Howrah News Service -  Latest news and headlines on Howrah,West Bengal and World: Path to White House is via Missouri

Path to White House is via Missouri
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ASIANAGE on 10 October, 2008 02:40:55
 
By Michael Mathes
St. Louis,Missouri
Oct. 10: With the 2008 presidential election boiling down to a handful of
battleground states, the tightest race of all has emerged in Missouri, the most
accurate political bellwether state in US history.
The campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain are taking a no-holds-barred
approach to the midwestern "Show Me" state, and with good reason; Missourians
have voted for the presidential winner in all but one election since 1904.
With such imposing history dictating outsized attention for the state,
Republican McCain made two stops in Missouri in late September while Democrat
Obama earlier launched a bus tour of the state’s Republican stronghold
southwest. Officials from both parties concede the campaigns are pouring
resources into the state in a mad dash for Missouri’s 11 electoral votes. The
candidates have blitzed the state with political ads, with Mr Obama reportedly
spending six million dollars on media advertising and Mr McCain close on his
heels with 5.5 million. Missouri’s vote is on a knife edge, and recent major
polls have toggled back and forth; Thursday’s average of recent polls by
independent website Realclearpolitics.com shows Mr McCain at 47.8 per cent and
Mr Obama at 47.4 in Missouri. The previous day it was Mr Obama 47.8, Mr McCain
47.5.
"Missouri is in the middle of the country geographically but also the centre of
the country politically," Washington University history professor Peter Kastor
said. "It is a state where various regional political cultures all exist."
That could favour Mr Obama, Mr Kastor said, as he has the passionate oratory
skills of the deep South combined with a hard-driven persona of a cosmopolitan
Northeasterner. But he will have to overcome latent racism among rural whites,
an element more than one expert described as an "unknown quantity".
—AFP