Obama Gets Back to the Issues

The Obama campaign is sticking with the issues this week. After losing last week to a full-bore discussion of Sarah Palin and lipstick and pigs (not necessarily in that order), Sen. Obama has spent the week driving home messages about the dire economy in his speeches while his surrogates reached out to interest groups one by one, swing state by swing state with LGBT concerns resting right at the nexus of both.

Not only did the campaign hold a conference call with reporters Wednesday designed to remind the LGBT community that Sen. Obama backs repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the Illinois senator finally granted an interview with the Philadelphia Gay News that was set to hit stands Thursday.

Among other things, he hit the military theme again, telling PGN he would not use an executive signing order to overturn the ban.

"I want to make sure that when we reverse 'don’t ask, don’t tell,' it’s gone through a process and we’ve built a consensus or at least a clarity of that, of what my expectations are, so that it works,” Obama said. “Although I have consistently said I would repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ I believe that the way to do it is make sure that we are working through a process, getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff clear in terms of what our priorities are going to be. That’s how we were able to integrate the armed services to get women more actively involved in the armed services.”

In an interview earlier this year, Sen. Obama told The Advocate that he would not use support for repealing the ban as a "litmus test" for choosing his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The PGN interview could be considered a PR move of sorts for Sen. Obama in a battleground state where he may have ruffled some LGBT feathers. During the heated primary with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign declined to speak with PGN, prompting publisher Mark Segal to run the paper's interview with Sen. Clinton alongside a blank space where Sen. Obama's interview would have gone. Pennsylvania's 21 electoral votes are considered critical to Democrats in November -- many pundits say Obama cannot win the election without winning the state and recent polls show him in a dead heat with John McCain there.

The campaign also dispatched Vice Presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden, who hales from Scranton, to Pennsylvania earlier this week, mainly to court white blue-collar workers, a demographic that helped deliver the state to Sen. Clinton during the primary, and Catholic voters, who have been getting a barrage of messages from conservative bishops warning them against voting for candidates who show support for abortion rights (i.e. Barack Obama and Joe Biden).

While the military served as a vehicle for wooing LGBT voters this week, elsewhere the Obama campaign happily pivoted to the economy after news that financial firm Lehman Brothers collapsed and the Federal Reserve bailed out insurance behemoth American International Group.