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 WARREN, Mich. (AP) - One day after an embarrassing rejection by West Virginia's blue-collar voters, Barack Obama on Wednesday plunged into the task of convincing working-class whites that he understands them and will do more to help them hold their jobs and pay their bills than Republican John McCain.
Perhaps no other task is more vital to his hopes of becoming the first black president, and only the second Democrat elected to the White House in four decades.
Obama has galvanized black voters, broken fundraising records and drawn hundreds of thousands of excited young adults to his campaign. But McCain still hopes to trump him by wooing so-called Reagan Democrats, those working-class voters who are wary of social liberals but anxious about their jobs, which are concentrated in a manufacturing sector long battered by imports and changing technologies.
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