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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Bill Clinton's dramatic return to the campaign trail powers Kerry toward the finish line.
Oct 26, 2004 | Four years after Al Gore left him sitting on the sidelines and seven weeks after heart troubles left him thinking that his life -- never mind his political life -- might be over, Bill Clinton was back Monday doing what Bill Clinton does best.
The former president and the man who would be the next one appeared together Monday at an outdoor rally estimated at more than 100,000 strong -- so big that it spilled out of Love Park and into the streets of Philadelphia's Center City. Although Clinton was subdued in speech, he was effervescent onstage. As his own campaign theme song blared over the loudspeakers -- will Fleetwood Mac always give Democrats the chills? -- Clinton hugged old friends, laughed that big laugh of his, and looked like there was no place in the world he'd rather be. "If this isn't good for my heart, I don't know what is," he said.
With exactly one week to go in the presidential race, Clinton will have plenty of opportunities to take the cure. He will campaign in Florida Tuesday before heading west to New Mexico and Nevada at the end of the week. He'll make those stops without Kerry. The candidate campaigned Monday night in Michigan and Wisconsin and will travel next to Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio and then Wisconsin again before returning for his 26th visit to Florida on Friday.
It's a big map, and it's a far cry from the three-state circuit that many observers thought Kerry and Bush would be running this week. Conventional wisdom said that Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida were the big three battleground states, and that whoever won two of them would almost certainly win the presidency.
It hasn't turned out that way, at least not yet. From the look of most polls, Kerry has Pennsylvania about as locked up as it's going to get before volunteers start driving people to the polls next week, and the Bush campaign has all but acknowledged that it's going to need to find a way to win without Ohio. That's the good news for the Democrats. The bad news is that Bush is doing well in several states Gore carried in 2000 -- well enough that he might survive the loss of Ohio and Pennsylvania so long as he wins Florida.
That's why Kerry will spend much of this week in what were once second-string battlegrounds. There are no gimmies on the list -- if any of the states were easy wins for Kerry, they wouldn't be on the list. But some of the states present bigger challenges than others. New Mexico is effectively tied. Bush appears to be up a little in Wisconsin, and he is up 1 or 2 or 6 -- depending on which poll you believe -- in Minnesota.
Bush owns Iowa for now, although Kerry made a play for the state Monday when he vowed to call a farm summit in his first 100 days in office. And the Silver State of Nevada seems awfully red, but -- if the resources being thrown at the state are any guide -- the Kerry campaign sees room to make a move there. Clinton sees hope in Arkansas; Kerry spokesman and former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry said Monday that the former president believes Democrats have an "opportunity" in Arkansas, and he'll campaign there over the weekend in an effort to exploit it.
McCurry denied that the Kerry campaign was using Clinton in a targeted way to avoid offending swing voters who may not share hardcore Democrats' love for Bubba. "There's nothing targeted about a rally with 100,000 people," he shot back when a reporter asked Monday. Still, it's clear that Clinton will be deployed, at a minimum, to bolster the black vote. African-Americans played a highly visible role in Monday's rally -- Carol Moseley Braun and Philadelphia Mayor John Street both spoke, and Patti LaBelle sang the National Anthem -- and Clinton and Kerry put in a call afterward to ministers in predominately black churches around the country.
