N.C. key to GOP victory

Welcome to Ohio.

That's what North Carolina has become in this presidential election -- a key Ohio-like, swing state that could determine the election.

Think the state is not important? Last weekend, Cindy McCain was at Lowe's Motor Speedway. On Monday, John McCain was in Wilmington, and on Saturday he was in Concord. Sarah Palin was in Elon and Greensboro. Barack Obama is in Fayette-ville today.

If you were at The Raleigh Times restaurant the other day, you would have spotted CBS correspondent Jeff Greenfield. Last week, I was giving directions to CBS anchor Katie Couric for a barbecue restaurant in Lexington. Reporters from Europe and Asia are showing up.

Hank Williams Jr. and James Taylor are crooning across the state for their candidates.

So why do the presidential candidates have Carolina on their minds?

Because McCain cannot win the White House if he loses North Carolina, says Tad Devine, a leading strategist for the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry.

With the polls showing North Carolina a tossup, both campaigns are throwing massive resources -- money, manpower, candidates -- into the state.

"You don't send a presidential candidate into a state unless that state is a critical target," said Devine, a Washington political consultant.

Until recently, the presidential campaigns in this state were one-sided. The Obama campaign gambled that it could win a state that had not gone Democratic in a presidential election in 32 years.

On Friday, Obama opened his 47th field office in North Carolina, this one in Apex. He has about 400 staffers in the state, and a network of 21,000 volunteers. Obama has outspent McCain on television advertising, by some measures, by an 8-1 margin.

The initial reaction of the McCain campaign was to view the Obama effort in North Carolina as a diversion. If they had to defend Republican-leaning North Carolina, then things had gotten pretty bad.

By early October, the McCain campaign decided it needed to push back here. It now has about 40 offices and about 30 staffers.

Obama has made five trips to North Carolina in the general election campaign, starting in June. The GOP ticket didn't arrive until Oct. 7, when Palin campaigned in Greenville.

"The McCain people wouldn't be there if it [the Obama threat] wasn't real," said Devine. "The most precious thing a campaign has this time of year is your candidate."

At this juncture, McCain should be campaigning in such traditional swing states as Ohio and Florida, rather than fighting for North Carolina, according to Andy Taylor, a political science professor at N.C. State University.

The battle, Taylor said, is "being fought behind McCain's front lines."

This is probably not a state Obama needs to win to capture the presidency. But if he were to a win a red state such as North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri or Colorado, it could be enough to put him over the top.

But it's difficult to see a scenario in which McCain gets to the White House without North Carolina.

This was, after all, a state that twice gave 56 percent of its vote to President George W. Bush. These were not close elections.

But Obama is gambling that a sour economy, an unpopular war and an influx of new voters will be enough to paint a red state blue.