View full sizeRock star Bruce Springsteen performs Thursday during a get-out-the-vote rally for President Barack Obama at Cuyahoga Community College's Western Campus in Parma.Activist rock star Bruce Springsteen
. And former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice never much cared for politics.
Yet here they were in Ohio last week, each on the stump for the first time this year.
Roughly 24 hours and five miles apart, their 2012 debuts give a sense of where things stand in this electoral battleground. While President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney continue to urge base supporters to cast early ballots, the messaging for what's expected to be a close election is being tailored more to persuadable voters.
Consider Springsteen. After campaigning for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004 and for Obama in 2008, he planned to sit
out this cycle. Whatever persuaded Springsteen to return to the fold less than three weeks before Election Day, Team Obama hopes it rubs off on other disaffected Democrats who might otherwise take a pass.
For maximum effect, the campaign paired Springsteen with former President Bill Clinton
, the state's seventh most populous city and a huge Cleveland suburb filled with white working-class voters. Clinton offered a clinical defense of Obama's first term and an excoriating take-down of Romney's candidacy. The crowd ate it up, then sang and swayed along with Springsteen and his guitar and harmonica as he performed several familiar tunes.
Springsteen's assessment of Obama, telegraphed the night before in
he posted to his website, was far more sober than Clinton's. In the letter, addressed "Dear Friends," Springsteen reflected on the "tremendous amount of hope and expectations" that Obama carried to the White House four years ago, then lamented "a really rough ride" that followed.
"I remember President Obama's election night was an evening when you could feel the locked doors of the past finally being blown open to new possibilities," Springsteen said in Parma, before praising several of Obama's positions and policies. "Then comes a hard daily struggle to make those possibilities real in a world that is brutally resistant to change."
Before you discount Springsteen's value to the Obama campaign, understand a few things.
View full sizeFormer Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice campaigns with Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (not pictured) during a rally Wednesday at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea.For starters, more than 3,000 turned out for the event at Cuyahoga Community College's Western Campus. That's not a huge crowd by Obama standards, but many who went already are supporters. The mere sight of Clinton and Springsteen together is enough to keep these true-believers motivated through Election Day. For those who need a nudge, the campaign padded its get-out-the-vote database by collecting telephone numbers and email addresses in exchange for free tickets.
But Springsteen's brooding is intended for another audience: the doubters. Springsteen seems to seek reconciliation between Obama and those who, like him, were disappointed by the slow pace of change in the first term. The takeaway, stripped of the New Jersey troubadour's poetic touch, is that it's natural to be frustrated, but Obama's on the right path.
The theme fits into Obama's broader, though somewhat conflicting, narrative. The messaging relies heavily on recent nostalgia, the presence of Clinton and Springsteen being the most vivid example. Obama is reaching back for these loyal stalwarts, deputizing them as validators of his re-election campaign slogan: Forward.
But Obama and his surrogates have talked about the future only in the abstract. Absent from his stump speech is the momentous call to action of 2008.
Instead, Obama's case for a second term is based on the premise that his predecessor in the Oval Office, George W. Bush, interrupted the economic prosperity of the Clinton years. Forward, essentially, means the Good Old Days.
Stephanie Cutter, Obama's deputy campaign manager, acknowledged the sentiment if not the conflict.
"When the president talks about going forward, he talks about going back to an economy that's built to last, that is built from the middle out -- that we're paying down our debt in a responsible way but still making the investments that we need to grow," she said during an interview before the Parma rally. "Clinton did that during his eight years in the White House, and he created 22 million jobs because of it, and we had the largest economic expansion since World War II."
Romney has relentlessly slammed Obama for a lack of specifics, though he has hardly been more forthcoming when it comes to explaining
. Yet Romney, revived by the polling bounce he got after outperforming Obama in their first debate, is now packaging himself as a sensible centrist who can deliver change faster.
Gone is the more conservative image Romney needed to emerge from the Republican primaries. And more people are paying attention. On Oct. 9 in Cuyahoga Falls, Romney drew a crowd of 12,000 -- his largest to date in Ohio. In the days that followed he drew 9,500 in Sidney, 8,500 in Lancaster and 11,000 in Lebanon.
Romney's running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, joined him for the Lancaster rally and drew another 1,300 on his own at a forum in Youngstown.
. After drawing wide praise in August for her speech at the Republican National Convention, Rice kept her distance. GOP sources said it was U.S. Sen. Rob Portman who coaxed her on to the campaign trail for a rally Wednesday in Berea with Ryan. Portman, of the Cincinnati area, served with Rice in the Bush administration.
An Alabama native and noted Cleveland Browns fan, Rice has crossover appeal, especially among women. Like Portman, she operates outside the ideological wing of the GOP and sprinkles her speeches with poignant personal stories.
Though she has resisted overtures to take a more active role in politics, she is seen by many as an enticing prospect for national office. So in a very different way, Rice offers Romney what Springsteen offers Obama at a time when tight polls in Ohio show few undecided voters. She can appeal to the disgruntled change voters from four years ago who believe that Obama has let them down. Rice can point to Romney and Ryan and tell her fans in so many words: These are our guys.
"Her endorsement and her voice to this campaign sends a clear message that the Romney-Ryan campaign is speaking to voters in different camps," said Scott Jennings, a senior adviser to Romney and director of his Ohio campaign.
About 1,200 attended the event at Baldwin Wallace University.
"I think it did a world of good for the campaign," Jennings said.
How much it helps in Berea and Cuyahoga County is relative. Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 3 to 1. Obama won the county by more than 258,000 votes in 2008 and won Ohio by 4.6 percentage points. Romney's prospects of flipping the state rely at least in part on his ability to peel away votes from Obama's firewall in the large urban counties.
"It's just holding the numbers down," said Jerry Hruby, the mayor of Brecksville and a key Romney backer in Cuyahoga County. "We need to be getting those independents and hoping those other guys stay at home."
In other words, Hruby's hoping for 2010, when lower turnout in Cuyahoga County helped sink Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland's re-election. Cutter was reminded of that election Thursday when meeting with Ohio reporters.
"We need Cuyahoga to turn out, but we feel good about where we are -- 2012 is not really comparable to 2010. President Obama wasn't on the ticket. But certainly we learn lessons in every election. We learned a lot of lessons in 2008, and we've been building on that ever since."