As Obama hits the road, he and U.S. get to know each other
By Jeff Zeleny
Thursday, July 10, 2008
BUTTE, Montana: Senator Barack Obama marveled at the view here in Big Sky Country. He discovered that the gumbo in New Orleans was far tastier than in Chicago, and he was pleasantly surprised that he loved Austin, Texas, and its music.
The presidential campaign has not only given the United States a chance to meet Obama. It has also given Obama a chance to meet the United States, and it has taken him to large swaths of the country that he had never seen before.
Since the beginning of his political ascension less than four years ago, Obama has visited New Orleans, toured parts of the Great Plains and traveled across the South, all for the first time. He made a nighttime stop at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, paid his respects at the grave of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and dropped by the home of President Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri.
Not since he was 11 - when he traveled through a handful of U.S. states with his mother, grandmother and sister by Greyhound bus, train and an occasional rental car - has Obama seen this much of the United States.
Having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and spent much of his adult life in large cities, Obama, 46, is now acquainting himself more deeply with the United States and finds himself unusually surprised by some of his findings.
"A place that I've come to love, which I did not expect until this campaign, is Texas," he said in an interview the other day aboard his campaign plane, a patchwork of the countryside passing below him.
"I ended up loving Texas! I've been struck by how many beautiful places there are in the country that you don't necessarily think of as beautiful. Pittsburgh, for example, is a really handsome town with the rivers and the hills."
The Democratic primary campaign, because of its unusual duration, took Obama to nearly every state in the continental United States.
Most past U.S. presidential nominees had been on the stage for years or even decades, traveling around the United States to raise money and build a network for themselves and others.
Over the course of a long career in politics, as well as his service in the U.S. Navy, Senator John McCain, Obama's Republican rival, has seen much of the United States. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, but he lived in many places growing up, following his father's military career from Virginia to California and several other U.S. states. McCain has traveled to 42 states since his presidential campaign began last year.
Meanwhile, Obama's first trips to Iowa and New Hampshire came on the cusp of his own debut as a presidential contender. The senator is a relative rarity, a candidate who is not from a famous family and whose background limited his opportunities to travel while in college and immediately after.
His salary as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1980s - about $12,000 annually - allowed him to travel only once or twice a year. Now, he is more likely to travel once or twice a day, and he often christens his arrival in a new destination with a personal greeting as he soaks in his surroundings.
"It is fun to be in Fargo," he said one recent afternoon as he stood in the warm sunshine at an outdoor park in North Dakota. "But it doesn't look like it does in the movie," he said, referring to a 1996 movie by the Coen brothers named after the city.
Another favorite discovery, he said, was the wide-open beauty of Oregon. This past spring, as his campaign bus traveled through the state from Portland to Corvallis, he also picked up a bit of trivia.
"Oregon actually is the size of Great Britain, except it has three million people and Great Britain has 80 million," Obama said in the interview. "You pick up facts like that, and you realize again how lucky we are."
While he chose nearly 20 years ago to settle in Chicago, a city rich in history and with an immensely diverse population, Obama has no second residence to add texture to his life story.
Obama's success in the crowded Democratic primary season was rooted, to a large degree, in his biography. But in the general election campaign, one of his most pressing challenges is to assure voters that he is one of them, that his background and upbringing are not so different from their own.
Even though he did not make his first trip to the continental United States until he was 11 and his family history is unique among presidential candidates, Obama says he does not consider himself to be at a political disadvantage.
"My grandparents and my mom, in many ways, were so quintessentially American that they transmitted those values to me at a very early age," he said, adding that his childhood in Hawaii was filled with stories about Kansas, leaving him knowing far more than anything he knew about his father's family in Kenya. "I feel like there hasn't been a lot that has been unfamiliar to me as I've been traveling around."
"In terms of culture, politics, attitudes, people," he said, many of the regional distinctions in the United States have been muted. After 18 months of traveling extensively across the United States, he said, "the biggest differences have more to do with rural, suburban, urban, as opposed to north, south, east or west."
Still, local U.S. newspapers have picked up on a handful of his on-location gaffes, which then are telegraphed to a wider audience by the Republican National Committee.
In May, when Obama arrived for a rally in the largest city in South Dakota, he declared: "Thank you, Sioux City!" Sioux City is in Iowa, whereas Obama was in Sioux Falls.
A week later, he greeted the crowd in a large arena in South Florida with, "How's it going, Sunshine?" A few minutes later, he added, "It's good to be in Sunshine!" Actually, he was in Sunrise, Florida.
The other day, as Obama made his second trip of the year to Butte, he exhaled as he took in the Rocky Mountains in the distance and the ridge that marks the Continental Divide.
"This is just a terrific opportunity for us to visit what has to be one of the prettiest states in the country," Obama said, speaking over the applause of a few hundred local residents. "I've had a chance now to campaign in 49 states. The only place that I have not been yet is Alaska."
As he left Montana on a plane bound for Missouri, Obama previewed an itinerary that he hoped would come to pass.
"I will make it to Alaska at some point, but maybe after I'm president," he said. "I can't wait." |
