Obama, McCain
duel in final hours:
US: White House front-runner Barack Obama dueled with John McCain on
the penultimate day of the epic 2008 campaign, presenting a tableau of
his loving family and vowing to change America.
On the home stretch before today’s election, the Democrat bidding to
be America’s first black President appeared before 80,000 supporters
here with his wife Michelle and their two daughters aged seven and 10.
But McCain fought for a comeback win in Pennsylvania — which went
Democratic in 2004 and which he must win to stand a chance of victory —
as the state Republican Party ran an ad about Obama’s fiery former
pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Obama and his family were introduced by a rousing set from fabled
rocker Bruce Springsteen in Cleveland, who brought many in the vast
crowd to tears with “The Rising,” which is played before all Obama
rallies.
“A rising is coming,” Obama said after Springsteen exclaimed to
deafening cheers: “I want my country back, I want my dream back, I want
my America back!”
McCain, following his own two-day bus odyssey around rust-belt Ohio,
was also stepping up the pace with his first midnight rally of the
campaign, in Florida, following events in Pennsylvania and New
Hampshire.
“We are two days away from changing America, and it’s going to start
right here in the great state of Ohio,” said the 47-year-old Obama,
whose rival McCain, at 72, would be the oldest president elected to a
first term. The Democrat’s campaign has not made the age difference an
explicit issue of the election, but the contrast was implicit as his
young family rejoined him on the campaign trail at rallies in western
states Sunday and in Ohio.
Obama again hammered McCain on the stricken US economy, and said his
policies would extend President George W. Bush’s economic and foreign
policy legacy. His wife meanwhile exhorted supporters to vote early or
turn out en masse Tuesday.
“There’s this beautiful thing about my husband, he thinks he can do
everything,” Michelle Obama told an earlier rally attended by more than
60,000 people in Columbus, Ohio.
But she stressed: “Barack Obama needs you for the next two days. He’s
going to need you for the next four years and eight years.”
The Democratic nominee seemed buoyed by the presence of his family.
“Everything looks a little better. Crowds seem to grow and
everybody’s got a smile on their face,” he said. “You start thinking
that maybe we might be able to win an election on November 4.”
Obama has been criss-crossing battleground states that backed Bush
last time, and the latest polls make him the hot favorite.
But McCain said the polls had been wrong before, and would be wrong
again.
“My friends — the Mac is Back, and we’re going to win,” he roared in
Pennsylvania, a rust-belt state where polls favour Obama and which he
must win to have any chance of getting the 270 electoral votes needed
for victory.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party, meanwhile ran and ad about Wright,
who pitched Obama’s campaign into crisis earlier this year when video
clips of his shriek “God Damn America” in a sermon surfaced.
“Barack Obama: he chose as his pastor a man who blamed the US for the
9/11 attacks. Does that sound like someone who should be president?” the
ad said.
Later the Arizona senator returned to New Hampshire, where he won the
Republican primary in 2000 and earlier this year. “I come tonight to the
independents, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, vegetarians, asking
you to let me go on one more mission,” he said, in one of his signature
town hall meetings in the northeastern state.
In the US presidential Electoral College, states are apportioned
votes based on their population, ranging from giant California with 55
to the least populous states such as Alaska, Montana and Vermont with
just three. Gallup laid bare the challenge that McCain faces, with its
tracking poll Sunday giving Obama a lead of up to 11 points depending on
the survey model used. Among “traditional likely voters,” Obama was up
51 percent to 43.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll gave Obama a 53-44 per cent lead, and
Rasmussen said the Democrat was on 51 per cent to McCain’s 46.
McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis, however, said the polls were
skewing the true perception of the race.
“There is no doubt that John McCain is increasing his margins in
almost every state in the country right now, and I think what we’re in
for is a slam-bang finish,” he said on Fox News.
The presidential campaign has narrowed down to states that have been
reliably Republican in recent elections, or in the case of Virginia,
Indiana and North Carolina, that have not voted for a Democratic hopeful
in decades.
Cleveland, Monday, AFP
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