Democrat presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama ridiculed Republican rival Senator John McCain and his running mate for claiming they would bring about the changes needed to get the country back on the right track.
Obama’s comments on Saturday came as both campaigns scrambled to react to the implications for taxpayers and the economy of a reportedly impending government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
A day earlier the government reported that the US jobless rate hit a surprising 6.1 percent last month.
PHOTO: AFP
The latest economic setbacks only underscored how large a factor the troubled US economy has become in the presidential campaign, mostly eclipsing the Iraq War as voters worry about losing their jobs, homes and health insurance coverage.
Speaking to 800 people in a barn at a Terre Haute, Indiana, fairgrounds, Obama said people should not believe the claims by McCain and his vice presidential pick, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, that they were the agents of change ready to shake up business as usual.
“Don’t be fooled,” Obama said of the campaign’s comments at the Republican National Convention last week. “John McCain’s party, with the help of John McCain, has been in charge” for nearly eight years.
Obama and McCain said they were both briefed by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the mortgage crisis and the administration of US President George W. Bush’s steps toward a government takeover of the two financial companies, which together hold or back half of US mortgage debt.
News of a government takeover on Friday followed a report by the Mortgage Bankers Association that more than 4 million US homeowners with a mortgage, a record 9 percent, were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of June.
“Any action we take must be focused not on the whims of lobbyists and special interests worried about their bonuses and hourly fees, but on whether it will strengthen our economy and help struggling homeowners,” Obama told reporters after a campaign stop in Indiana.
He stopped short of making detailed proposals, saying “we need to carefully address” the possible impact on community and regional banks.
A government bailout could cost taxpayers around US$25 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said.
McCain and Palin addressed the crisis briefly at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Palin said that the two financial companies have “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”
“The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help,” she said.
McCain said in an interview for CBS television’s Face The Nation scheduled to air yesterday that the mortgage giants needed to be restructured, saying they are “the classic example of why we need change in Washington” and reflect “the kind of cronyism, corruption, that’s made people so justifiably angry.”
McCain and Palin attracted thousands to the rally in Colorado Springs, a city that is home to many Christian conservatives and military families. They were to head later to New Mexico, trying to blunt Obama from making gains in Western states that went Republican in the 2004 election.
In the short time since McCain spirited the little known 44-year-old first-term governor out of Alaska and onto a national stage as his running mate, Palin has become an instant celebrity who has energized the party’s conservative base. At the Colorado rally thousands of supporters changed “Sa-rah! Pa-lin!” before McCain took the stage with her.
The McCain campaign was planning to keep Palin with McCain for several more days, rather than dispatch her to campaign by herself, keeping her out of the reach of reporters who might subject her to tough questions about her record in Alaska, including an ongoing ethics investigation into her firing of the state’s public safety commissioner.
At the convention, McCain, who has served 22 years in the Senate, tried to frame himself as a political outsider and maverick, borrowing the same message of change that Obama has made the centerpiece of his run for the White House.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS