50 State Strategy Note...

Apologies if this has been mentioned here -- the article is not new. I just noticed it in a Hawaiian paper while waiting for my Hawaiian barbecue dinner.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080713/BREAKING01/80713063">Obama may visit Hawaii in August

If Obama visits Hawaii, it will leave only one state he hasn't visited during the campaign -- Alaska.

I'm no political historian, but if he makes it to both Hawaii and Alaska, I'd be surprised if that didn't make him the first presidential candidate ever to campaign in all 50 states.

I'm not sure whether that's a worthwhile political goal, but it's notable and interesting to me, anyway.

I'm serious.

to force McCain to go. With the bigger and faster jets I would like to see Obama go there so that he can say that he has gone to all 50 states.

Since Alaska and Hawaii were added in '59, in 1960 he wanted to be the first candidate to make that claim.

Thanks for the post... Naturally, I had to go look it up once someone *else* said it, instead of me. I'm your typical lazy researcher.

I found an article on it... Interesting. It suggests that it's not necessarily a smart thing to promise to campaign in all 50 states. But with 48 *already* covered, it might not be such a stretch for Obama.

Here's the article. It's an interesting historical note. You got the year and campaign right. Thanks for pointing me to it!

Politico -- Ponder vs. pander: The debate problem
By: Roger Simon
August 6, 2007 07:21 PM EST

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=3D314C21-3048-5C12-002E771C64DC6233

...Take the YearlyKos debate in Chicago over the weekend, which involved all the Democratic candidates except Joe Biden and was conducted in front of an audience of liberal, online activists.

It was a good, interesting debate, but near the end, the candidates were pressed hard to please the crowd.

They were asked whether they would promise to campaign in all 50 states if they were the Democratic nominee.

The answer should be "yes" if the candidates want to meet a wide variety of interesting people.

As historian Richard Norton Smith would say years later on the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer": "In practical terms, that meant on the Saturday before the election, when (Nixon) should have been in Illinois or Texas, he was on a plane headed for Alaska."

It was a very close election. Kennedy won by two-tenths of one percentage point in the popular vote. But he really won the presidency with narrow victories in Illinois (9,000 votes) and in Texas (46,000 votes), giving him the margin he needed in the Electoral College.

And as long as the Electoral College is the way we elect presidents, visiting all 50 states makes little sense...

(There's more, but that's the pertinent section.)


But the answer should be "no" if they want to be elected president.

Richard Nixon campaigned in all 50 states in 1960, and it may have cost him the election.

At the Republican convention that July, Nixon said in his acceptance speech, "I pledge to you that I, personally, will carry this campaign into every one of the 50 states of this nation between now and November the 8th."

It was not an entirely wacky idea -- though, as we all know, Nixon was a pretty wild and crazy guy -- because Nixon wanted to take some credit for Alaska and Hawaii having become states the year before.

But it was politically dumb, and his opponent, John F. Kennedy, did not fall into the trap of making the same vow.