Obama will fight for AZ.

Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's campaign manager, rallied local volunteers Sunday by assuring them that Obama intends to fight for Arizona, a state he lost four years ago to Sen. John McCain.

Messina, a former deputy White House chief of staff, spoke for about three minutes to several dozen supporters at an Obama phone-banking session at the Organizing For America office in central Phoenix. He said that together they would build "the single best grass-roots campaign in modern American political history."

"You all in here are making calls, talking to voters and doing what you do, because you understand the simple truth, which is we can win Arizona," Messina told the troops. "People said last time, 'Oh, you can't win Virginia,' until we did. 'You can't win Florida,' until we did. 'You can never win North Carolina,' until we did. And so a whole bunch of people are saying, 'Can he win Arizona? Can he not win Arizona?' The fact is you all are the secret weapon we have."

Signs that Messina and the Obama campaign are serious about competing in Arizona, a traditional Republican state that has gone Democratic in presidential elections only twice since 1948, include the three Organizing For America offices that already have opened in Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff. A fourth office will open soon in Glendale. Obama and his strategists believe that Arizona would have turned blue in 2008 had home-state senator McCain not been on the ballot as Obama's GOP foe. Obama last month made a stop at an Intel Corp. site in Chandler.


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