STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- On Saturday night, Barack Obama went bowling for the first time in 30 years.
Part of his new effort to get closer to working-class voters, the presidential candidate grabbed a bite at Altoona's Original Texas Hotdogs, then strapped on a pair of size 13 1/2 shoes at Pleasant Valley lanes, to cheers from patrons. He never loosened his tie and the bowling wasn't pretty - basketball's his game - but from a public-relations standpoint, it was a ten-strike.
"Sen. Barack Obama makes a surprise visit to Altoona today," the local CBS TV station announced during the NCAA basketball playoffs.
Connecting with ordinary people and their everyday concerns is part of Obama's strategy for confronting perhaps the biggest remaining hurdle in his fight with Hillary Clinton: white, blue-collar Democrats. Their votes were key to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in neighboring Ohio this month, and they've been decidedly cool to Obama's candidacy.
If he could win enough working-class whites to take Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, the nomination race would effectively be over. But no one is predicting an Obama victory yet, and polls show Clinton with a double-digit lead in the state.
Obama tangled with Clinton in Ohio over the North American Free Trade Agreement, a sticking point with many left behind in mill towns that once were thriving communities rich in coal and good-paying steel industry jobs. Economic decline is much on the minds of Rust Belt residents in parts of central and western Pennsylvania that closely resemble eastern Ohio, where Obama lost badly to Clinton.
At a question-and-answer session in Johnstown, Pa., on Saturday, a woman who said that 200 co-workers at a local call center had their jobs outsourced to India wanted to know how Obama would reverse the impact of globalization.
"I don't want to make a promise that I can bring back every job that's left Johnstown," he said. "It's just not true. Some of those jobs aren't going to come back." The solution, he said, is to create good-paying jobs, with more than $200 billion in taxpayer-funded public works projects and incentives to spur employment in "green" industries.
Obama is also trying to turn down the temperature of the Democratic contest. He told reporters that he wants his campaign to "show some restraint" and be "measured in how we present the contrast between myself and Sen. Clinton."
