Morning News

July 12, 2008

Barack Obama’s campaign chose a small hion gh school gym for his speech in Dayton Friday, July 11, and the cozy surroundings helped amplify the energy of the 1,300 supporters who packed the room.

Peggy Perreira and Brenda Allen, friends from Oxford, drove up for the event because they are big Obama fans. At the end of the speech, Perreira ran to the side of the stage to meet Obama close up.

"I asked him for a hug and he gave me a kiss!" she said.

Allen said she liked Obama’s message.

"He is trying to unite everyone," she said. "That’s exactly where we are as a country. We need unity."

Local Democrats gave the candidate high marks for his speech on energy.

City Commissioner Nan Whaley said she went to a town hall in Dayton when Al Gore was running for president in 2000 in which Gore talked about creating jobs through environmental policy.

"What a difference eight years make," she said.

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin said it was exciting to hear Obama talk about the U.S. strongly supporting green energy.

"He really established a path for us to become leaders in energy in the world," she said.

Montgomery County Commissioner Debbie Lieberman said some of the initiatives Obama pushed in the speech — high- speed rail between cities and creating jobs locally through alternative energy — have been discussed locally for years. Obama pledged $15 billion a year to invest in new sources of energy.

"These are things we have been talking about and pushing for," she said. "We have the work force and we are ready to go. And $15 billion a year would be an incredible start."

During his speech, Obama talked about building high-speed rails connecting a series of Midwestern cities, including Dayton, from Chicago to Detroit to Pittsburgh to Indianapolis.

That pleased Tom Roberts, a state senator from Dayton.

"High-speed rail has been talked about here for years," Roberts said of a proposal to link Dayton to Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati by rail.

Because of Ohio’s strong connection to the auto industry, Roberts sees opportunities for the state to be a leader in building the cars of the future.

"We need to look at the kinds of cars we are building and use what we have in Ohio to build the kinds of cars that will be fuel efficient," he said.

Sylvia Logan of Dayton and her niece, Madison King, were most impressed by a long response Obama gave to a question about improving the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Logan said she liked Obama’s plan for supporting more preschool programs and making college more affordable. Madison, a student at Precious Blood Catholic School said preschool could help kids come to school better prepared.

"Too many kids have a hard time reading," she said. "It’s important for them to be able to read and have a good education."

From the Dayton Daily News:

Dayton and other parts of the Midwest should be the hub of new green energy jobs, given its location and skilled work force, Democrat Barack Obama told the Dayton Daily News on Friday, July 11.

"One of the benefits of being in the Midwest is that we should be at the center of the action," Obama said in a brief interview following his town hall meeting at Stivers School for the Arts.

When asked what he would do as president to bring jobs back to Dayton, Obama said, "Dayton and other portions of the Midwest that have been hard-hit by the loss of manufacturing should be some of the centers for building this new green economy that has to be one of our priorities moving forward. It’s critical that we develop a car that’s getting much higher mileage. It’s critical that we are developing biofuels that can help drive our economy and loosen our dependence on foreign oil. And Ohio and cities like Dayton have the skilled workforce, the experience in manufacturing, the research facilities that allow them to be centerpieces for the major investment — $15 billion a year, as I talked about. I also think that Dayton has a distribution hub historically and can benefit from infrastructure improvements of the sort that I’ve called for."

With the high gas prices and slumping economy, General Motors announced last month that it is closing its sport utility vehicle assembly plant and eliminating 2,500 jobs. Aiming for the long-term goal of energy independence does not have to mean sacrifice and pain in the near term for auto towns like Dayton, Obama said.

"The problem is, had we said to the automakers 20, 25 years ago, ‘We are going to work with you to make more fuel efficient cars but that’s the direction we have to go,’ car makers would have adapted. But they were resistant and we didn’t have the political will to do it," Obama said. "And so, instead of that SUV plant, we could have had a Prius plant or the U.S. equivalent of a Prius plant, a hybrid plant. We can’t double back on that lack of foresight but at least moving forward we can make sure that we are planning for the future so that 20 years from now, people are looking back and saying Dayton has been a city that sees the future and America is a country that sees the future."

From the Columbus Dispatch:

…Yesterday in Dayton, Obama spoke to an enthusiastic crowd estimated at 1,300 at the Stivers School for the Arts about "energy security" and then took five questions from the audience.

He called for an aggressive plan to break the nation’s dependence on foreign oil as a way to keep the country secure, saying America needs a program for energy independence similar to the one that sent men to the moon in the 1960s.

"The price of a barrel of oil is now one of the most dangerous weapons in the world," Obama said. "That’s why we have to end the tyranny of oil in our time, in this generation."

Obama offered a range of proposals to reduce U.S. consumption of oil, including a $150 billion "clean-energy fund" to help create fuel-efficient cars and alternative sources of energy.

He also criticized McCain for not doing enough about energy during his 26 years in Washington, as well as McCain’s proposals for a "gas-tax holiday" and for increased offshore drilling for oil if states allow it. Obama said prices would not be lowered.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Barack Obama is offering a prize to five Virginians who register at least 100 new voters apiece before the Oct. 6 registration deadline.

They get to meet with him.

Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder announced yesterday that the Obama campaign has a goal of registering 151,000 prospective new voters over the next three months. That would be 1,000 more than Obama himself helped register as a community organizer in Chicago before he ran for office.

The personal meeting with Obama will be offered as an incentive in a program the Obama campaign has dubbed the "Can You Beat Obama? Challenge."

…"Virginia voted for me at a time when no other state had dared to go that far," he said.

Wilder, elected in 1989, was the nation’s first elected African-American governor.

Wilder said Virginia is a pivotal state and Obama can win it because he has shown that he cares — coming to this state twice already since he sewed up the Democratic nomination.

No Democratic presidential candidate has carried Virginia since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

From CNN:

Every casino keeps a lot of money on hand, but few gamblers are confident enough to try to win it all.

Barack Obama is doing just that — betting big as he campaigns across the US.

Officially, the plan is called the "50-State Strategy," and it gives you an indication of just how optimistic the Democrats are feeling.

The strategy gets its name from the fact that although the U.S. is made up of 50 states, no presidential candidate campaigns in them all.

Most states vote so predictably for the same party in most presidential elections that it doesn’t make sense for either candidate to spend any of their limited time or money trying to affect the outcome.

You’d rarely see a Republican candidate for the White House working to win over largely liberal New York; or a Democrat trying to rally conservative Montana.

The battle is really fought and won in the "swing" states that do move from one party to another - that’s fewer than 20 states overall. The rest of the country largely watches the election unfold from a distance.

This year, though, Obama’s campaign says it will be in all 50 states.

Obama’s people believe that they have…so many volunteers that they can afford it, they can organize it and they can staff it.

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Comments

One Response to “Morning News”

John on July 12th, 2008 1:55 pm

I am not very impressed with Obama’s Energy Plan - If you can even call it a plan>>?? I like the boon pickens plan, I signed a petition asking Obama to at least give his plan serious consideration. You can sign the petition at http://www.theobamaplan.com

I had never heard of tboon pickens till about a week ago. I think I like the plan, I just seen it and It seems pretty solid. I dont know though? He is a billionaire after all. Can he be trusted? His complete plan is at http://www.tboonpickens.com

I wonder if either candidate will embrace his plan. Wonder what every one else thinks>>???

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