Amy Chozick reports on the presidential race from St. Louis.
Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.
The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.
Lt. Samuel Dotson of the St. Louis Police Department confirmed the number of attendees piled into the grassy lawn by the Mississippi River.
To be sure, big crowds don’t always signal a big turnout on Election Day. But Obama’s ability to draw his largest audience yet in a typically red state that just weeks ago looked out of reach, could signal a changing electoral map.
For months Missouri polls put Obama as much as ten percentage points behind Republican John McCain. It was widely believed that McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate would have won over the state’s conservatives and boosted his chances there. So far, that hasn’t happened.
A Rasmussen poll released on Friday shows Obama leading in Missouri 52% to 46% for McCain.
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill had harsh words for Palin when she introduced Obama on Saturday. Referring to comments Palin made earlier this week in North Carolina about “pro-America” states, McCaskill said “We have reached a new low in America politics when a candidate dares to say that one part of America is pro-America and another part is anti-America.”
She also took a dig at McCain for selecting a vice presidential nominee with limited experience. “One [candidate] picked one of the strongest candidates for vice president he could’ve picked in the United States and well, the other didn’t.”
Recognizing that big rallies don’t always result in cast ballots, the Obama campaign has dispatched thousands of field organizers and volunteers to Missouri to knock on doors in a statewide get out the vote effort.
ST. LOUIS - Under the Gateway to the West, the St. Louis arch, Barack Obama addressed an estimated 100,000 people in the Show Me State just 17 days before the general election - his biggest rally to date in the United States.
The candidate, who accepted his party’s nomination in front of 80,000 in Denver, looked out to the sea of people and simply said, “What a spectacular sight. All I can say is wow.”
While he acknowledged he thought “the winds of change are blowing all across America,” he cautioned, “Democrats have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
“You can’t let up or you can’t pay too much attention to the polls. We’ve got to keep making our case for change; we’ve got to keep fighting for every vote; we’ve got to keep running through that finish line,” he urged the massive crowd.
and to tie back into this string -- (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32949517 and preceding (whole buch of 'em) and following (I'd originally intended those as continuing this string, starting from the post to which this post is a reply, but goofed)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty." from John Philpot Curran, Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790
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