Sarah Palin in Coal Country

By Suzanne Smalley

To hear Sarah Palin tell it, this race is far from over.

There's the theme song to the classic underdog film "Rudy" -about a pint-sized factory worker turned football player at Notre Dame whose faith leads him to save the team against all odds-that accompanies her onto the stage at most rallies. There's the joke in her stump speech that Tina Fey better hold onto "that Sarah outfit 'cause she's gonna need it."  And at a rally last night in Batavia, Ohio, a working class town about 40 minutes east of downtown Cincinnati, there was the way Palin launched her speech, with congratulations for the Cincinnati Bengals for winning their first game of the season, before she promised, "There's gonna be another underdog win here Tuesday night!"

Palin hit four cities in all corners of Ohio yesterday, careening from the Akron/Canton area to Marietta, a small city in Appalachian southeastern Ohio (where Hillary Clinton dominated in the Democratic primary), and Columbus before ending the day in Batavia. In Marietta, a crucial part of the state for McCain-Palin, the Alaska governor made an unexpected stop, visiting Pee Wee football players preparing for a game. Cheerleaders standing nearby told Palin their team had already played, and had lost. "We always lose," said one cheerleader. Palin responded: "Well, keep trying."

The governor has been following her own advice. Throughout the day yesterday, Palin hit Obama and the press equally hard, highlighting an audio tape of Obama criticizing the coal industry that surfaced on conservative blogs over the weekend and suggesting it had been intentionally suppressed by a biased media. "You hear Barack Obama talking about bankrupting the coal industry," Palin said at the Columbus rally, referring to the tape. "John McCain and I, we will not let that happen to the coal industry." Palin also asked indignantly why the tape has been "withheld from the electorate." In fact, though the Drudge Report first highlighted the tape yesterday, audio of the interview has been available on the web site of the San Francisco Chronicle since mid-January, when Obama made the comments in an interview with the newspaper's editorial board.

Crowds yesterday reacted emotionally to news of the tape. Ohio is coal country, especially in the southeast, an area of Appalachia in which McCain-Palin is clearly hoping to drive up huge margins. (The southeastern part of Ohio borders West Virginia, and is home to a large number of so-called Reagan Democrats, some of whom Democrats fear will not support Obama because he is black and because of the emotional primary battle with Clinton). In the tape Obama can be heard explaining his support of a cap and trade program that would charge polluters for carbon emissions.

"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can," Obama says on the tape. "It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted." Palin's false assertion that the media has been suppressing the tape angered some Palin supporters. In Batavia, a couple of men in the crowd looked at reporters angrily and made snide comments, prompting laughter from the journalists.