Below The Beltway

It’s been 44 years, when Lyndon Johnson decimated Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential Election, since Virginia went for a Democrat in a Presidential election. There have been many indications that this year could see an end to the GOP’s four decade long winning streak and, last night, Barack Obama sent a signal that he will be fighting for the Old Dominion this year:

Sen. Barack Obama launched his general election campaign for president in Virginia yesterday, rolling up his sleeves and rallying families, college students and people playing hooky from work to help him “win this election and change the course of history.”

The presumptive Democratic nominee drew more than 10,000 people to a late afternoon rally at Nissan Pavilion and spent the morning courting voters in coal country at a town hall meeting in southwest Virginia. Last night, Obama delayed a trip home to Chicago to meet with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In Virginia, Obama delivered his standard stump speech at both campaign stops, but the events were weighted with significance, a reminder of one of his biggest primary wins and his determination to compete in Virginia and other traditional Republican strongholds in November.

Now, several of my fellow Virginia bloggers are calling the rally a bust because it didn’t attract the 25,000 to 50,000 people that some people, apparently the Chairman of the Prince William County Democratic Party as best I’ve been able to determine, had predicted. (See their reactions here, here, here, and here).

But answer this question — does anyone think that John McCain could pull together 10,000 people for a rally that starts when most people are just getting off work on less than three days notice ?

I don’t, and I doubt he ever will. Just ask the 1,000 or so people who listened to his speech in Louisiana on Tuesday night while Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of about 15,000 in Minnesota.

There’s excitement among Democrats about Obama. When it comes to McCain, it’s more a matter of grudging, reluctant, sometimes very reluctant acceptance. That’s the kind of thing that can matter in a close election, which 2008 is likely to be. The last time I saw Republicans this unenthusiastic about their nominee it was a guy named Bob Dole, and we know what happened to him.

The number of people who showed up last night isn’t as important as the fact that they did, in fact, show up. That, combined with how well Obama actually did in the February primary, should be taken as a sign that Virginia is going to be a battleground state this year and that McCain is going to have to do more than just assume that history will repeat itself.

Because I’m not so sure that it will.

Update: More blogospheric reaction from James Young, Leslie Carbone, Scott’s Morning Brew, and Extreme Mortman.

There seems to be a lot of fun being had over the estimate of 25-50,000 people showing up last night. Whoever made that estimate obviously made a mistake, but that doesn’t discount the people who did show up and it shouldn’t blind the Virginia GOP to the very likely possibility that the fight for the Old Dominion could be a lot tougher in 2008 than it has been for quite a long time.