Reporting from suburban Columbus, Ohio, Byron York‘s latest Washington Examiner column documents the two major candidates’ different approaches to the final weeks of the presidential campaign.
As the candidates campaign almost nonstop in this most critical swing state, the presidential race has come down to a battle of two slogans: “Big Change” versus “Vote Early.”
“We’re going to see big change in November,” Mitt Romney said Thursday, speaking to a crowd estimated at 3,100 on an unusually warm October afternoon in this suburb of Columbus. “This is an election about big things.”
In contrast, the first thing Barack Obama did when he addressed a significantly bigger crowd — 9,500 — at a Dayton park Tuesday was to deliver the admonition: “Vote early. Do it now.”
That’s where the campaign is. Romney is pushing the same proposals — repeal of Obamacare, the five-point plan to jump-start the economy — but with the sense that everything looms larger and seems more consequential as the days tick down until Nov. 6. Obama, who has seen a semi-comfortable lead in Ohio shrink to something near a dead heat, just wants his supporters to get it over with.
While Romney tries to persuade, early voting has become the mantra of the Obama campaign, from the president down. On Thursday afternoon in Chicago, Obama sought to lead by example as he cast his own vote early — a presidential first. Obama used the occasion to make a pitch for early voting, leaving the impression he flew Air Force One to Chicago solely for a photo-op urging his supporters to vote early.
