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains.

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