On Tuesday, after leaving Ocala, FL, enroute to Melbourne, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden stopped at Florida's mega retirement community, The Villages, for an ice cream cone.
Then, on Wednesday evening, Obama campaign surrogate Caroline Kennedy visited The Villages to give Democrats there a pep talk.
Follow me below the fold to find out what happened.
A disclaimer:
I was unable to be on hand personally for either event. What I'm about to tell you comes from talking to friends in The Villages and quoting from news accounts.
And now, some background:
The Villages is a Republican stronghold. In 2004, voter turnout there exceeded 80 percent, and George W. Bush beat John Kerry there by a margin of 60 to 40 percent.
The Villages CEO, H. Gary Morse, is one of the largest donors to the Republican Party and Republican candidates in Florida.
This is not a place where Democrats are made to feel welcome.
But Obama volunteers have been working The Villages hard, and some Republicans there are switching sides in this election. Even the most die-hard McCain supporters are beginning to resign themselves to the idea that McCain will lose the election.
It was against this backdrop that Joe Biden made an impromptu stop at the Spanish Springs Town Square for a vanilla chocolate chip ice cream cone Tuesday afternoon. He stayed for a half-hour. And by the time he left, a crowd of over 200 people had gathered to shake his hand, get his autograph and wish him well. Merchants in the stores he visited were gushing with pride and enthusiasm. An art gallery owner who had a painting in the store depicting past Democratic presidents playing poker got Biden to autograph the painting, and couldn't say enough good things about the candidate.
The Villages Daily Sun, a newspaper owned by The Villages and tightly controlled by Morse, put the visit front and center on its front page, with two large color photos, and reported the facts I've described above.
In typical fashion, The Daily Sun did try to minimize the event. They compared Biden's unannounced, unpublicized weekday visit drawing 200 to Sarah Palin's earlier highly-promoted weekend visit, which they're still saying drew 60,000 people (it's worth noting that The Ocala-Star Banner, in reporting Biden's visit to Ocala Tuesday, revised their estimate of Palin's crowd from the originally-reported 60,000 downward to a more realistic figure of 25,000).
And while The Star-Banner and local television reporters who attended Biden's Ocala rally estimated his crowd there (again on a weekday) at 3,500, The Daily Sun (which did not send a reporter to the event) used the AP's description of the crowd in Ocala as being in the "hundreds." (Technically accurate... 3,500 is "hundreds"... it's also "thousands.")
It gets better. Caroline Kennedy appeared in The Villages Wednesday evening. She gave a presentation in support of the Obama campaign in the Rhett Butler Room of The Savannah Center, an auditorium in The Villages. The Daily Sun did little to promote the visit, running a couple of small blurbs. Despite that, the overflow crowd numbered over 1,000, according to this morning's report in The Star-Banner. (I haven't seen today's Daily Sun yet. While they won't be able to ignore the visit, no doubt they'll report the crowd as numbering in the "dozens.")
It gets even better. The Daily Sun's web page is remarkably amateurish for an outfit run by a billion-dollar corporation, and runs only one major story per day from the paper, rather than giving visitors access to all the paper's content, as most newspaper sites do.
As of 8 a.m. this morning, the paper's front page story was that of a Villages couple whose 39-year-old son has been appointed as the U.S. Coast Guard's representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Presidential Transition Team. The story is accompanied by a photo with the following caption:
Villages residents Dr. Joseph "Buddy" Staier and his wife Paula show a photo of their son, United States Coast Guard Cmdr. Mikeal Staier, who was recently appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Presidential Transition Team.
Except that the photo accompanying the story isn't that of the smiling Staiers holding up the picture of their son. It's a photo of a smiling Caroline Kennedy standing at a podium in The Savannah Center behind an Obama-Biden '08 sign.
No doubt H. Gary Morse is hitting the Pepto Bismol bottle and furiously dialing the Daily Sun's web host as I write. Anyone want to take bets on how long this error will stand? Here's the link to the web page. Check in on it from time to time!
If you want to read an encouraging story of how upbeat Democrats in The Villages are becoming (and get a better idea of what they're up against), follow this link to a sidebar article The Star-Banner ran this morning.
For a Democratic candidate paying an unannounced half-hour visit to draw a crowd of 200 in The Villages is amazing. For a campaign surrogate to draw a crowd of 1,000 in The Villages is nothing short of miraculous.
Folks, it's fun being a Democrat in Central Florida right now! And don't worry, Kossacks - we're leaving it all on the road here in our little piece of the I-4 corridor. I've already voted. I'll be phonebanking Saturday for the final day of early voting, and I'll be driving Obama voters to the polls all day Tuesday. There are hundreds more volunteers like me working here in Ocala to deliver Marion County for Barack.
Let's GOTV!