Michelle Obama aims past crowd, to undecideds

By Michael Mishak

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Michelle Obama showed up at an outdoor rally in North Las Vegas on Monday and found the party had begun without her.

Barbecue was smokin’ in the parking lot at the College of Southern Nevada, supporters were dancing to Motown and the crowd — estimated by campus police at 1,700 — erupted with chants of “Yes we can!” when the wife of the Democratic presidential nominee arrived.

It was just the type of overconfidence she has been warning crowds about in recent campaign appearances, including one in Las Vegas last week. And, one day before Election Day, she drove the message home.

“This year has been fun. The rallies are great,” Obama said. “But the only day that matters is tomorrow. The crowd sizes don’t matter. The money doesn’t matter. The enthusiasm doesn’t matter if people don’t vote. That’s where we all come in.”

And then: “Barack Obama will be the underdog until he is sitting in the Oval Office.”

The audience had already gotten the message. By a show of hands, nearly everyone in the crowd had voted early. So it turned out she was preaching to the choir, but she added, “There are still undecided folks out there.” A poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and NBC News last week found 8 percent of likely voters in Nevada were still undecided.

So she made the argument for her husband.

“What I want people to understand is Barack gets things in a way that we need in a leader,” Obama said. “We need someone who understands the challenges of working families. Barack understands it because he’s lived it.”

She said his upbringing by a single mother had given him compassion and the understanding that people sometimes “need a little hand up every now and then.” She also emphasized his time as a community organizer, helping unemployed steel plant workers on the South Side of Chicago.

She summed up her husband’s policy proposals: cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families, providing tax breaks for companies that create American jobs, enacting near universal health care, investing in education and ending the war in Iraq.

Obama also gave the crowd another reason to make phone calls and knock on doors in the final hours of the campaign: to honor the memory of Terence Tolbert, the state director of the Obama campaign who died of a heart attack Sunday night. Obama called Tolbert “one of the most talented, driven, inspired workers we had on the campaign. He really got this state where it is today.”

It was Obama’s second to last stop of the campaign. She was set to appear at a rally in Colorado before going home to Chicago.