Barack Obama is offering a prize to five Virginians who register at least 100 new voters apiece before the Oct. 6 registration deadline.

They get to meet with him.

Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder announced yesterday that the Obama campaign has a goal of registering 151,000 prospective new voters over the next three months. That would be 1,000 more than Obama himself helped register as a community organizer in Chicago before he ran for office.

The personal meeting with Obama will be offered as an incentive in a program the Obama campaign has dubbed the "Can You Beat Obama? Challenge."

Wilder decried those who question whether an African-American presidential candidate can carry Virginia.

"Virginia voted for me at a time when no other state had dared to go that far," he said.

Wilder, elected in 1989, was the nation's first elected African-American governor.

Wilder said Virginia is a pivotal state and Obama can win it because he has shown that he cares -- coming to this state twice already since he sewed up the Democratic nomination.

No Democratic presidential candidate has carried Virginia since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. But Wilder said Obama needs to campaign in rural areas of the state.

Wilder appeared on Obama's behalf at the campaign's new Virginia headquarters in a converted plumbing fixture warehouse at 1208 W. Marshall St. in the Carver area.

Another presidential candidate, consumer crusader Ralph Nader, will bring his campaign to Richmond today at a 1 p.m. rally at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, 2000 E. Cary St.

Some Democrats blame Nader's presidential candidacy in 2000 for siphoning off enough votes to defeat Democrat Al Gore and hand the victory to George W. Bush.

Wilder said yesterday that he wished Nader had not run, but called him irrelevant.

In a telephone interview, Nader said he did not cause the Gore loss -- the U.S. Supreme Court did. This was a reference to the Supreme Court ruling on the Florida election that assured Bush a victory.

Nader called the two-party system "a duopoly" designed to inhibit competition.

"Look at what they have done with gerrymandering. They don't even like to compete with themselves," he said.

Nader is gathering the 10,000 signatures needed to get on the Virginia ballot, but hasn't qualified yet. He said he expected to, although Virginia's ballot law is the 12th most difficult in the nation.
Contact Tyler Whitley at (804) 649-6780 or twhitley@timesdispatch.com.