My new column in the Boston Globe deals with the Obama campaign's choice of states to seriously contest in November's election, a priority list that is noticably different from what a Hillary Clinton campaign would have come up with. An excerpt below:
WILL BARACK Obama go with the flow or reverse the tide in this year's presidential election? In both 2000 and 2004, the Democratic nominee came within one state of winning the Electoral College, so one could argue that even a slight bump in the party's national popularity will push a few Democratic-trending states into Obama's column and guarantee him a win. The alternative view, forcefully advocated by Hillary Clinton in the primaries, is that the Democrats need to take back states that have drifted away from the party since Bill Clinton left the White House.
Obama is certainly not conceding historically Democratic states where George Bush made significant gains in 2004, but he is signaling a preference to fight in places where the GOP showed signs of slippage in the last election. Paradoxically, this path of least resistance could dramatically change the electoral map. At a fund-raiser earlier this month, campaign manager David Plouffe told the crowd that Obama could win the election even if he loses both Florida and Ohio, two states that Bill Clinton carried in 1996.
Also, the Obama campaign recently deployed thousands of volunteers to 17 "key" states, and conspicuously absent from the list are several states that voted for Bill Clinton twice before shifting strongly toward Bush (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia). Instead, Obama is concentrating on Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia, which have voted Republican in every election since 1976 but failed to give Bush much of a boost in 2004.
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