McCain campaign bus coming to area

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The McCain Bus is coming! The McCain Bus is coming!

But John McCain is not going to be on it.

Instead, residents of San Juan, McKinley and Cibola counties will have the opportunity to see some of the literature being put out by the McCain campaign that’s not be distributed to local groups and hear representatives of the campaign promoting McCain and Sarah Palin for president and vice president.

As revealed in Tuesday’s meeting of the McKinley County Republican Party, the bus will be in the Farmington area most of the rest of this week, in Shiprock for the Northern Navajo Fair on Saturday and then in McKinley County for three days. After that it journeys to Grants.

Local Republicans haven’t decided yet where the bus will be situated during its three days here, but the object is to have it accessible to as many area residents as possible so the likelihood is that on one day at least the bus will be located near the Rio West Mall/Wal-Mart area.

With only 33 days to go before the election, local Republicans held a strategy meeting Tuesday night to begin concentrating all of their efforts to get Republicans to the polls — hopefully early — and to convince as many others that they should be supporting Republican candidates this election.

That means that a lot of people in this area will be getting phone calls from local volunteers from the Republican Party giving them a brief — less than a one minute spiel — on why it’s imperative that they vote Republican this year.

Alan V. Pearson, the man chosen last night to be the leader of these efforts, lifted up a big stack of papers loaded with names of people in this area. These names, he said, are of “soft Republicans, soft Democrats and independents,” the kind of people that are still undecided and may be persuaded by a phone call to vote Republican.

In a county where Republicans are outnumbered more than 4 to 1 — and as much as 10-1 in some Navajo precincts — anything the Republicans can do to narrow that gap was discussed at length last night.

Thousands of phone calls will be made in the next month. Volunteers in San Juan are already making 4,000 calls a week to people in their area and McKinley County Republicans hope to match that with volunteers making as many as 50 calls an hour each, using a scripted message that has been prepared by Republican leaders and geared toward the issues that they think will give the candidates the biggest support.

In this area, said Mary Jean Christensen, that will be the Republican’s anti-abortion stance, which she said should play out well among Navajo voters.

Another thing the Republicans will be doing is having debate parties.

They did this last Friday when the presidential candidates debated, and they plan to do this again at 6 p.m. Thursday at Sammy C’s Restaurant on Coal Avenue, when the two vice presidential candidates will go at it.

Friday’s party may not have persuaded anyone to vote Republican, but it did draw in a good number of people who offered to volunteer their services in the coming weeks and Republican leaders hope Thursday’s event will do the same.
So, the message of Tuesday’s meeting rang out loud and clear — the Republicans aren’t going to sit this election out and plan to take the battle to the Democrats.

Information: Pearson, 979-1492 or e-mail: wdjd@mac.com