Obama started the day
Monday in the Philadelphia region, where polls show his strongest base of statewide support, especially in predominantly black neighborhoods of the city and in a ring of affluent suburbs such as Blue Bell.
Despite the understated tone of the event, which seemed targeted more at Obama's large traveling contingent of reporters than to his small audience of voters, there was still evidence of some of the rock-star treatment that has followed the Illinois senator wherever he campaigns.
"ObamAAAA!!!" one nearly hysterical woman shrieked as his convoy rolled onto campus and students jostled for position. "It's like he's The Beatles," one reporter mumbled to another.
The first-term senator rolled up his sleeves and saddled up on a stool in the community-college courtyard for an issues-based discussion with a private audience of fewer than 50 people.
Obama, in a thinly veiled reference to his opponent, told the handpicked crowd that "not all of us have talked about the need to change how Washington works.
"One of the key distinctions, I think, in our campaign has been the way it's really been built from the bottom up, the grassroots," he said. "That we've been financed by ordinary people, that we have built our organizations through volunteers. We really feel like we've got a chance to break the mold and get out of the typical pattern of our politics over the last 20 years."
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As bees and pollen buzzed about, Obama spoke for about an hour with three dozen or so people at Montgomery County Community College in suburban Philadelphia. (
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/a_mellow_start_on_pa_primary_e.html)
"We figured it might be nice to get outside, since I've been campaigning all through the winter," Obama said, noting the chilly weather he faced even in South Carolina.
The questions from the upscale and heavily white audience tended toward the economy and foreign policy.
One man asked whether Obama would be willing to raise the gas tax to create a "price signal" to consumers to use less oil.
The Illinois Democrat said he opposed a three-month holiday on gas taxes, something proposed by likely Republican nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona. But he also said he would not seek to raise the gas tax if elected president. "Consumer just can't bear it right now," he said.
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"The economy is like an ocean-liner," he said. "If you steer it in the right direction, it might start off just going one or two degrees differently. But that one to two degrees, 20 years out, means you've avoided the big iceberg."
"I've said I think John McCain's proposal for a three-month tax holiday is a bad idea," Obama, an Illinois senator, told the small forum with middle-class voters. (
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN2144994520080421)
Obama said that consumers would only see the price cut for a short time before the costs "spike right up" again. He also said there was no guarantee that oil companies would not just raise prices at the pump by the same amount as the tax cut.
"We're talking about 5 percent of your total cost of gas that you suspend for three months, which might save you a few hundred bucks that then will spike right up," Obama said. "Now keep in mind that it will save you that if Exxon Mobil doesn't decide, 'we'll just tack on another 5 percent on the current cost.'"
Obama added that the money from the gasoline tax is needed for the federal highway fund.
Asked what he would do in his first hundred days as president, he
said that the Iraq war would top his priority list.
He said he would call the Joint Chiefs of Staff into a room "and give them a new mission - to set a date for our withdrawal out of Iraq."
His second major move, he said, would be to begin work on a national health-care plan open to all Americans. Next, he said, he would work toward a national energy plan, focusing on infrastructure investment in environmentally friendly "bio fuels."
A woman whose family pays $1,372 a month for private health insurance
asked what Obama would do to make things better in the first few months of his presidency. Another woman asked about the possibility of tax relief for adults who take on their aging parents as dependents. A dyslexic man asked how the senator would address special education funding, and an unemployed computer consultant suggested investment in technology as a way for the federal government to energize the economy.
Obama touched on many of those issues as he outlined goals for his first 100 days in the Oval Office, assuming the senator makes it past this summer's Democratic convention and November's general election.
Day one would include a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss setting timetables for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Then, Obama said, he would work with Congress to establish a framework for health care reform with a goal of solidifying policies by the end of his first year that could be implemented by 2010.
He would then begin to establish an energy plan, review the country's existing trade agreements, and have the attorney general review the executive orders made by President George W. Bush — a notion that drew hearty applause from the audience.
The stop was intended as a casual and intimate gathering, “though it doesn't feel very intimate at the moment,” Obama said, referring to the swarm of international media held at bay a few yards away by a line of park benches set up as a makeshift barrier.
Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance at the end of her husband's remarks to shake hands and pose for pictures with the crowd.
Obama
closed out the final full day of the campaign with one of the biggest indoor rallies he has had anywhere - in the new basketball arena at the University of Pittsburgh. Campus police officially estimated the crowd in the Petersen Events Center at 10,000.
The candidate, with arms crossed, smiled and leaned his head back, scanning the rafters, as he was introduced by an assortment of speakers.
Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry, told the crowd, "Just imagine: We have the opportunity to elect the first African American president."
The crowd responded, clapping and chanting, "Yes, we can; yes, we can."
"We don't have to settle for what is. We can imagine what might be," Obama told the throng. "The force that will bring about that better life, that better world . . . comes from the bottom up. It comes from the people, their determination, their hopes. . . . This generation has its own call to action. . . . We are in a defining moment in our history."
from Oliver Burkeman's blog at GuardianUK:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/usa/2008/04/obamas_pennsylvania_finale.htmlBarack Obama's big eve-of-poll rally wound up at the University of Pittsburgh, and with the deafening roar of the 7,000-plus crowd still ringing in my ears, I asked one woman what the event had meant to her. "He makes my heart sing," she said, and then repeated the phrase, an elated expression on her face. I reached for my notebook. "Oh no," she said, suddenly grave. "I'm not allowed to speak to the press. I'm a volunteer. I signed a form." It was a tiny example of the combination of idealism and rigorous control that has helped get the Obama campaign where it is today: somewhere within six or seven points of Hillary Clinton in a state where early polls put her 20 points ahead.
The idealism part is hard to resist: there isn't really much comparison between the energy levels in a hall full of Obama's supporters and a hall full of Clinton's. Teresa Heinz -- who introduced Obama and his wife, and whose late husband John Heinz was a Pennsylvania senator -- could barely finish her speech, because Obama's crowds don't respect traditional applause lines; they erupt halfway through sentences. "Let me ask you," she said. "Are you ready to -- " And then the response: "Yes!"
Obama drives them wild -- "We are declaring independence from the same old politics!" -- but tonight he addressed the issue of his inexperience, too, something the Clinton campaign may choose to interpret as a sign that he's unsettled. "My opponents have said, oh, pretty words, don't mean anything, false hopes, Obama's too idealistic, head in the clouds... Listen. The reason you need hope, the reason you need faith, is precisely because things are tough. If things were easy, you wouldn't need faith, you wouldn't need hope."
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