Obama visits places abnormal, for a Democratic nominee, to prove he's normal; will he return?

One writer called it a "values tour." One news outlet dubbed it an "apple pie campaign." Whatever it was, or is, Sen. Barack Obama has been going some abnormal places, for a Democratic nominee, to prove he's a normal guy. Only July 3 and 4, he visited North Dakota and Montana, and today he's in North Carolina, all states that were not on the list of Bush states his campaign manager said they are targeting: Virginia, *Missouri, Colorado, *Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico. (*He visited these states last week, too.)

"Some Republicans have dismissed Obama's "values" tour as more of a 'head fake' than a real foray into GOP territories he thinks he can win in November," wrote Jonathan Weisman of The Washington Post. Teri Finneman of The Forum in Fargo (which ran the photo above) asked him the right question: Will he return to North Dakota? "It’s hard to anticipate what my schedule’s going to look like in October," he said. "That’s a pretty long ways off. But we have committed resources here. I’ve got some of my best staff people who are here. They’re going to be organizing at a grassroots level. I think there’s a lot of excitement here in North Dakota around this campaign, and in the fall, I think we may surprise a lot of people. This thing, is, I believe, going to stay very close." (Read more) In Montana, he said, "I'm a firm believer that 90 percent of success is showing up, and Democrats haven't been showing up in these states."

But how many of "these states" are there? Charles Peters, West Virginia native and founding editor of The Washington Monthly, recalls how Obama nearly ignored the largely rural, overwhelmingly white and entirely Appalachian state in the primary season: "Why didn't he show respect for the people of Kentucky and West Virginia by doing more than token campaigning there? These are troubling questions for an Obama supporter like me. I hate to contemplate the reaction of those less sympathetic to his cause. His San Francisco side could still cost him the election." (Column not available online)

Obama's future schedule will be determined partly by the political winds, which are currently at his back. "There's a hurricane force out there in this country of people who say, 'We want change,' " John Weaver, a former top adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain, told Weisman. "And if we're not careful, the Democrats might have the kind of year we had in 1980," when a Republican wave swept out Democratic Senate mainstays in the West." (Read more)

Whatever Obama's future schedule, last week's stops were part of "the core of his campaign’s goal this summer: To establish his American cultural normalcy," Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith write for Politico. They note that the "apple pie campaign" took Obama to overwhelmingly white places, and they quote former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder and another Southern black political figure on the race angle. “He has got to make Americans understand that he comes from the same place that most of them come from,” said Harvey Gantt, who was the first black mayor of Charlotte and almost unseated Sen. Jesse Helms. “He has to bend over backwards to show that he is like them. Unfortunately, we’re not yet at a time in our country’s history that he can afford not to.” (Read more)