Battleground fatigue: A letter from Columbus

By James Oliphant
Tribune correspondent

October 28, 2008

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Here’s one random sampling from a battleground state, with some margin for error.

“I just want it to end,” my father says. “Make it stop.”

The phone has just rung, and he knows the number. Knows not to answer. “It’s just them,” he mutters.

“Them,” by the way, is a non-partisan designation. When it comes to wanting to be left alone, my father is politically agnostic. It really isn’t his fault. He’s lived here going on 40 years and has watched, helplessly, as his once-sleepy town sprouted up around him, went major-league and now is suffering the consequences of being the most divided large city in one of the most divided states in the union.

Throw in advances in technology and the transformational effect of hundreds of millions in cash, and there is literally nowhere to hide. John McCain, Barack Obama and their surrogates can’t be ducked or dodged. They’re on television, on the phone, pounding on doors, sending mail. When it’s one-and-one, they call that felony stalking. Writ large, it’s the modern political campaign in a make-or-break state.

There’s no relief. Michelle Obama was here Friday. McCain Sunday. It’s like the old joke about the weather here. Don’t like it? Wait.

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Biden: No brain scans for aneurysms

The Chicago Tribune reports that among recent medical records released by Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, there are no scans that might indicate the potential for another dehabilitating aneurysm such as the ones he suffered 20 years ago. Biden, 65, had multiple brain surgeries following the attacks.

Here’s the report:

Newly released medical records from vice presidential candidate Joe Biden do not include the results of any recent brain scans, which some experts consider necessary to assess whether the senator is at risk for a repeat of the brain aneurysms that nearly killed him 20 years ago. Biden’s most recent physical exam in July showed him to be in good health, according to a letter from Dr. John Eisold that the campaign released Monday. The letter from Eisold, who is the attending physician for Congress, described Biden’s cardiac capacity as excellent.

But the 49 pages of records the campaign released gave no indication that Biden’s doctors sought follow-up tests after the serious aneurysms he suffered in 1988. Medical experts are divided over the need for such precautionary brain scans, but many feel it is the only way to be sure a patient is out of danger.

“If this was my patient, I would re-image every three to five years to make sure no new aneurysm had cropped up,” said Dr. Mark Alberts, a professor of neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

The health of the candidates on both sides has become a small but growing issue in the last days of the presidential campaign. A comprehensive look on the subject by the New York Times’ Lawrence K. Altman stated that all four candidates on both tickets could be more forthcoming about their physical condition.

Terre Haute: More images from the trail

 

Is this a shot at the media?

 

Obama speaks on the Fannie Mae bailout.

Obama: Images from the trail

Images from the trail

 

Obama adviser David Axelrod briefs reporters on the campaign plane

 

 

Obama campaigns at a hydroelectric turbine plant in Pennsylvania.

Obama: ‘Who are they fighting for?’

 

 

Barack Obama addresses reporters at a hydroelectric turbine plant in York, Pa. 

YORK, Pa.–Barack Obama said Thursday he wasn’t surprised by the ferocity of Republican attacks this week during the party’s convention in St. Paul.

“This is what they do,” Obama told reporters after a campaign event at a plant in York. “They don’t have an agenda to run on. They haven’t offered a single concrete idea so far in two nights about how they would make the lives of middle class Americans better”

Obama echoed a theme that his campaign has established all day in response to jabs from former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin that questioned his experience and mocked his work as a community organizer as a young man in Chicago.

Obama called the attack on community service “curious.”

“i would argue that doing work in the community to try and create jobs, to bring people together, to rejuvenate communities that have fallen on hard times, to set up job-training programs in areas that have been hard hit when the steel plants closed, that that’s relevant only in understanding where I’m coming from, who I believe in, who I’m fighting for and why I’m in this race.

“And the question I have for them is? Why would that kind of work be ridiculous? Who are they fighting for? Who are they advocating for?

Obama: McCain wants ‘campaign to be about biography’

 

Obama speaks to a crowd on a farm in Dillionvale, Ohio

 

 

 

Obama at an economic forum in New Philadelphia, Ohio.

 

Writ Large is on the road this week, embedded with the Barack Obama campaign. 

DILLONVALE, Ohio—The politician who became famous in part because of his life story said Wednesday that the presidential race isn’t about biographies or personalities.

“I don’t know what John McCain is thinking,” Sen. Barack Obama told a crowd at an eastern Ohio college, “but I am going to be talking a whole lot about issues.”

Obama’s comments came as a response to remarks made the day before by John McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis.

Davis told the editorial board of the Washington Post that “this election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Seeing the opening, Obama pounced, saying the Republicans were trying to steer the campaign away from issues such as the stagnant economy, because that’s where they hold a disadvantage. And it gave him a ready-set opportunity to promote his economic agenda.

Obama, of course, has long trafficked in his own compelling biography, even writing a book about his life as the son of a Kenyan father who was raised by his Kansas-born single mother. And even as he derided the McCain campaign, he couldn’t help but strike some well-worn personal chords himself, taking about the financial struggles of his mother and grandmother.

Obama and Biden: Two sides of the coin

TOLEDO, Ohio–Political observers said adding Joe Biden to the Democratic ticket for president would do a lot of things for Barack Obama: provide him with a better connection to middle-class voters, shore up his foreign policy profile, perhaps give him a shot at winning a battleground state.

Add something else: Biden has taken the oh-so-serious, scripted Obama campaign into the realm of improvisational theatre

Take Sunday at a small-scale event in here in Toledo. Biden was doing his job, laying out the case for Obama, when he simply couldn’t resist the urge to riff.

“There’s a gigantic — gigantic — difference between John McCain and Barack Obama, and between me and I suspect my vice presidential opponent . . . Well there’s obvious differences,” he paused. “She’s good-looking,”

The crowd laughed, and one woman shouted that Biden was “gorgeous.”
.
“Where’s that person?” Biden asked. “Who said that? Who said that? Would you say that again for my wife?”

Obama, by contrast, has called Gov. Sarah Palin “compelling” and “dynamic.” He’s never mentioned the former Alaska beauty queen’s appearance.

ON THE BUS: An Obama campaign digest

Writ Large has gone on the road. For the next week, we’ll be with the Barack Obama campaign as it buses through the battleground states.

SOMEWHERE IN WESTERN OHIO–Campaigns are long marches. Extended, heavily choreographed, highly accessorized, marches.

They aren’t unlike Hollywood movies or Broadway plays. What the viewer sees on the screen is the result of hours, days, even weeks of preparation.

For those like us who are along for the ride, that means there a eternal stretches of lassitude, punctuated briefly by something that somewhat resembles action, but lacking any of the attendant drama.

Right now, the press bus is rolling across the farmlands of western Ohio. We just passed through a town named Mt. Victory, where one homeowner has planted a sign that reads “No way, No How, No McCain.”

The town has also preserved an old Gulf gas station, harking back to the happy times of cheap gas and boundless optimism.

Perhaps Barack Obama may want to consider having an event there. You can’t beat a burg named Mt. Victory for symbolism.

DOUBLETAKE: Is Mac thumpin’ PC?

Welcome to Doubletake, your morning mash-up with Tribune correspondents Jim Tankersley and Jim Oliphant. Now in new Extreme Arctic Blast flavor.

Jim Oliphant: So, get your text message yet?

Jim Tankersley: No. And my new rule is, no text, no veepstakes in the chat. This is non-negotiable.

Oliphant: I haven’t gotten mine yet either. But this I am pret-ty sure this art student in Denmark has me confused with someone else.

As for the veep, the guessing game has reached critical mass. I’ve read LeBron James is “confident” it’s going to be Tim Kaine, but he’s also hearing Bayh’s name again.

Tankersley: And your streak of mentioning Ohio sports reaches an unprecedented 12 days! Quick, tell me something about your hair. What I’m saying is, I’m not taking your running-mate bait. I refuse.

Oliphant: Sebelius up? Biden down? Hillary in an “October Surprise”?

Tankersley: Say, what do you make of that situation in Pakistan with Musharraf leaving?

Oliphant: Uh, unstable? A tinder box. Yes, a geopolitical tinder box. I think that is always the safe answer.

Do you think he would make a good veep? Build that bridge to the Muslim community?

And–do I have to say it?

Tankersley: You might as well.

Oliphant: Pretty decent head o’ hair for a deposed head of state.

Tankersley: And there it is.

 

Yes, I took over in a military coup, fired the Supreme Court, and

couldn’t find Osama if he came equipped with a Lojack, but check

out this head of hair. All mine, baby!

 

Oliphant Here is an excerpt from a recent story on Musharraf by our colleague Kim Barker. Gotta love the introductory graf to the quote.

Many insiders said his resignation was part of a deal allowing him to avoid the humiliation of a public impeachment in Parliament and perhaps avoid criminal charges for actions during his almost nine years as president, including seizing power while army chief in 1999, declaring emergency rule in November, and firing the country’s top judges, also in November.
“I am leaving with satisfaction that whatever I could do for this country, I did that with honesty,” Musharraf told the nation in a televised speech.

 

Classic stuff.

Tankersley: OK, here’s a topic more up your alley. We’re about to hit the party conventions – I’m off to Denver in fairly short order, in fact – and polls show the race basically tied.So — who’s position would you rather have at this point in the race? McCain or Obama?

Oliphant: McCain.

 

Read the rest at the Swamp, the blog of the Tribune’s Washington bureau.