Democratic Senator Barack Obama hit White House rival Republican Senator John McCain with a prime-time TV onslaught as he vied to clinch victory in battleground states in the climactic run-up to Tuesday’s vote.
After his 30-minute appeal on national television late on Wednesday, which cost at least US$3 million to air, Obama held a midnight rally near Orlando with former president Bill Clinton in the latest burial of Democratic hatchets.
Obama beat Clinton’s wife Hillary to the Democratic nomination, but the former president delivered a strong endorsement at his first joint campaign event with the party’s champion in front of 35,000 supporters in Kissimmee.
“The presidential campaign is the greatest job interview in the world. And on Tuesday, you get to make the hire,” Clinton said, contrasting the economic prosperity of his own 1990s tenure to the crisis now sweeping the nation.
“This is not a close question. If you make the decision based on who can best get us out of the ditch ... I think it’s clear the next president should be, and with your help will be, Senator Barack Obama,” he said.
Obama is stepping up the pace on the final approach to the most consequential election in a generation, as the US grapples with the financial hurricane and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Democratic front-runner was to hit three states yesterday, departing Florida after a morning rally for more events in the raging battlegrounds of Virginia and Missouri. McCain was conducting a bus tour of Ohio.
Pursuing his quest to be elected the first US black president, Obama ended his special broadcast with a live cut to the thumping climax of a rally attended by 20,000 supporters in Sunrise, Florida, late on Wednesday. The ad, which aired on three networks before the decisive World Series baseball game, featured patriotic tropes, intensely personal moments and stories of real Americans struggling to make ends meet.
The 47-year-old Democrat, promoted in the broadcast as a loving family man who overcame hardship to reach the pinnacle of politics, pledged to remake the American Dream for all and safeguard the nation from foreign threats.
“We’ve seen over the last eight years how decisions by a president can have a profound effect on the course of history — and on American lives,” he said intently to the camera. “This election is a defining moment. The chance for our leaders to meet the demands of these challenging times and keep faith with our people.”
McCain, 72, was unimpressed earlier on Wednesday in Florida — the biggest of all the battleground states where the election will be won and lost.
“When you’re watching this gauzy, feel-good commercial, just remember that it was paid for with broken promises,” he said, attacking Obama’s decision to opt out of public campaign financing.
The Arizona senator renewed his attacks on Obama’s past links to 1960s radical William Ayers and lambasted his opponent’s credentials to be commander-in-chief.
“With terrorists still plotting new strikes across the world, millions of innocent lives are still at stake, including American lives,” McCain said.
“The question is whether this is a man who has what it takes to protect America from Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and other grave threats in the world,” McCain said. “And he has given you no reason to answer in the affirmative.”
Whether McCain’s tactics are successful remain to be seen. Polls have repeatedly shown that the economy rather than national security remains the defining issue of the campaign.
A poll from Quinnipiac University on Wednesday showed Obama with a still sizeable, albeit slightly narrower lead in Ohio and Pennsylvania but with Florida now too close to call.
Another poll from Rasmussen showed McCain closing to within three points of Obama nationwide for the first time in more than a month, trailing 47 percent to 50 percent.
But a survey of toss-up states by CNN and Time had Obama expanding his lead in Colorado and holding steady margins in Florida and Virginia.
Also See: Two brave candidates, but the choice for US president seems clear
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
OPTIONS: Asked if one potential avenue to a third term was having J.D. Vance run for the top job and then pass the baton to him, Trump said: ‘That’s one,’ among others US President Donald Trump on Sunday that “I’m not joking” about trying to serve a third term, the clearest indication he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029. “There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago, his private club. He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term