Barack Obama and John McCain were yesterday starting the first full week of a five-month election campaign, intent on redrafting the US political landscape to capture the White House in November.
After Hillary Clinton’s exit from the primary race and fulsome endorsement of Obama on Saturday, supporters of the Democrat and his Republican rival hammered two of the defining themes for the presidential election — the economy and Iraq.
“The fact is that John McCain voted 95 percent of the time with [US President] George Bush last year and 90 percent of the time with George Bush over the entire presidency,” said John Kerry, the Democrats’ defeated nominee in 2004.
“That’s not a change. That’s not reform. That’s not a difference,” the Massachusetts senator told ABC News.
McCain backers cast Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal whose first instinct was to thrust big government into every corner of US society. And his inspirational oratory had no substantive underpinnings, they said.
“When it comes to Senator Obama, it’s all talk,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said.
“[He] never did anything the left didn’t want to hear, whether Iraq policy or anything else, and John has been his own man for a long time,” he said, touting the Arizona senator’s maverick appeal to independent voters.
But Obama, 46, is not ceding the centrist electorate that could well decide who succeeds Bush next January. The Illinois senator’s coming itinerary was taking him far from Democratic strongholds, giving an insight into his strategy for making history as the nation’s first black president.
Yesterday Obama was launching a two-week, nationwide economic tour starting in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976.
The tour was to take Obama to Missouri today, which has not chosen a Democrat since voting for former president Bill Clinton in 1996, having already visited Virginia last week (previous Democratic victory: 1964).
Both candidates were rolling out biographical television spots to re-introduce themselves to voters after the grueling primary season.
Obama’s story is of a mixed-race trailblazer who, he says, personifies hope and the American dream. McCain, 71, is the grizzled veteran and war hero who survived five years of torture during captivity in Vietnam.
Opinion polls indicate that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction — a signal of a problem for the party in power.
“The atmospherics for the Republicans haven’t been this bad since 1974,” said former McCain adviser John Weaver.
The former first lady was not entirely out of the picture yet, with Clinton surrogates flagging up her 18 million primary votes to press her qualification to be vice president in an Obama administration.
“I’ve looked at every other possible candidate. No one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings,” said California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who hosted a fence-mending meeting between the two Democrats late on Thursday.
Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson reaffirmed that the New York senator was not agitating for the vice presidency under Obama.
“Senator Clinton said she will do whatever she is asked to do to elect Barack Obama. She’s not seeking the job and it is Senator Obama’s decision, solely his decision,” he told CNN.
There was praise meanwhile for Clinton’s elegiac concession speech, which contrasted with her defiance on Tuesday night when Obama clinched enough delegates to become the Democrats’ new champion.
“She knocked it out of the park yesterday with her speech,” Virginia’s Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, told Fox News on Sunday.
“And the match-up between Senator McCain and Senator Obama couldn’t be more clear,” he said, adamant that Democratic wounds would heal in time for the Nov. 4 election.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion