Providence shines, just a bit, on Obama in return visit

PROVIDENCE, RI – The last time Barack Obama stumped on this Rhode Island College campus, several thousand spectators had waited in a cold drizzle to catch a glimpse of him, then a presidential candidate on an 11-state winning streak.
"I'm going to need all of you," Obama told the crowd of around 1,600 outside. Then he went inside, where around 5,000 more people jammed the college’s field house to hear him say, "I don't want to just end the war. I want to end the mind set that got us in the war."
Six years have done little to dampen the enthusiasm of
Rhode Island College students and others who have been buying tickets all week to listen to the president. On Friday, Obama returned to the college to talk up the economic recovery and the role of women in the economy.
But the winning streak is definitely over. Just four days before Election Day, Obama made no mention of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and state treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate who is in a tight race against Republican Allan Fung, the mayor of Cranston - and a graduate of Rhode Island College."is not a campaign event" Raimondo, who was in the college field house said.
In a year when most Democrats have distanced themselves from Obama, Rhode Island is a state where he can do little harm to his party's electoral fortunes, and perhaps even some good. He won election here with more than 62 percent of the vote in both 2008 and 2012 and despite dismal approval ratings nationwide, he still has drawing power here.
Yet the job of plugging for Raimondo was left to Michelle Obama, who appeared with the Rhode Island Democrat on Thursday and told a crowd of roughly 1,000 at the Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex that their votes could be decisive. A week earlier, Hillary Clinton came to the state to stump for Raimondo