If this is Sunday, it must be Ohio. As the presidential race entered its final full week, the John Edwards campaign spent Sunday on a bus tour of Ohio, a critical state for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. It started in Cincinnati at 9:35 a.m., when an entourage of four buses (one for the candidate, one for his staff, and two for the press) plus vans, police and Secret Service left the Cincinnati Hotel for the Allen Temple AME Church. The candidate stayed an hour, then it was back to the hotel where the press filed their stories and packed up.
At 1 p.m., Edwards and his two youngest children, Jack and Emma Claire, got on their bus for the hour-plus drive to Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Dayton. He pulled right up to a typical “Frest Start for America” rally, spoke for about 45 minutes, then did TV interviews and reporter roundtables inside his bus with the local press.
The caravan left Dayton around 4 p.m. and drove to a Main Street rally in Lima that started around 5:45 p.m. After another round of local interviews, Edwards and company left for the two-hour drive to Toledo to spend the night.
Monday morning featured a 9:30 a.m. rally at which Edwards amended his stump speech to include the news of the day–the discovery that 380 tons of high-powered explosives had gone missing in Iraq. From there the entourage headed to the Toledo airport to fly to Milwaukee, then Dubuque, and finally Minneapolis–four states in one day. x
