Barack Obama was in Raleigh, NC today, home of my birth many moons ago (and no, I don’t remember much of it as we moved out of Carolina when I was seven back in 1963), and the lede of today’s AFP report on the campaign perfectly describes what he was doing there:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama mauled John McCain’s economic platform as the White House hopefuls locked horns Monday at the start of the first full week of a five-month election campaign.

With the field cleared by Hillary Clinton’s emotional exit from the Democratic race, Obama turned his full fire on his November election foe with a speech delivered in the Republican stronghold of North Carolina. […]

Obama mocked his rival presidential contender for confessing to limited knowledge about the economy, and for reversing his initial opposition to multi-billion-dollar tax cuts rammed through by Bush. […]

“[McCain] calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he’s a passionate critic of government spending,” Obama said in Raleigh at the launch of a two-week campaign swing devoted to the economy.

“And yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq — policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt,” he said.

Obama said that despite mounting home foreclosures nationwide, Bush had warned against political interference in the property market.

“Now, Senator McCain wants to turn Bush’s policy of ‘too little, too late’ into a policy of ‘even less, even later’,” he said.

He does have a way with words. If the situation wasn’t so dire, I’d have a smile on my face at that witticism. Still, it’s good to see Obama going into the heart of Republican electoral territory to make the case why middle class voters of all races should dump the Republican brand for a Party more in tune with their economic interests. And it looks like his next few campaign stops will continue this approach, the 50 state strategy that Howard Dean pioneered and Obama obviously intends to make his own.

The itinerary of the 46-year-old Obama, on a historic quest to be the first black president, showed he intends to fight hard for centrist voters and those feeling the pinch from the economic downturn.

North Carolina has not voted for a Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976. On Tuesday he was to visit Missouri, which has not chosen a Democrat since voting for former president Bill Clinton in 1996.

Among other stops, the Illinois senator’s tour was also to encompass Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida — three battlegrounds that could go either way on November 4.

I wish, however, that this stupid “centrist voter” myth reporters are so fond of repeating could be finaaly put out of its misery. These “centrist” voters for the most part aren’t centrists. They are low information voters who in the past have been bamboozled into voting for “compassionate” conservatism, or voting for promises of “tax cuts that never seemed to come their way, even as Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Paris Hilton saw their tax burdens reduced (no offense to any of these folks, especially Buffet who has called for higher tax rates for the rich). Or they’ve voted against their interests out of fear (Communism and now terrorism) or racist appeals that suggest black people are getting all the goodies from government when Democrats are in power. After the last eight years of Bush, I think these people are ready to hear a different message, and respond to it. Especially in the prevailing economic conditions.

If they don’t “get it” this year that Republicans have played them for fools, they never will. And nobody likes to be treated like a fool, right?