The road to the White House doesn't typically run through places like Dillonvale, Ohio…a town of about 700 people in the eastern, Appalachian part of the state. Getting there takes you through a lot of windy, lonesome two-lane, county roads ….and past the occasional produce stand. I'm on my way down to see Obama talk to rural voters here, people like , 83-year old George Basham in Dennison, Ohio.
BASHAM: I come out here as early as I can get produce, and stay as late as I can get it.
Basham is a World War II vet, and leans left, politically. He says he works at the farm stand because his Social Security check isn't enough to cover expenses. And, like many voters in eastern Ohio, he was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter.
BASHAM: I think when we lost Hillary, we lost our best hopes for a president that could or would have done something.
Basham is not sure who he's going to vote for now. He doesn't think highly of Obama. When I stopped recording, he said he thought he heard Obama say something about not helping white people.
This is Obama's challenge. Rural parts of Ohio, like here in Jefferson county, went for President Bush in 2004, but have also been strong backers of Democrats like Governor Ted Strickland and Senator Sherrod Brown. Doug O'Brien, the Obama campaign's rural vote director in Ohio, says Strickland and Brown were great at reaching voters far from urban centers.
O'BRIEN: And they made sure that the message got through to the rural parts of the state and that's what Obama is doing.
O'Brien says Strickland will be a real asset, as he campaigns on Obama's behalf in rural Ohio. But there's no substitute for rubbing elbows with the actual candidate.
That's why Obama came to a family farm in such an isolated area this week. In nearby Smithfield, the region's troubles are obvious. On the tiny main street, a row of shops is crumbling---remnants of a by-gone department store and hardware business. Across the street, there's a small shop with a little of everything: food, videos, even a hair salon. I ran into John Dominick, the store's owner.
DOMINICK: Because of the depressed area, through the years, what has happened is grocery stores, stuff like this, have gone out of business, so we're a little of everything for everyone.
In addition to his shop, Dominick is also a state legislator. Turns out he had run into Obama staffers and encouraged them to come to the area. They took him literally and set up the Dillonvale event.
DOMINICK: It's an area that's taken a hard whippin' over the last 40 years, so it's good to see, and hopefully he can relate to the middle class and relate to the people that he has to relate to to take the election and win Ohio.
So how did he do?
Obama's speech here was mostly his standard stump, with a few lines thrown in to address the concerns of some of the locals I met like Liz Cochran and Bob Mieczkowski.
COCHRAN: A lot of abandoned homes and foreclosures like everywhere in the United States.
OBAMA: We've got more home foreclosures now than at any time in the great depression.
MIECZKOWSKI: We lose a lot of jobs, seem to be going overseas now.
OBAMA: We're going to create 5 million new jobs, reopening the old steel plants, now making wind turbines and reopening old textile mills to make solar panels. We're going to put Americans back to work and those jobs can't be outsourced.
Many of the jobs in this region are in the coal industry, an industry that contributes heavily to global warming. Obama is walking a fine line…he's against adding new coal power plants but supports new so-called "clean coal" technology that is said to reduce carbon emissions.
It's hard to know how Obama's speech at the farm went over with most people here. His audience was only invited guests.
Still, his showing up has to count for something. Ohio State Political Science Professor Paul Beck says rural Ohio is up for grabs this year. And, he says, Obama is more aggressive than his predecessors.
BECK: Obama is very much running a strategy of trying to gain votes across the state of ohio, not like previous Democratic candidates, certainly Gore and Kerry before him concentrating all of their attention on urban areas; that's a change in strategy.
Obama has a greater challenge because many people here say they don't know much about him, and some whisper about his race. At the farm, Obama highlighted his common roots.
OBAMA: This is where I come from. I come out of the middle class. I was born to a single mom, who had to work, go to school, at the same time had to borrow money, at one point to go to on food stamps because she was struggling to get by, but ended up making it.
Obama talked to about 300 people at the farm-which is nearly half the size of the town's population. Whether he's spreading himself too thin by going after rural voters is an open question but the effort could help dispel the notion that he is a big city elitist who doesn't understand this part of America.
Dan Bobkoff 90.3 reporting from Steubenville, Ohio.