Obama laps McCain in Albuquerque

Barack Obama pressed the flesh with supporters after his half-hour speech at the University of New Mexico Saturday night. (Photo by Gwyneth Doland)

ALBUQUERQUE — Once again, New Mexico is one of maybe a dozen battleground states lavished with personal attention by the presidential candidates in the campaign’s final days.

No more proof is needed than Saturday’s same-day dueling Albuquerque visits by John McCain in the morning, Barack Obama at night.

Eight days to Election Day and the race is playing out at a fever pitch. And if the science of polling is to be believed, it’s not particularly close. The current Real Clear Politics average concludes that Obama has an 8.4 percentage point lead in New Mexico, with 7 percent still undecided. Undecided voters this late in the game typically break away from the party in power.

But an even more convincing, less-academic sign that Obama has the edge in our quadrennial swing state contest was on vivid display Saturday night.

The Democratic nominee’s 45,000-plus rally at the University of New Mexico’s Johnson Field was possibly the largest political rally ever in the state’s history, as convincingly reported by KOB-TV’s Valerie Castro. (NMI’s Heath Haussamen notes that estimates were similar for a 1996 rally for then-President Bill Clinton at New Mexico State University.)

“Is New Mexico gonna go for Obama?” Gov. Bill Richardson practically shouted from the podium when he addressed the crowd. The mass of people extending well into nearby streets responded with a roar. “Are we going to be the battleground state that makes Senator Obama president?” Another roar. The exuberant ex-presidential-candidate-turned-traveling-Obama-booster then gave what he called “my official estimate” of the record-setting UNM crowd. “I’d say we have 300,000 here!”

To many, it probably felt that way.

Of course, a sense of being near a historic man at a historic time was on many minds.

The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Kate Nash reported this by quoting the words of UNM student Michelle Jewitt, who got in line at 1 p.m. for a rally that didn’t really begin until after 9 p.m.

“When I saw the line, I just decided to stay,” she said. Although she had seen Obama speak before, she wanted to bring her two sons. “This is history. I hope he will be our next president, and they can look back as adults and say, ‘I was there the first time we had an African-American president.’”

Spoiled by both sides

Many New Mexicans have been getting more and more spoiled by our battleground status ever since our swing state swung blue in 2000 by a mere 366 votes. Truth is, New Mexico has been a classic bellwether state in presidential politics for a long time. Since the beginning, actually.

Dating back to statehood nearly a century ago, New Mexico has always voted for the winner of the presidential race with only two exceptions — 1976 and 2000.

This year, in particular, southwestern voters are proving to be the new regional battleground constituency, with the color blue clearly gaining. Along with Colorado and Nevada — both trending Democratic — New Mexico finds itself on the leading edge of a new Electoral College strategy.

Obama’s lead in this particular southwestern battleground is all the more remarkable given our slim history of electing African-American candidates statewide.

For his part, McCain clearly gets the battleground thing.

At his Expo New Mexico campaign stop, he explained, “My friends, I’d like to give you a little straight talk this morning,” he said. “We need to win New Mexico!” The Arizona senator proceeded to make a familiar, if slightly mangled case:

My friends, I’m a fellow westerner. I understand these issues. I understand land and water and Native American issues and border issues. And I understand the challenges that a great western states (sic) face with our growth and with our needs and our challenges. And my friends, Sen. Obama has never been south of our border. You know that? And he doesn’t know these issues. I know them. I know what the southwest is. I know the strength in the culture, in our Hispanic culture in the strength of our great states. And we welcome it, and we welcome it and I’m proud, I’m proud to be a senator from the West.

McCain spoke those words to an underwhelming crowd, especially as compared to Obama’s later that same day.

Peter St. Cyr, a blogger and reporter, described the Republican faithful who showed up to cheer on McCain as an “embarrassingly small crowd.” As for the exact numbers: “While the state’s Republican Party says they handed out a little more than 3,000 tickets, less than 1,000 people bothered to show up,” St. Cyr wrote.

It was apparent to me from the press section up close that even inside the inner-perimeter set up for the event, there was still a lot of empty space. McCain aides could be seen scurrying to get volunteers to fill in right up until McCain took the mic.

Manuel Lujan, the long-time Republican congressman from the 1^st Congressional District before he was appointed secretary of the Interior by the first President Bush, served as master of ceremonies for the event. In an interview shortly after McCain’s stump speech, it was also apparent that he was stung by the criticism already pouring in over the size of the McCain event.

“My instructions were to get it at the Spanish Village. It’s symbolism. And [the Albuquerque fire department] said, ‘Well, you’re going to be limited to 1,000 to 1,200 people. That was the fire department limit,” Lujan emphasized.

“We could have had a lot more,” he insisted unconvincingly. “Some people were turned away. A lot of people were turned away.”

The battle for Latinos

Lujan, one of the state’s most successful Hispanic politicians ever, explained that McCain always had an uphill battle for the votes of the approximately 40 percent of New Mexico voters who are of Hispanic heritage, more than any other state in the country.

“Hispanics are primarily Democrats, two-thirds or three-quarters,” Lujan offered.

At his raucous rally at UNM, Obama tipped his hat to the crucial demographic constituency. “Latino community,” he said, “you hold this election in your hands. You can be the swing vote in every part of this country.”

Delivering one of the campaign’s most creative slogans to date, Richardson made the same point earlier with a newly invented Spanish word — “Obamanos!” — followed by these more familiar words: “Sí se puede!”

Richardson’s voice echoed across the field as the crowd took the hint and began to chant.

An enthusiasm gap

Somehow the chants at the state fairgrounds for McCain seemed fewer. Or maybe just quieter.

The widening Obama enthusiasm gap in New Mexico plays into a more visible organizational gap. With his unprecedented dozens of campaign offices scattered across the state, a lopsided advantage in new registrants and a near avalanche of TV ads, Obama’s lead here seems practically insurmountable.

Of course all these advantages have been spurred on by one very strategic broken promise: Obama’s decision not to accept public financing and abide by the spending limits that go along with it. Instead, the Illinois senator bypassed the limits, raised over $600 million, and is currently swamping McCain by nearly all paid measures of the campaign with one week to go.

This week, Obama’s New Mexico campaign is unleashing what it calls an “unprecedented” Spanish-language media buy.

Perhaps predictably, Democrat Debbie O’Malley, an Albuquerque city councilor who attended the Saturday evening rally, said the enthusiasm gap is candidate-driven.

“Obama was described as transformational by Gen. Colin Powell. And it’s true. He has a way about him. He has a presence that’s very special, very unusual. People feel they trust him and they’re motivated by him,” O’Malley said.

Fellow Democrat and City Councilor Michael Cadigan pointed to more tangible proof for the enthusiasm gap.

“I was at a early voting site today and, first of all, the early vote turnout has been huge. It’s been primarily Democrats,” Cadigan said. “It’s just gonna be a totally different demographic voting this time around. And I think Obama’s gonna win it by 5 or 6 points in New Mexico. At least.”

Cadigan’s words reveal another gap, a confidence gap.

That gap could be seen in one less-obvious way. The Obama event didn’t require tickets. The McCain event did.

Dispensing event tickets from state party headquarters, as the Republican Party of New Mexico chose to do, is an odds-on way to engineer a perfectly scripted, image-friendly campaign stop. It’s a sign of a campaign on its heels.

(Michele Obama’s event this Tuesday on the historic Spanish plaza in Las Vegas is also a ticketless affair.)

In his remarks, McCain puts the best face possible on the bleak outlook for his campaign.

“Let me give you the state of the race right now. Ten days to go, we’re a few points down, and the pundits, of course, as they have, four or five times, have written us off,” McCain said. “You know, my friends, we’ve got them right where we want them.”

Marco Gonzales, a former member of Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici’s staff who lost in the GOP primary for the 3^rd Congressional District nomination, agreed that McCain is the underdog. He also put the best face forward.

“I think the polls have indicated that the race is probably within three or four points, but there’s still plenty of undecided,” he said as he left the rally. Gonzales went on to predict a come-from-behind-victory for McCain.

Overconfident?

At UNM, O’Malley, the Democratic city councilor, expressed a note of caution.

“We really have to be careful about being overconfident,” she said, even though nearly every major issue appears to favor Obama.

ABC sitcom star George Lopez, a native of Los Angeles, warmed up the UNM crowd with a home state appeal that’s been honed by what Lopez described as 20 years of standup comedy routines for New Mexico audiences.

“I’m here for two reasons,” Lopez said. “The first reason is to get Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States of America.”

Loud cheers filled Johnson Field for reason No. 1.

“And the second reason is to take some green chile back to Los Angeles!”

Lopez’s rationale was one part ethnic, in deference to a battleground state’s signature food with centuries-old Spanish roots. But another part transcended easy divisions. After all, almost every New Mexican likes green chile.

And it appears more and more New Mexicans are coming to like Barack Obama’s historic bid to be president with eight days to go.