Obama on another plane

I'm in Upstate South Carolina for the weekend to visit my grandmother and see the Tar Heel baseball team play at Clemson.

I thought I might be getting a respite from the North Carolina political campaign, so I was pretty surprised yesterday when I got into town and heard Barack Obama ads running on the top 40 station in Greenville.

The truth is though that Asheville doesn't really have a top 40 station. So a lot of young people in western North Carolina who want to listen to popular music listen to B93.7 in Greenville. It's a savvy choice of place to advertise for him to reach the 18-35 demographic that he's so popular with.

It also shows that the Obama campaign is just operating on a different level with its savviness, which of course is made possible when you raise a whole heck of a lot of money.

On another note, when I took a walk through campus and downtown Chapel Hill yesterday morning, three people decked out in Obama shirts and stickers tried to register me to vote.

Obama's expanded his lead in North Carolina and narrowed the field in Pennsylvania considerably in the last few weeks. Folks always want to look to major national news stories to explain this movement, but his superior ground game shouldn't be discounted either.