Published November 4, 2008, in The St. Augustine Record

On Election Day eve, Obama stops in Jacksonville

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Barack Obama took to the arena stage here at 11:15 a.m. Monday, 37 hours and 45 minutes before the last polls close on his nearly two-year campaign for the presidency.

Obama was far, by just about any measure, from where he was when the first gun sounded on the primary season: an underdog junior senator trying to become the first black presidential candidate.

The Democrat from Illinois is still a junior senator, but that is about the only holdover from the first campaign stops in Iowa.

He now is the first black presidential candidate and is hardly an underdog going into Election Day.

He was on his first of three stops on election eve in what is typically GOP territory, afterward recording an interview to be aired during halftime of the Monday Night Football game before flying to Charlotte, N.C.

Before arriving here he reportedly learned that his 86-year-old grandmother who helped to raise him had died Monday morning in Hawaii. He did not mention her death here but announced it in a statement when he arrived in Charlotte. From there he went on to Manassas, Va.

In Jacksonville, though, the mood was hardly grim, as he approached the lectern to a chant of “yes – we – can.”

But near the end of his 28-minute speech, he reminded the estimated crowd of 9,150 that there were still 37 hours and 17 minutes left in the race.

“Florida, don’t believe for a second this election’s over,” he said. “Don’t think for a minute the powerful will concede anything without a fight.

“This is going to be close here in Florida. This is going to be close all across the country.”

Though optimistic, Steven Schale, the Obama campaign’s Florida director and a St. Augustine native, wasn’t publicly predicting how much Obama would win by in Florida.

(He wrote a number down in private and will wait until tonight to see if indeed his candidate won and, if so, how close his prediction was.)

No matter the margin, the confidence he carried Monday had been months in the making.

The campaign has changed the modus operandi of past Democratic bids in the state, Schale said, by setting up shop in Republican strongholds such as Ocala and St. Augustine, in a small art gallery-turned-headquarters on San Marco Avenue.

“I don’t harbor any grand illusions that we are going to win St. Johns County,” he said in an interview after Obama’s speech. “But if we do three or four points better than John Kerry, and we replicate that throughout the state, we’ll be in for a good night.”

Most recent polls indicate that they will, though they show the Democrat has a fairly slim lead in the state. That would have been encouraging news in mid-September, when a Quinnipiac University poll showed his opponent, John McCain, a Republican and the senior senator from Arizona, had a comfortable 7 percent lead here.

On Sunday, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, made a swing through Florida, stopping in Tallahassee, Gainesville and Daytona Beach, adding to the push to win the state’s 27 electoral votes when some didn’t think it would even be a contest.

Bill Nelson, Florida’s Democratic senator, told reporters at the arena the state could have been written off.

“To begin with, some thought it was. But I said, ‘Uh-uh, uh-uh,’” Nelson said, wagging his finger.

A good chunk of the talk dealt with what has become the election’s predominant issue: the economy.

That was no accident: “His campaign said that if we keep on talking about the economy we’re going to lose,” Obama said of McCain, “which is why I keep on talking about the economy.”

Trying to hit the point home, he asked how many spectators make less than a quarter-million dollars a year, the minimum for his proposed tax-relief plan. Just about everybody cheered and raised their hands.

Obama also attacked his opponent for having stood with President Bush on fiscal issues — “He hasn’t been a maverick, he’s been a sidekick to George W. Bush.” — and for turning to “slash-and-burn, say-anything, do-anything politics” in the homestretch of a heated campaign.

“That’s how you play the game in Washington,” he said. “When you have run out of ideas you try to distract.”

Rachel Buff hasn’t been distracted, but she won’t be voting for Obama.

Well, she can’t. She’s 14, but she hopes she will be able to cast a ballot for his re-election in 2012. But the freshman at Creekside High School, who spent a few hours recently making calls for the campaign, got an experience of her young lifetime Monday, as the senator departed from his vehicle at the airport.

Members of the traveling press pool ran from their buses, passed Secret Service agents and heavily armed police, to snap photographs of Obama greeting supporters. One of them was Rachel Buff. Her father works at the airport and asked campaign staff if his daughter could stand on the tarmac as Obama departed; they said she could.

She expected to watch him from afar, but she brought along a list of questions to ask him if she got the chance, hoping to turn his answers into a story for a community newspaper in Julington Creek, where she lives.

A staffer took the list to Obama for him to autograph. Lynn Buff, Rachel’s mother, said once he saw the questions he asked who had written them. Someone pointed out Rachel, and she was summoned. He didn’t answer the questions but asked her what grade she was in and how old she was and took a photograph with her.

So what is it about Obama? “His views,” she said. “I agree with everything he believes.”

“Believe” is one of those keywords the Obama campaign has been using for months, along with “change” and “hope.”

In an interview, the pastor who gave the convocation at the rally, the Rev. John Newman, said that one verb and those two nouns have been hard to come by in the black community, either because of authentic oppression or because it had been making excuses for its struggles.

That could all very well change in the early hours of Wednesday, Newman said, putting words to the feeling that exuded from the smiles and the chants and the dances to the funk and disco background music before and after Obama’s speech. It appeared that the largely black audience did believe.

“If he wins tomorrow night, African Americans are going to wake up on November the 5th and never look at themselves the same way again,” Newman said. “Never.”

A version of this article was printed Nov. 4, 2008, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record; this version was amended to correct the first reference to John McCain.