We finally had the grand opening of our Obama office in Phoenix this week! We are so happy to have the Obama campaign officially here as part of the 50 state strategy, and this latest graph from pollster.com shows you why:
We do not concede Arizona in this election to McCain.
They opened the office in a heavily Hispanic area of Phoenix, which I think was a smart move given that Hispanics are heavily favoring Obama. Here are some pics of the grand opening.
According to our local (biased) press,
Barack Obama's presidential campaign opened its Phoenix headquarters Wednesday, signaling, according to supporters, that Obama will challenge rival presidential candidate John McCain for votes in McCain's home state.
Democrats contend that Arizona is a battleground state, despite a series of surveys that indicate Arizona's fourth-term Republican senator holds a double-digit advantage against the first-term Democratic senator from Illinois.
Now if the reporter for this article had just looked at the pollster.com graph above and stopped quoting select polls, he would have presented that this was a closer race than most of the media wants to cover. They can't be seen to be embarassing the home state boy, lest they face the wrath of John McCain. As documented in my previous diary here, McCain has a habit of angrily berating local reporters when they don't cover him the way he thinks he should be covered. In addition, if the local press reporter above had also read my other recent diary here, he might have presented a more balanced article about why Obama does have a chance to win Arizona.
Nonetheless, the local press does report these facts in regards to the Obama campaign office opening in Arizona:
No decision has been made regarding whether Obama or his running mate, Joe Biden, will appear in Arizona during the final two months of the campaign, he said.
Similarly, no decisions have been made concerning whether contributions will be spent on multimedia advertising in Arizona, he said.
I also like the bizarre spin the McCain campaign placed on this office opening here:
In contrast, McCain's Southwest campaign manager, Bettina Nava, said she interpreted the new campaign headquarters as an indication that Obama realizes he's losing ground elsewhere around the country.
Other reports indicate that approximately 1500-2000 people showed up to the grand opening of the Obama office here, with this other good news:
"People are coming in every day making contributions - coming in with cash and checks, come up to our front desk, saying we are doing this because we want change," said Cieslak.
He said there are a handful of paid staffers in the Phoenix office, field organizers in Tucson and volunteer coordinators in Flagstaff. Cieslak said opening a Tucson office is "still being discussed."
I hope they open an official office in Tuscon, which is a Democratic hotbed in Arizona. Meanwhile, our Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano is campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Hopefully, she will get back here to Arizona to stump for him as well, as she did during the primary election.
The fight carries on in the Southwest--Si Se Puede!