During the course of my internship with the McCain Campaign a couple of weeks ago and I was interviewed by the Washington Post.
Here it is.
McCain Forced to Fight for Virginia
Traditionally Red State Finds GOP Struggling to Match Obama Operation
By Michael D. Shear and Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 17, 2008; A01
Sens.
Barack Obama and John McCain will take different messages to different
audiences in different parts of Virginia over the next two days, but
they will have the same goal in mind: to urge their supporters to spend
the final stretch of the campaign fighting for every vote they can find.
Obama
will hold a rally today in Roanoke, a conservative part of the state
where he hopes to keep the race relatively close. McCain will travel
tomorrow to Prince William County, where he aims to cut into Obama's
Northern Virginia base.
In his quest to win the Old Dominion,
Obama is trying to end 44 years of Republican dominance and become the
first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson to carry the state. McCain's
challenge is more immediate, as he has less than three weeks to reverse
polls that show a trend against him.
By every organizational
measure, Obama's campaign appears to have the advantage -- it has
nearly three times as many offices, has contacted tens of thousands
more potential supporters, and has helped register nearly half a
million new voters this year, most of whom state officials believe
favor the Democrat.
But Virginia remains a state with strong
conservative tendencies, and it is unclear whether a majority will pull
the lever for a Democrat whom McCain has derided as having "the most
liberal voting record in the United States Senate." A key to a McCain
comeback will be whether Republicans have built a strong enough
get-out-the-vote operation in a state where none has ever been needed,
something many party leaders question.
"People have no idea how
hard you have to work to shake the tree for every last vote," said Rob
Catron, a longtime political consultant who has managed GOP campaigns
in the Hampton Roads area for years. Republicans "still think, somehow,
that Virginia is bulletproof when it comes to presidential elections,"
he said.
Aides say the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as
McCain's running mate transformed their effort, energizing church
communities, home-schooling leaders and social conservatives.
In
Southwest Virginia, there are now waiting lists 300 deep for signs that
used to sit on shelves. Victoria Cobb, president of the Family
Foundation, is handing out conservative voter guides to churches she
had never heard of before. And home-schooling champion Michael P.
Farris's "Generation Joshua" is organizing teams of teenage McCain
door-knockers in parts of Northern Virginia.
McCain's staff
members also say they have recruited volunteers in 1,500 of the state's
precincts, assembled one of their best phone and door-knocking
operations, and used the latest technology to quickly update voter
lists.
The Republican National Committee has also begun making
automated phone calls in Virginia and in other battleground states that
talk about Obama's connections to "terrorists," a reference to the
Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers. And the Republican Party of
Virginia has circulated a mailer bearing a dark-skinned face and the
words "America must look evil in the eye and never flinch."
Still,
Republicans are not bullish about their statewide effort, especially
compared with an Obama operation that got in gear before the state's
February primary.
The GOP "doesn't even know where the
Republicans live" in Fairfax County, bemoaned longtime county
Supervisor Michael R. Frey, expressing dismay at what he described as
his party's lack of organization, unity and excitement.
"Until
Sarah Palin was nominated, there was absolutely no enthusiasm for
McCain's candidacy," said Farris, who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant
governor in 1993. "People were resigned to vote for him, but that was
it. There was no reaching out. No one asked us to do anything. In the
last few weeks, people have asked us. So we're going to do it."
Obama's
campaign has staged huge voter-registration drives that have gone
unmatched by McCain, according to local registrars, who say they are
swamped by Obama's efforts.
In Fairfax alone, election officials
processed about 1,000 applications per day before the deadline this
month, General Registrar Rokey W. Suleman II said. A total of 61,000
registrants signed up in the county this year.
Although voters
do not register by party in Virginia, Suleman said the vast majority of
the new registrants probably are Obama supporters because virtually all
the applications have come from drives led by groups backing the
candidate. Suleman said he has seen no registration drives by the
McCain campaign.
McCain has 20 "victory centers" in the state,
but that is about a third of the campaign offices his rival has.
Obama's 3,000 volunteers knocked on 262,000 doors on a recent weekend
-- a huge number compared with the 300,000 doors that Democrats knocked
on during the state's 2005 gubernatorial campaign.
By
comparison, McCain's volunteers personally contacted 130,000 voters
with a combination of phone calls and door-knocking during a recent
week, a senior campaign strategist said.
Evidence that McCain's
efforts are trailing is especially stark across voter-rich Northern
Virginia. On an early October weekend, Obama's 16 offices buzzed, while
McCain's five were nearly deserted.
In West Springfield,
Republican volunteer Fred Tsai sat alone at the front counter of an
isolated McCain campaign office. Another volunteer could be heard
making phone calls in a back room, but no one else appeared during a
15-minute period on a Saturday morning. "We just opened up this past
week," Tsai said.
Down the road, at least 200 volunteers
overflowed out of a storefront Obama operation in southern Fairfax as
they waited for instructions on going door to door. Many had driven
down from the District and Maryland; many others had found the location
through the Obama campaign Web site.
Similarly, in Gainesville
in western Prince William, two young McCain volunteers sat alone by the
phones in a cavernous new campaign office. But in Dumfries, Obama
volunteers and paid staff fielded a steady stream of eager supporters
wanting to help.
At the McCain office in Sterling on a recent
Sunday afternoon, three people made calls at a bank of about 20 phones.
"We may not have as many offices as Obama," said Kevin Brown, 18, one
of the three. "But we've got a lot of spirit."
Trey Walker,
McCain's top operative for the mid-Atlantic region, described those
examples as the "normal ebb and flow" of a phone-bank operation.
"We're
very happy with where we are organizationally," he said, calling
McCain's efforts larger than any recent statewide campaign. "Our daily
goal is to knock on thousands of doors a day across the commonwealth.
We continue to exceed that."
The McCain campaign says that
Virginia is its third-best state when it comes to meeting its goals for
phone-calling and door-knocking. The number of voters volunteers
contacted in a single week -- 130,000 -- exceeded all but one of
McCain's battleground operations, a senior campaign strategist said.
And
the volunteers on the campaign's front lines for McCain insist that
they are succeeding, pointing to what they call "collateral," the signs
and bumper stickers that used to languish on the shelves.
In
Virginia Beach, Ken Golden said the 1,500 McCain yard signs he had in
late September are gone. "He makes the announcement of Sarah Palin and,
my God, the stuff is leaping out of the headquarters and the victory
center."
At the Mecklenburg County Republican committee meeting
in September, McCain chairman Tucker Watkins marveled at the 40 people
who showed up to volunteer. A year ago, he said, six people attended
the regular meeting.
Herbert H. Bateman Jr., a Republican on the
Newport News City Council whose late father was a congressman, conceded
that Democrats are working harder than ever in his community. But he
said the mood feels no different from that of past years on the
Republican side.
"I've received phone calls, I've seen signs in
yards, and I've seen plenty of advertising by McCain-Palin," Bateman
said. "I haven't seen them give quarter to anyone."
But some of
Virginia's longtime operatives said they do not think McCain's turnout
operation is strong enough. They say his campaign is being run by young
people who have little experience with statewide campaigns in the Old
Dominion. The state director for McCain's campaign was a junior staff
member on Jerry Kilgore's gubernatorial campaign in 2005, tracking
Democrat Timothy M. Kaine around the state with a camera.
A
senior Virginia Republican called the McCain operations in the two most
populous areas of the state -- Northern Virginia and Tidewater --
"lackluster" and said it makes him nervous. He said the veterans of
past campaign have vanished.
"They're not there. They've not
been active. They've not been encouraged to be part of the campaign,"
said the Republican, who is supporting McCain and does not want to be
identified as critical of the effort.
Asked about the campaign's
lack of longtime Virginia operatives, a top McCain strategist noted the
string of losing Republican campaigns in the state recently, including
Kilgore in 2005 and U.S. Sen. George Allen in 2006.
"It's probably a very positive thing in Virginia to have some new blood," the strategist said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101604283_pf.html