ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the days before and after Tuesday’s second presidential debate, Barack Obama will spend his time in states where Democratic presidential candidates rarely go, especially this close to an election.
This past weekend and through the middle of this week, Obama has been focusing on Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. It has been nearly a month, for example, since he visited Ohio, the battleground of battlegrounds.
The red-state itinerary is the latest example of just how aggressively the Illinois senator has worked to widen the playing field, boosted by an economic crisis that he claims his opponent has handled in an “erratic” fashion.
Emerging briefly Sunday from debate preparations, Obama responded to a comment that a top McCain adviser made in a weekend Washington Post story. The adviser said Republicans are “looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama’s aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans.”
The Democratic nominee mocked that statement during his appearance at a packed high school football stadium.
“Turn the page on the economy? We are facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and John McCain wants us to ‘turn the page’ on talking about the economy?” Obama asked.
McCain spent Sunday preparing for Tuesday’s debate in Nashville, Tenn.
Before he set up his debate camp in this liberal bastion nestled amid the Blue Ridge Mountains in otherwise conservative western North Carolina, Obama stopped Saturday in Virginia, another state where he is spending heavily on advertising.
If he is to win North Carolina, where George Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 by 12 percentage points, Obama will need to score wide margins among transplants to the state and blacks, who account for about a fifth of registered voters.
McCain had dominated the North Carolina polls, but in the past few weeks, Obama has been gaining. An average of recent surveys by pollster showed McCain ahead by about 1 percentage point — within the margin of error.
Paul Cox, Obama’s North Carolina spokesman, said the campaign now has more than 40 offices in the state. He said Democrats have registered about 224,000 new voters since the start of the year, compared with 40,000 for Republicans.
This is Obama’s fifth visit to North Carolina since the start of the general-election campaign. Shortly after he departs Tuesday morning, his wife, Michelle, is set to land in the Tar Heel State for an event with military families.
The morning after the debate, Obama is scheduled to fly to Indiana, a state the Democrats have not carried in a presidential race since 1964.
Obama has been boosted in many traditionally Republican states by his marathon primary fight with Sen. Hillary Clinton, a stressful period for Democrats that nonetheless helped register new voters and build political organizations.
Meantime, the Obama campaign launched the last of four ads criticizing McCain’s health-care plan. The ad is set to air in battleground states starting today.
The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
