◼ "His campaign is getting smaller and smaller," Romney said of Obama, accusing the president of focusing on smaller issues at the expense of big problems like jobs and the economy. "And our crowds keep getting bigger and bigger. There's a crescendo of passion about changing Washington." - Byron York/Washington Examiner
In the wake of Romney's decisive victory over Obama in the first presidential debate October 3, the campaign's trajectory here in Ohio is up, up, up. Not just in the polls, where Romney has cut a five-and-a-half point Obama lead in the RealClearPolitics average of polls to 1.7 points, but also in Republicans' everyday lives as they talk to friends and, in some cases, volunteer for the campaign. And on Saturday evening in Lebanon, population 20,242, county seat of Warren County, where John McCain beat Barack Obama 67 percent to 31 percent in 2008, optimism had returned.
"There is hope, we have hope now," said Tracey Perry of Loveland as she waited for Romney to speak to a crowd of nearly 10,000. "We were afraid the message was never going to get out."
"We were depressed," said Cinda Hacker, of Centerville. "The debate turned it around."
