Bush plans rally in Valley

Youngstown's Democratic mayor introduced the president at a campaign stop in Canton on Friday.
By DAVID SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- George W. Bush will make his first official campaign stop in the Mahoning Valley on Wednesday as a sitting president.
National and local Bush-Cheney campaign officials confirmed Friday that the president will visit Mahoning County, probably Youngstown, for a rally. Details about the visit such as the topic of the rally, time, location and ticket availability are still being worked out, and will be released early next week, campaign officials said.
Bush visited Canton on Friday to discuss health-care issues, tort reform, and an improvement in the state's unemployment rate from 6.3 percent in August to 6 percent in September.
The economy is a key issue in Ohio, a state that has lost more than 230,000 jobs under the Bush administration.
Youngstown Mayor George M. McKelvey, a Democrat who supports Bush, introduced the president at the Canton event.
McKelvey said Bush was the best man for president because of his strong stance on national security, and the mayor's belief that Bush would provide a safer future.
The Canton visit was Bush's first to Ohio, considered a key battleground state in the presidential race, since Oct. 2. Bush advisers say the president wasn't abandoning the state. He hadn't visited Ohio because of a scheduling glitch, they say. The advisers said earlier this week that Bush plans to visit every media market in Ohio before the Nov. 2 election.
"George Bush is wasting his time in the Valley, and if he really cared about voters in northeast Ohio, he would have started paying attention to the economy in the state four years ago," said Brendon Cull, spokesman for the Democratic Coordinated Campaign in Ohio.
Bush visited Youngstown on May 25 to tout his community health-care center program. That event was an official presidential visit and not a campaign stop, meaning taxpayer dollars were used to pay for it.
Bush spoke for about 35 minutes at the Spotlight Arena Theater at Youngstown State University's Bliss Hall to a crowd of about 200 people, consisting largely of local Republicans, doctors and those in the health-care field.
McKelvey was in the audience for that Bush speech and went to a private invitation-only dinner of about 25 people at the White House with the president the next day. McKelvey's endorsement of Bush came in August.
Bush visited the Valley one other time. It was in August 2000 after Bush was officially nominated by the Republican Party as its presidential candidate at its national convention. He made a whistle-stop train visit to Youngstown and met McKelvey for the first time.
Kerry has visited the Valley five times this year.
Valley strategy
The Kerry and Bush campaigns acknowledge that the president will not win Mahoning and Trumbull, two of the state's most Democratic counties. But if Bush can keep Kerry's voting percentage in the two counties to under 60 percent, he stands a good chance of winning Ohio, local political experts say.
Bush won Ohio in 2000 by 3.6 percentage points even though Democrat Al Gore received 61 percent of the vote in Mahoning and 60 percent of the vote in Trumbull.