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."
He blames his defeat in Ohio, at least in part, on a lack of time to introduce himself to voters, an excuse he won't be able to use in Pennsylvania, the biggest primary left, where the election is still more than three weeks away.
To promote his regular-guy themes, Obama is midway through a six-day bus tour that is taking him from one end of the commonwealth to the other, his longest campaign swing in a single state this year.
Rolling across the steep hills and narrow valleys of the western Pennsylvania countryside, his bus does not advertise its presence. There is not so much as an Obama bumper sticker, much less a campaign banner, on the outside of the rented luxury liner, named for Harry Truman by a Nashville firm that caters to celebrities.
The unmarked bus and somewhat stealthy nature of his campaign swing - many stops aren't announced in advance - also reflect the highly nuanced Obama effort in this state. He is trying to lay the groundwork for a Pennsylvania comeback, while keeping expectations in check, something his campaign has been less effective in doing than Clinton's.
Obama calls himself the underdog and says "we may not be able to win" the state but "we're going to work as hard as we can."
There will be fewer big rallies and more dialogue with voters at campaign events, he said, though yesterday Obama spoke to more than 10,000 people at Penn State University, his first mass event in the state.
Already, on his "road to change" tour, he's dropped into sports bars, to sip a local brew, and mingled with steelworkers at plants outside Pittsburgh and in Johnstown. He's also made himself available for interviews with many, if not most, of the state's local TV and radio stations and daily papers, while spending millions more than Clinton on an intensive ad campaign.
Interviews with voters illustrate both the progress he's making and the challenge he faces against Clinton, who is benefiting from the aggressive support of much of the Democratic establishment, led by Gov. Edward G. Rendell.
Ron Burkett, 45, of Quecreek, said he changed his registration from Republican to Democrat so he could vote for Obama in the primary. But he says that racial prejudice will hurt Obama's chances. "People say they don't know a lot about Barack Obama," he said. "That's because they're afraid to say they won't vote for a black man."
Obama supporter Frank Kovach, 64, of Vinco, a retired union electrician, likes Clinton but thinks "she's beholden to the lobbyists." He gave the first campaign contribution of his life to Obama and likes "the idea that it's not big corporations that support him. It's ordinary people."
But Andy Peretin, 65, a retired steelworker from Johnstown, said he's leaning toward Clinton, along with "most people my age," because of her experience in Washington. "She can probably get more things done."
Mike Susko, president of a Teamster's local that covers much of western Pennsylvania, conceded that persuading his members to support Obama, the union-backed candidate, will be "a challenge."
The recent endorsement of Obama by Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, an anti-abortion Democrat whose family has long been popular with more conservative whites, will help, he added, by reassuring working-class voters who are concerned about Obama's "name" and his religion. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that more than one in 10 white Democrats mistakenly think Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, is a Muslim. The belief is more prevalent among rural, working class, and less-educated voters. David Swain, 58, who works part-time for the county, said he'd like to see an African-American president but favors Clinton because of her health care expertise.
The laid-off steelworker, who grew up in a racially-mixed Johnstown neighborhood, said that "it came down to, frankly, who is the better person, rather than who is black or white."
Obama's Pennsylvania strategy could generate a primary election surprise - not a victory, according to politicians and analysts in the state, but a closer finish than the polls are showing now. "He's going to diminish the expectations, say it's an uphill fight, but in the meantime, they're doing a lot of things that may pay dividends for him," said political scientist G. Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College, whose most recent statewide poll showed Clinton 16 points ahead.
"It seems hard to believe that he can win this state, but he might be able to get it into single digits," he added, which could be interpreted as a victory.
paul.west@baltsun.com