SCDems News
SC Obama campaign reaching back to volunteers
July 24, 2008
Barack Obama's presidential campaign is taking shape in South Carolina, recruiting volunteers it hopes will help deliver a state that has backed Republican presidential candidates since 1980.
More than 50 Obama supporters munched chips and pretzels Tuesday night and sipped sweet tea in a meeting room at the state Democratic Party headquarters for Obama's Campaign for Change, signing up for tasks in the weeks before the November election.
It's the first substantial volunteer effort in South Carolina by the presumptive Democratic nominee since he won the first-in-the-South primary here. Obama supporters say the campaign organizing will make sure that Republican John McCain cannot take for granted support in South Carolina, which hasn't swung Democrat in a White House race since Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford with 56 percent of the state's vote in 1976.
McCain's campaign isn't worrying about South Carolina. Southeastern regional spokesman Mario Diaz said the campaign doesn't discuss strategy, but says it has confidence in the relationship it already has with the GOP and voters here. "The people in South Carolina know Senator McCain very well," he said. "We are extremely confident we will win South Carolina."
McCain's efforts in South Carolina will be run out of the Republican Party's Victory 2008 operations when they're set up, GOP Chairman Katon Dawson said.
Dawson said he's told the McCain campaign to spend money in other states and that the South Carolina GOP, combined with U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, will look out for McCain in the Palmetto State. "We've got South Carolina taken care of."
Don't tell that to the crowd at the Obama volunteer meeting.
"We all have to be one heartbeat toward this campaign for change," state primary campaign leader Anton Gunn told the group. "That means every little thing matters. ... It's got to start with the little things."
That goes for electing Democrats up and down the ballot, all the way to mostly unknown county auditors, Gunn says.
Dawson doubts that will happen. Obama, he says, is making a bad business decision by spending money here.
But Obama's South Carolina Campaign for Change coordinator Kyle Cox says it's time to get volunteers re-engaged in the fall campaign. Cox worked here during the primary, leading efforts to recruit and train volunteers and increase voter registration. It paid off for Obama as he defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton by a two-to-one margin with 55 percent of the vote. .
There are newcomers, too. Christian Smith and Deanna Futrell said they'd moved to South Carolina about a week ago. She's a Spanish teacher and he's working on a doctorate in rhetoric at the University of South Carolina a few blocks away. In Kentucky, they'd put an Obama bumper sticker on their car - and watched Clinton win that race with more than 65 percent of the vote to Obama's 30 percent.
"It's the first campaign that we've really been excited about," Smith said. "We want to get involved."
The State
