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BEXLEY, Ohio — She was a last-minute substitute for her husband, but Michelle Obama Friday urged a college campus crowd of 2,000 to close the deal for Barack Obama in the closing days of the election.

“Eleven days is nothing,’’ she said in a Capital University gymnasium next door to where Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin rallied to a larger crowd just two weeks ago.

“It’s a long, hard race, and it will be close,’’ she said. “Don’t be fooled. We don’t look at the polls…We take nothing for granted.’’

Those polls that she said they don’t look at have recently turned in her husband’s favor in a state that even Mr. McCain said he must win if he hopes to win the White House on Nov. 4.

Mr. Obama had initially expected to be in the Columbus area Friday, but instead he squeezed in a quick trip to Hawaii to visit the ailing grandmother who helped to raise him.

“No matter how important you are, family comes first,’’ said U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio).

Mr. Obama is expected back in northern Ohio on Monday, the day after Mr. McCain rallies in the swing Appalachian region of the hotly contested state. Michelle Obama also flew to Akron Friday for another rally.

While smaller that what her husband has become accustomed to, the crowd Ms. Obama faced was exuberant. A large portion of the crowd, as demonstrated by a show of hands, had already voted.

“My husband, Barack Obama, gets it,’’ she said. “He gets it cause he’s lived it. Something happens to your perspective in life when you’re raised by a single mother….He saw her continued struggle to figure out how to support her family and get her education. He saw her sacrifice everything for him.’’

And she tried to relate to the many college students in the crowd, noting that, although she and her husband went to Harvard University, they relied on loans to do it. She promoted her husband’s proposal to help make college more affordable by linking government scholarship aid to social service.

”In this society, people can’t afford to be teachers, social workers, musicians, youth coordinators, or pastors because what happens is the salaries they earn in these jobs won’t cover the cost of the degree it took to get the jobs,’’ she said. “Don’t we deserve a president who gets it?’’

Ohio’s First Lady, Frances Strickland, drew a roar from the crowd when, at one point while speaking, she held up her arm to display a price tag dangling from her red suit jacket. It was an obvious reference to recent publicity about GOP spending of $150,000 on Ms. Palin’s wardrobe.

Matthew Myers, a 40-year-old unemployed college professor living in Bexley, attended the rally, saying he’s tired of Mr. McCain’s characterization of Mr. Obama’s policies as socialism.

“They were talking about redistribution of wealth all over the news yesterday,’’ he said. “There’s been a massive redistribution of wealth over the last eight years. It needs to go back the way it was.’’

In the prepared remarks he expected to deliver Friday in Denver, Mr. McCain continued to represent Mr. Obama’s tax policies as “redistributing the wealth.’’

“Senator Obama may say he's trying to soak the rich, but it's the middle class who are going to get put through the wringer, because a lot of his promised tax increase misses the target,’’ he was expected to say.

“To pay for nearly a trillion dollars in new government spending, his tax increase would impact 50 percent of small business income in this country, and the jobs of 16 million middle class Americans who work for those small businesses’’

Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.

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