National News
Obama gets a different kind of chilly reception
CHESTER, Pa. (AP) - The World Series got suspended. Obama politics never stop.
Democrat Barack Obama carried on Tuesday with an outdoor rally at Widener University, outside Philadelphia, despite a cold, steady rain that made the temperature feel freezing.
About 9,000 people came out to hear the presidential contender. They stood in mud.
"I just want all of you to know that if we see this kind of dedication on Election Day, there is no way that we're not going to bring change to America," Obama told the shivering crowd.
The weather was so miserable that Obama's rival, Republican John McCain, canceled a rally 50 miles north in Quakertown - hardly insignificant, given the dwindling campaign time.
Even Major League Baseball suspended the fifth game of the World Series in Philadelphia because of the same wet conditions Monday night, a first in the history of the baseball championship.
Gone were Obama's suit and tie. He wore jeans, sneakers and a waterproof raincoat. Still, shunning an umbrella, he got soaked. Obama later changed clothes before resuming his events.
McCain and Obama converged on Pennsylvania, a vote-rich state where Obama leads but McCain remains hopeful of a turnaround. Later, Obama was heading to Virginia, a longtime Republican state where he leads in polls.
Closing in on history, the front-running Obama has returned to broad, uplifting themes of change in hopes of ending the campaign in the most positive light.
The election is in one week.
Obama promised better days "if we're willing to reach deep down inside us, when times are tough, when it's cold, when it's raining, when it's hard - that's when we when stand up."
Gunning for the 270 electoral votes the Democrat needs to win the White House, Obama is almost exclusively targeting tossup red states, the label for the ones that trend Republican. Any one of them might tip him to victory. Combined, they could give him a dominant win.
Meanwhile, he can afford to spend little time at all defending Democratic blue states except for one - Pennsylvania - where McCain is pushing hard to nab a win.
McCain and running mate Sarah Palin held a rally in Hershey, Pa., on Tuesday before going their separate ways - McCain to North Carolina, another contested state, while Palin stays in Pennsylvania. The event they scuttled in Quakertown was to be held at a baseball stadium.
Obama's rally was in the strategic Philadelphia suburb of Chester.
The small city is in Delaware County, a pivotal swing area of the state. Neighborhoods here range from economically depressed to working class to ritzy. Republicans hold an edge over Democrats in voter registration, and both campaigns are surging to get out the vote. Chester itself is predominantly black, but the broader county has a mostly white population.
The event was a cross-state bookend to Obama's appearance Monday in Pittsburgh, where he pledged to cut taxes for the middle class and help factory workers as much as company owners.
Obama was then heading to Virginia, which is offering up intense political interest this year. Obama is vying to become the first Democrat for president to win the state in 44 years.
The Illinois senator was staging a rally at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, an area which has posted one of Virginia's largest gains in voter registration this year.
At night, Obama will campaign in Norfolk, Va., a major military community. This will be Obama's ninth trip to Virginia since he clinched the Democratic Party's nomination in June.
McCain and Palin are campaigning aggressively in Virginia, too. The transformation of the Washington-savvy northern Virginia region, coupled with distaste for an unpopular president, no longer makes the commonwealth reflexively Republican.
Palin: 'Far-left wing of the Democrat Party’ could takeover
LAKEWOOD, Ohio (CNN) – With her voice beginning to crack on this final marathon day of campaigning, Sarah Palin promised an audience in Ohio: “We will win!”
“You can just feel it here,” she said at a rally in the Cleveland suburbs. “You can just feel it here in Ohio, victory's coming, we can do this, we can win, we can win Ohio. And we must win for you.”
The crowd chanted “We will win! We will win!” throughout her remarks. At one point, Palin warned with urgency: “We must win.”
“We must win,” she said, “because Ohio, the far-left wing of the Democrat Party, not mainstream Democrat ideology, the values, the planks in the platform of the Democrat Party. It's the far-left wing of the party is getting ready to take over the entire federal government.”
Palin again accused Barack Obama of wanting to bankrupt the coal industry, citing an interview the Democrat gave to the San Francisco Chronicle in January in which he discussed his “aggressive” cap-and-trade proposal to limit carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
“Just yesterday, revelation, an audiotape surfaces,” Palin argued, despite the fact that the Obama interview has been posted online for nine months. “People are starting to hear in his own words what Sen. Obama’s intention is for the coal industry. You got to hear this tape. You’re going to hear Obama saying it, talking about bankruptcy, bankruptcy there in the coal industry. He’s explaining all this to the San Francisco Chronicle, and he says …”
Palin was interrupted by an audience member who shouted “Liberal!”
She continued: “And there must be something about San Francisco and he because it’s like I heard on Fox News today, it’s like a truth serum where when he’s there, he seems to be more candid, and remember it was there that he talked about, there you go, the bitter clingers, the cling-ons, all of us, I guess, you know holding on to religion and guns and, um, so something about he being there in San Francisco.”
Obama says attacks on wife 'completely out of bounds'
CNN – Looking back at his two-year marathon for the presidency, Barack Obama told CBS he was most angered by "right-wing" attacks on his wife, Michelle, and said many of them were "completely out of bounds."
"I do believe there is a Republican or right-wing media outlet, or set of media outlets, that went after my wife for a while in a way that I thought was just completely out of bounds," Obama told CBS' Katie Couric in an interview that aired Monday morning.
"Frankly, I would never have considered or expected my allies to do something comparable to the spouse of an opponent. I just feel like family are civilians."
Mrs. Obama took particular heat from conservative circles for comments she made during the primary season, when she said that for the first time in her adult life "I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Those comments were highlighted by several Republican state party chapters in an effort to paint the potential first lady as angry, leading the Democratic presidential nominee to call on them to "lay off my wife" in an ABC interview in May.
Mrs. Obama was also been labeled "Obama's baby mama," by Fox News and "Mrs. Grievance" by the conservative National Review. Some conservative outlets also buzzed last summer about the possibility of a tape, which has never appeared, that showed her using the word "whitey" from the pulpit of Trinity United Church. The Obama campaign said Mrs. Obama had never uttered the word and that no tape existed.
"I just feel like family are civilians, and they don't sign up for this stuff… They really should be bystanders in this process, even if they're campaigning for you," Obama told CBS in the interview that aired Monday.
Protesters make noise at Biden event
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) – Just two days after completing a three-day bus tour of central and southern Florida, Joe Biden is back in the state for three events Sunday, this time in the north as part of campaign’s final battleground state push before Tuesday’s election.
On the campus of Florida State University Sunday morning, Biden continued to deliver the campaign’s ‘closing arguments’ that include a plea to supporters to reach out to Republicans after the election in order to bridge the partisan divide.
For the first time since being named the Democratic vice presidential nominee, a small group of McCain and Palin supporters tried to interrupt the Delaware senator’s remarks from the public sidewalk about 150 yards from the podium. Their chants inaudible through a megaphone, they took to using the device’s siren to disrupt.
Biden referred to “the people in the parking lot” four times, using them as an example of those that Democrats will have to reach out to after Tuesday.
“I mean it literally. Not a joke. I know you find some of that obnoxious,” said Biden. “We gotta end this. Somebody's got to be big enough to stand up and end this.”
There’s also a practical reason, Biden argued, legislation won't be able to pass without bi-partisan support.
“You think we're going to get education reform? You think we're going to re-establish and end this war and re-establish our place in the world without getting a significant portion of Republicans to agree with us as well? No one party can do this.”
Barack Obama and Biden have been targeting McCain and Palin over the past two days for the endorsement they received from Dick Cheney on Saturday, asking if any more proof is needed that this Republican ticket would be a continuation of the Bush-Cheney administration.
“Folks, John McCain and Sarah Palin can have Dick Cheney’s endorsement,” said Biden, We’ll settle for people like Warren Buffett and Colin Powell.”
After Sunday in Florida, Biden continues the swing state tour in the campaign’s final hours, heading to Missouri Monday morning, Ohio in the afternoon and Philadelphia at night. After voting at home in Wilmington Tuesday morning, he will visit at least one more swing state before joining Barack Obama in Chicago.
