by Stephen Collinson
DENVER, Colorado (AFP) – Barack Obama took aim at John McCain before record crowds after his rival acknowledged sharing the same Republican party philosophy as unpopular President George W. Bush.
Just nine days before the presidential election, Democratic candidate Obama on Sunday again attempted to shackle McCain to Bush's shattered economic legacy and tried to rebut attacks on his own tax policy.
More than 150,000 people flocked to two Obama rallies on the campaign trail in Colorado, with a record crowd of more than 100,000 in Denver listening as the Illinois senator tore into McCain for his support of Bush.
"Just this morning, Senator McCain said that actually he and President Bush 'share a common philosophy,'" Obama said.
"That's right, Colorado. I guess that was John McCain finally giving us a little straight talk, owning up to the fact that he and George Bush actually have a whole lot in common," Obama said.
Obama then listed what he saw as deficiencies of the McCain-Bush philosophy, which encapsulated his main campaign themes heading into the election on November 4 as America battles its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.
He said "the Bush-McCain philosophy" gave tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations and justified spending 10 billion dollars a month in Iraq "while the Iraqi government sits on a huge surplus and our economy is in crisis."
"We can't have another four years that look like the last eight. It is time for change in Washington," Obama said.
Obama spoke on the second day of a swing through vital western battleground states Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, after a short break from the campaign trail to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii who turned 86 on Sunday.
If he can win all the states that Democrat John Kerry captured in his unsuccessful 2004 presidential bid and peel the three western states away from the Republicans, Obama will be assured of the White House.
In an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press,", McCain argued that he had long had major differences with Bush on issues like climate change and government spending.
"Do we share a common philosophy of the Republican Party? Of course," McCain said. "But I stood up against my party, not just President Bush but others as well and I have the scars to prove it."
McCain also brushed off opinion polls indicating he is set to lose against Obama, insisting that his bid for the White House is still afloat.
McCain, who has been trailing Obama by more than 10 points in some national and state polls, told NBC that his campaign was "doing fine."
"We've closed in the last week and if we continue this close in the next week you're going to be up very late on election night."
Later McCain addressed rallies in Iowa and Ohio on a swing through the midwestern state where Obama holds the edge according to recent polls.
As he is expected to do throughout the remainder of the campaign, McCain relentlessly rammed home his contention that Obama is a closet socialist hellbent on raising taxes on ordinary Americans.
The 72-year-old former Navy pilot, speaking on the 41st anniversary of being shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War, also struck a defiant stance, casting himself as the underdog in the final stretch of the election race.
At one rally in Ohio late Sunday, McCain arrived to the theme tune from the boxing underdog movie "Rocky" to the delight of his supporters.
"I'm not afraid of the fight -- I'm ready for it," he exhorted.
He also repeated his claim -- angrily denied by the Obama camp -- that the Democratic nominee had already begun drafting his inauguration speech.
"What America needs now is someone who'll finish the race before starting the victory lap, not for himself but for his country," he said.
Earlier Sunday, McCain had issued a robust defense of running mate Sarah Palin after reports of bitter infighting within the campaign.
Asked on "Meet the Press" if he wanted to defend Alaska Governor Palin, who has been blamed for his sagging poll numbers , McCain replied: "I don't defend her -- I praise her. She needs no defense."
"She's a role model for millions and millions of Americans," said McCain. "She's just what Washington needs."
In another blow to the Republican campaign, The Anchorage Daily News, the biggest newspaper in Palin's home state of Alaska, endorsed Obama, saying he "truly promises fundamental change in Washington."
National polls have Obama up anywhere from four to 14 percentage points and with a solid lead in most battleground states, but some surveys show McCain has made up some ground in Ohio, Florida and must-win Pennsylvania.
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent
DENVER (Reuters) – Democrat Barack Obama sharpened his criticism of rival John McCain Sunday, warning a huge crowd of more than 100,000 supporters that a McCain White House would mean four more years of failed Republican policies and broken politics.
The Illinois senator, concluding a two-day swing through the Western battlegrounds of Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, renewed his favorite theme -- that McCain represents another term for Republican President George W. Bush.
"We're not going to let George Bush pass the torch to John McCain," Obama told audience estimated by Denver police at more than 100,000 -- the biggest crowd in a campaign that has already set records for fundraising.
The thunderous gathering, which Obama aides said exceeded the 100,000 who saw Obama at a recent rally in St. Louis, jammed a downtown Denver park and filled the steps of the Colorado state capital building.
"Just this morning, Senator McCain said that he and President Bush 'share a common philosophy,'" Obama told the crowd. "I guess that was John McCain finally giving us a little straight talk."
Obama repeated the criticism at a later rally in Ft. Collins, where about 50,000 supporters filled a campus yard at Colorado State University.
He said "the Bush-McCain philosophy" benefited the rich and promised the wealth would trickle down to everyone else. He noted Bush had voted for McCain last week.
"Well, Colorado, George Bush isn't the only one who gets to vote early -- you can vote early too. And you can finally put an end to the Bush-McCain philosophy," Obama said.
A spokesman for McCain, an Arizona senator, said Obama had not bucked the Democratic Party on major issues.
"John McCain opposed President Bush's wasteful spending policy, his Big Oil energy policy and his efforts to grow the federal government by 40 percent -- Obama supported Bush on all three," campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said.
MCCAIN ON DEFENSIVE
Obama leads McCain in national opinion polls nine days before the November 4 election, and is hoping to put Colorado's nine electoral votes in his column. Colorado is one of about a dozen states won by Bush in 2004 that McCain is struggling to defend.
Obama has focused on states like Colorado that allow early voting, urging supporters to cast their ballots before November 4 in the hopes of luring first-time and infrequent voters to the polls.
Polls show Obama with a solid lead in Colorado, where the Democrats held their national nominating convention and Obama gave his acceptance speech before 75,000 in Denver's open-air football stadium.
"Do you guys ever have a small crowd in Denver?" Obama asked as he took the stage before the sprawling sea of supporters.
Colorado has been trending toward Democrats in recent years amid an influx of new residents and growth in the Hispanic population. Bush carried the state by five percentage points in 2004.
Obama plans to launch a tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania on Monday that will feature what aides called his "closing argument" to voters, making his case for change from Bush's Republican policies.
He told supporters McCain was cranking up his negative attacks in the race's final days in a desperate effort to catch up. "John McCain has been throwing everything he's got at us, hoping something sticks," he said.
Obama picked up the endorsement of Britain's Financial Times newspaper, which said in an editorial it was "confident that Mr. Obama is the right choice."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he can “guarantee” a win on Nov. 4 in a squeaker victory that won’t be clear until late that night.
McCain spoke amid signs of a tightening race, and reports of renewed determination among his staff, which is badly outgunned in both money and manpower.
“I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I'm going to win it,” McCain told interim "Meet" moderator Tom Brokaw. “We're going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We're going to win it, and it's going to be tight, and we're going to be up late.”
McCain was down just 5 points in the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Sunday, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) leading by 49 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in the daily tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points.
Reuters reported that Obama's lead has dropped over the last three days after hitting a high of 12 points on Thursday. Pollster John Zogby said: "Things are trending back for McCain. His numbers are rising and Obama's are dropping on a daily basis. There seems to be a direct correlation between this and McCain talking about the economy."
The Washington Post reported Sunday: "[I]nside the McCain campaign the mood remains one of gritty resolve. Top aides know they are behind, but they hold out hope and, like their candidate, stubbornly refuse to give up."
McCain told Brokaw in Waterloo, Iowa, that he feels "like Knute Rockne ... go out there and get one for the Gipper."
“We are very competitive in battleground states," McCain said. "Obviously, I choose to trust my senses as well as polls. The enthusiasm at almost all of our [events] is at a higher level than I've ever seen, and I've been in a lot of presidential campaigns, usually as the warm-up act. ... And I see intensity out there, and I see passion. So we're very competitive.”
McCain added: “We're going to have to just get out our vote, work hard over the next nine days, and make sure that people know that there'll be a better future. People are very worried now — very, very worried, and have every reason to be. I think it's all about who can assure a better future.”
On the endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, McCain said: "I'm disappointed in Gen. Powell, but I'm very, very happy to know that [I'm endorsed by] five former secretaries of states who I admire enormously.”
McCain defended Republican National Committee clothing purchases on behalf of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Politico revealed during the past week that the RNC spent $150,000 on designer outfits at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for the vice presidential nominee and members of her family.
"She lives a frugal life,” he said. “She and her family are not wealthy. She and her family were thrust into this and there was some — and some third of that money is given back. The rest will be donated to charity. ... She is a role model to millions and millions and millions of Americans."
McCain appeared in a gracious mood, saying to Brokaw at the end: "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you have never forgotten where you come from.”
By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP National Writer – Sat Oct 18, 12:37 pm ET
The stories are almost comical: Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, registered to vote on Nov. 4. The entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, signed up to go the polls — in Nevada.
But no one in either presidential campaign is laughing. Not publicly, anyway.
Republicans, led by John McCain, are alleging widespread voter fraud. The Democrats and Barack Obama say the controversy is preposterous and is just political mudslinging.
In the middle is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, a grass-roots community group that has led liberal causes since it formed in 1970. This year, ACORN hired more than 13,000 part-time workers and sent them out in 21 states to sign up voters in minority and poor neighborhoods.
They submitted 1.3 million registration cards to local election officials.
Along the way, bogus ones appeared — signed in the names of cartoon characters, professional football players and scores of others bearing the same handwriting. And in the past few days, those phony registrations have exploded into Republican condemnations of far-ranging misconduct, and a relatively obscure community activist group took a starring role, right behind Joe the Plumber, in the final presidential debate.
Looking beyond the smoke and fire, the raging argument boils down to essentially this:
Is ACORN, according to McCain, perpetuating voter fraud that could be "destroying the fabric of democracy"? Or are Republicans trying to keep the disadvantaged, who tend to be Democrats, from casting ballots in a hotly contested presidential race that has drawn record numbers of new voters?
By legal definition, to commit voter fraud means a person would have to present some kind of documentation at the polls — a driver's license, a phone bill or another form of ID — that bears the name of Mickey Mouse, for example. To do so risks a fine and imprisonment under state laws.
Submitting fake registration cards is another matter. Local law enforcement agencies in about a dozen states are investigating fake registrations submitted by ACORN workers. Late last week, The Associated Press reported the FBI will be reviewing those cases.
Accusations of stolen votes have a long history in presidential elections. In the 2000 recount debacle, Republicans claimed illegal ballots were cast. Democrats contended that legal ballots were thrown out. In 2004, when Ohio gave the presidency to George W. Bush, Democrats charged that long lines and malfunctioning machines in that state led to an inaccurate count.
But in this contest, involving the first African-American in American history with a real chance at becoming president, the vitriol is particularly pointed.
"This is all just one big head-fake," said Tova Wang of the government watchdog group Common Cause. "What silliness this is, at this point. It's all about creating this perception that there is a tremendous problem with voter fraud in this country, and it's not true."
On Friday, during a campaign appearance, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin repeated McCain's recent claims that Obama has close ties to ACORN.
"You deserve to know," Palin told thousands in a park north of Cincinnati. "This group needs to learn that you here in Ohio won't let them turn the Buckeye State into the Acorn State."
Obama helped represent ACORN in a successful 1995 suit against the state of Illinois, which forced enactment of the so-called motor-voter law, making it easier for people to register vote. Obama said this week that he had "nothing to do with" ACORN's massive voter registration drive.
ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring retaliated this week in a series of conference calls and interviews. "What we're seeing is the manufacture of a crisis, and attempts to smear Sen. Obama with it. It gives you an excuse should you lose or if there's a contested outcome of the election."
Voter fraud is rare in the United States, according to a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Based on reviews of voter fraud claims at the federal and state level, the center's report asserted most problems were caused by things like technological glitches, clerical errors or mistakes made by voters and by election officials.
"It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate another voter at the polls," the report said.
Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, calls the current controversy "chapter 22 in a drama that's been going on awhile. The pattern is that nothing much ever comes from this. There have been no known cases of people voting fraudulently."
"What we've seen," Keyssar said, "is sloppiness and someone's idea of a stupid joke, like registering as Donald Duck."
ACORN officials have repeatedly claimed that their own quality control workers were the first to discover problematic ballots. In every state investigating bad registrations, ACORN tipped off local officials to bogus or incomplete cards, spokesman Kettenring said.
Many states require that all registrations be submitted to local voting officials so that election directors are in charge of vetting problem ballots, not the groups collecting them.
Part-time ACORN workers receive one day of training and are paid $8 an hour to collect signatures, according to Kettenring. He blamed bogus cards on cheating and lazy employees trying to make a buck for doing nothing.
When caught, Kettenring said, those workers are fired. The group is in the process of tallying the number of bad cards ACORN flagged for election officials, he said. Kettenring said he doubted the percentage of such registrations would reach 2 percent.
But Republicans say any number of fake registrations is unacceptable and could affect the November election.
Signing up voters is a small part of ACORN activities. The group frequently leads challenges to minimum wage laws, predatory mortgage lending in poor and working-class neighborhoods and immigration policies.
Controversy is nothing new. Its leaders are currently locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group's founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit's money several years ago.
Since the 2004 election, ex-employees have been convicted of submitting false registrations in states including Florida and Missouri.
"There are certainly problems and I don't think anyone disagrees on that," said Wang of Common Cause. "But it doesn't get reported that ACORN finds these registrations errors themselves. They flag them as being no good, but they have to turn them in anyway."
"They don't get processed," she said. "And Mickey Mouse is not going to vote."
WOODBRIDGE, Va. – A top aide to John McCain said Saturday the Republican presidential nominee still has a strong chance of winning the state because of his support in "real Virginia," the downstate areas far removed in distance and political philosophy from the more liberal northern part of the state.
"As a proud resident of Oakton, Va., I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia," McCain senior adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer said on MSNBC. "And that's really what you see there. But the rest of the state, real Virginia, if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain's message."
Program host Kevin Corke asked Pfotenhauer if she wanted to retract the comment, prompting her to reply, "I mean 'real Virginia' because northern Virginia is where I've always been, but 'real Virginia' I take to be the — this part of the state that is more Southern in nature, if you will. Northern Virginia is really metro D.C."
Earlier this month, McCain's brother, Joe, told those at an event for the Republican nominee that two Democratic-leaning areas in Northern Virginia, Arlington and Alexandria, were "communist country." He quickly apologized and called the remark a joke.
The senator's campaign headquarters is in Arlington, as is the home he uses while in Washington. McCain also attended high school in Alexandria.
Northern Virginia is the most populous in the state, so if McCain considers it enemy territory, he would have to run up large margins in the Hampton Roads and less populated areas of Virginia to win on Election Day. During a rally in the Washington suburb of Woodbridge, Va., on Saturday, McCain noted that his first posting in the Navy was in coastal Norfolk.
Democrats not only control the Virginia governor's office, but Democrat Jim Webb succeeded in 2006 in ousting Republican Sen. George Allen. Veteran Sen. John Warner, R-Va., is retiring this year and former Democratic Gov. Mark Warner is vying with former Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore to succeed him.
The popularity of Mark Warner has led some to suggest he may boost Democrat Barack Obama's chances, rather than the opposite.
One recent poll showed McCain trailing Obama by up to 8 percentage points in the Old Dominion, but political analysts believe the race may be closer. McCain was making a push to hold onto Virginia, which President Bush won in 2004.
Besides his rally in Woodbridge, McCain's campaign was launching a downstate bus tour on Sunday with Todd Palin, the husband of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
One of those attending McCain's rally said she wasn't sure about the geographical split of the state.
"I just hope that the state of Virginia will continue to support and continue to be a red state," said 45-year-old Diane Fuller of Manassas.
CHICAGO (AFP) – John McCain and Barack Obama's campaigns swapped accusations of rampant and widespread voter fraud Friday as legal battles over who ought be allowed to cast a ballot ensnared the race to the White House.
An estimated nine million new voters have registered for the hotly contested November 4 election, and the Obama campaign says Democratic registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.
The McCain campaign contends that an untold number of those registration forms are false and warned that illegally cast ballots could alter the results of the election and undermine the public's faith in democracy.
The Obama campaign's top lawyer, Bob Bauer, accused Republicans of recklessly "plotting" to suppress legitimate votes and to "sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for millions of Americans."
Republicans have launched a slew of lawsuits aimed at preventing false ballots from being cast, the most high-profile an attempt to challenge as many as 200,000 of the more than 600,000 new registrations submitted in the battleground state of Ohio.
That challenge was blocked by a Supreme Court ruling Friday.
Republicans said their fears were confirmed when investigations were launched last week in several states in the wake of revelations that the liberal-leaning community organization ACORN had submitted false voter registrations.
McCain said Wednesday the group is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
A day later, senior officials at the Justice Department told reporters that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating whether ACORN had systematically encouraged the creation of false registrations forms.
Bauer said the leak was a "brazen" violation of department policy not to discuss ongoing investigations, and accused Republicans of once again politicizing the Justice Department in an attempt to influence the election and "create an environment of fear and intimidation."
He said the matter should be turned over to a special prosecutor currently investigating allegations that US attorneys were fired by the Bush administration for failing to bring indictments of voter fraud and public corruption in the leadup to the 2006 election.
"What we're seeing is an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bauer said. "Nobody really expects thousands of Mickey Mouses or Tony Romos to show up at the poll and vote this fall."
ACORN, which has been a driving force in increasing voter registration among younger and low-income minorities, dismissed allegations of wrongdoing and said it was responsible for alerting election officials to the bulk of the suspect registrations.
ACORN said a standard internal review found that as many as 13,000 of the 1.3 million new voter registrations it collected could be false and blamed canvassers who were trying to get paid without bothering to sign up new voters.
To affect the election, those records would have to pass a screening process and people would have to succeed in voting with those false names, which is a serious crime and incredibly rare.
A 2007 study by the New York University School of law concluded that "it is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said even a small margin of voter fraud could change such a close election, particularly given that several states picked the president by a margin one percent or less in the past two elections.
"I don't think anybody at this time has any sense of how big this fraud has been," he told reporters on a conference call.
"It only takes a very little to undermine the public's credibility that these elections were honest, open and fair."
Davis also attacked Obama for failing to disclose his full relationship with the group - something McCain's running mate Sarah Palin highlighted on the campaign trail Friday - and said the scandal has cast a "cloud of suspicion" over the election.
"We think John McCain is going to win this election and we don't want a pall cast on it and I hope that the Obama people the day after the election understand we did everything we could to shine that the bright light of public scrutiny on all these issues," Davis added.
MIAMI – Republican John McCain told crowds in this battleground state Friday to "hold onto your wallet" because his Democratic presidential rival, Barack Obama, has talked of spreading the wealth around. McCain suggested voters could not rely on Obama's promise of tax cuts while returning once more to the story of Joe the Plumber, a regular part of McCain's speeches since the Arizona senator first mentioned the tax concerns of Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher in Wednesday's presidential debate.
Florida was McCain's first stop on a two-day tour through states, including North Carolina and Virginia, where he has surrendered his lead in polls during the past month despite their history of supporting Republican presidential candidates.
Last Sunday as Obama walked through Wurzelbacher's Holland, Ohio, neighborhood, Wurzelbacher asked him whether his plan to increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year would impede his ability to buy the plumbing company where he works. Obama replied that those making over $250,000 would be taxed more but that money would be returned to the middle-class through tax cuts. "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama said.
The McCain campaign seized on that remark.
"When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you'd better hold onto your wallet," McCain told a Miami rally crowd. "Sen. Obama claims that he want to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes for the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don't pay taxes. That's not a tax cut; that's welfare."
McCain, who bestowed the nickname "Joe the Plumber" on Wurzelbacher during the debate, claimed Friday that "the response from Sen. Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe."
In fact, Obama, his running mate Joe Biden and their campaign have barely mentioned Wurzelbacher. Obama and Biden both attacked McCain for portraying Wurzelbacher as representative of most blue-collar workers, asking how many plumbers make $250,000 a year.
Nonetheless, McCain elicited boos from a fired-up crowd when he said of Wurzelbacher, "People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn't ask Sen. Obama to come to his house. He wasn't recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Sen. Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks."
News organizations eager to learn more about Wurzelbacher did besiege his house Thursday and discovered and reported that he lacks a plumbing license and owes back taxes.
During an appearance Friday evening in the Space Coast community of Melbourne, McCain revealed that he had spoken to Wurzelbacher for the first time earlier in the day.
"I want to tell you his spirits are good and he's a tough guy. He's what small business people all over this country are about," McCain said to cheers. He encouraged the crowd, "Send Joe an e-mail and tell him you're with him."
Despite his criticism of the Democratic ticket, McCain himself has kept Wurzelbacher in the spotlight, mentioning him repeatedly in his appearances Thursday and then renewing the topic on Friday.
"Joe's the man!" McCain said Thursday during a rally in Philadelphia's suburbs.
Later, both McCain and Obama gave traditionally lighthearted speeches to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Fund Dinner in New York. McCain made light of questions about the plumber's income with a joke at his own expense.
"What they don't know is that Joe the Plumber recently signed a very lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to handle all the work on all seven of their houses," said the senator, who owns that many homes and investment properties with his wife, Cindy.
In Florida, McCain got a boost from his close friend Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee who now is a political independent. Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate on a major-party ticket, still has a strong following among Jews living in Florida and he came along to introduce McCain in Miami.
Later, in Melbourne, McCain reached out to the aerospace industry by pledging to spend $2 billion on aerospace projects during the period between retirement of the space shuttle and the launch of its replacment.
Noting the Chinese recently made their first space walk, he said: "We've got competition. We've got to stay ahead. We will be the first nation to Mars."
Recent surveys have shown Obama opening as much as a 5-point lead in Florida. The two are essentially tied in North Carolina, but Obama has opened a nearly double-digit lead in Virginia.
The state findings were echoed in an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Friday.
It showed people's regard for the Republican presidential nominee has deteriorated across the board since September, with McCain losing ground in how favorably he's seen and in a long list of personal qualities voters seek in White House contenders. Meanwhile, perceptions of Obama have improved or remained steady.
Retired Gen. Colin Powell, once considered a potential running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), now may endorse his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), according to Republican sources. But an air of mystery surrounds Powell's planned live appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," and no one is sure what he will say.
Powell’s unassailable national security credentials could sway voters who are vacillating about whether Obama is ready to be commander in chief, and his endorsement of the Illinois senator would make a national security emphasis by McCain in the election's closing days extremely difficult.
Powell, 71, a professional soldier for 35 years, has advised the last three Republican presidents.
The general’s camp is being coy about what he might or might not say on Sunday. But some McCain advisers suspect, without being sure, that Powell will endorse Obama.
“It’s going to make a lot of news, and certainly be personally embarrassing for McCain," a McCain official said. "It comes at a time when we need momentum, and it would create momentum against us.”
Powell, a four-star Army general, was national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, when George H.W. Bush was president; and President George W. Bush’s first secretary of State,
Powell has consulted with both Obama and McCain, and the general’s camp has indicated in the past that he would not endorse.
On “Meet the Press” in June 2007, Powell said: “I’ve met with Sen. Obama twice. I’ve been around this town a long time, and I know everybody who is running for office, and I make myself available to talk about foreign policy matters and military matters with whoever wishes to chat with me."
Asked by moderator Tim Russert if he would come back into government, Powell said: “I would not rule it out. I’m not at all interested in political life, if you mean elected political life. That is unchanged. But I always keep my, my eyes open and my ears open to requests for service.”
Asked about an endorsement, he said: “It’s too early.”
NBC’s ‘Andrea Mitchell broke the news of Powell’s surprise “Meet the Press” appearance on the “Today” show Friday.
“In what promises to be a dramatic moment Sunday, Colin Powell — a lion of the Republican establishment, whom McCain and Obama both have courted for months — will finally speak out on a variety of issues, appearing exclusively on ‘Meet the Press,’” Mitchell said. “Of course, years ago, he was talked about as the possible first … African-American nominee of a major party.”
Last week, Powell appeared as a character witness at Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-Alaska) corruption trial, telling jurors that Stevens is someone he trusts completely. "As we say in the infantry, this is a guy you take on a long patrol," Powell said.
Thu Oct 16, 2:09 PM ET
“Senator Obama didn't tell the whole truth about his relationship with Mr. Ayers last night,” McCain said in an interview on Fox News. “They served together on boards, together they made a decision to give $230,000 to ACORN, the group that is now being involved in what could be one the great voter frauds in American history.”
The Arizona senator also accused Obama of not fully explaining his association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
“He certainly didn't reveal all of his relationships with ACORN, which his campaign paid $832,000 in the primaries to a front group for ACORN,” McCain said. “And you know what it was described as? ‘Lighting and site preparation' Give me a break.”
“But we know this, that there are allegations of voter fraud by ACORN in every single battleground state. This is a widespread operation. Now we laugh when Mickey Mouse is registered to vote, but we don't laugh, we don't laugh, when there are voter rolls filled up with names that there is no authentication whatsoever. This could violate the most fundamental aspect of democracy and that is a free and fair election.
Pressed on his associations with Ayers and ACORN during the debate, the Illinois senator chided McCain for making the affiliations the “centerpiece” of his campaign.
Of Ayers, Obama said, “Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago, he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.”
“Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House. So that's Mr. Ayers.”
The Illinois Democrat also dismissed any alleged tie to charges of voter registration fraud conducted by ACORN.
“It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved,” Obama said. “The only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.”
By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer
Tue Oct 14, 6:04 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and John McCain will both pursue the image of a strong leader in troublesome economic times as they meet Wednesday night for their third and final presidential debate.
Their face-off comes as Obama widens his lead in typically Democratic states and campaigns with an air of optimism about his prospects, while McCain seeks a way to gain ground and finds himself defending traditionally Republican states with less than three weeks left in the race.
"We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change. ... As president I intend to act, quickly and decisively," McCain said Tuesday in battleground Pennsylvania. There, he unveiled new economic proposals and previewed a possible debate strategy: argue that he would be different from Bush and better than Obama.
One day earlier in swing state Ohio, Obama outlined his own economic plan and showed off his own pitch. He suggested that McCain was more of the same and that putting a Democrat in charge was the only way to fix the economy's woes: "It will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years."
The economic crisis has transformed the campaign over the past month. Obama has built leads nationally and in key states as the turmoil has returned the nation's focus to the unpopular Bush's policies. Now, the burden is on McCain to try to reverse his slide.
Wednesday's debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., is slated to focus entirely on the economy and domestic policy. The candidates will be seated at a table with moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS.
Both presidential contenders have used the previous debates to make and remake their main campaign points, frequently sidestepping direct questions such as how they would have to scale back their long lists of campaign promises in light of the economic crisis.
Advisers for each candidate say he will use the final debate to lay out his vision for the country and promote his economic policies while drawing differences with his opponent.
Character attacks — subtle or not — also could occur.
Obama has increasingly labeled McCain "erratic" and "lurching" during the economic crisis. The words suggest unsteadiness on the part of the 72-year-old four-term senator.
The Democrat's campaign released a pre-debate memo Tuesday that argued McCain was "ill-equipped" to lead during this crisis, saying his response "has careened, sometimes changing course within the span of a single day."
McCain has accused Obama of lying about his association with 1960s radical William Ayers, a founder of the violent anti-war group Weather Underground. Obama was 8 years old when the Weather Underground claimed responsibility for a series of bombings. Now a professor in Chicago, Ayers hosted a meet-the-candidate session at his home for Obama as he prepared to run for the state Senate. Later, the two worked with the same charity and social-service organizations in Chicago.
McCain has softened that attack on the campaign trail in recent days, though not in his TV and radio ads.
His campaign assailed Obama's on Tuesday for its "failure to explain how it is that Barack Obama carried on a decade-long friendship with a man who sought to topple the U.S. government through violence."
McCain has solidified and energized his base of Republican voters, but he has problems with his support among swing-voting independents. A recent Associated Press-GfK Poll showed them divided about evenly between the two candidates. That's a problem for McCain because Democrats decisively outnumber Republicans this year.
Compounding McCain's woes, new Quinnipiac University polls released Tuesday showed Obama leading by double digits in two states that Democrat John Kerry won four years ago and that McCain is trying to put in his column this year — Wisconsin and Minnesota — as well as in Michigan, which McCain abandoned earlier this month.
Also, McCain running mate Sarah Palin is being dispatched to campaign in usually Republican states such as Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia to shore up GOP support. However, McCain campaigned Tuesday in Pennsylvania and was to return there Thursday as well, a signal of the campaign's sustained effort to try to pick off that Kerry-won state offering a whopping 21 electoral votes.
To win, 270 are required.
McCain's strategy relies on keeping Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and Ohio in the GOP column along with 21 other Bush-won states that aren't seriously contested. That would give McCain 260 electoral votes. He would then have to win 10 more votes from a pool of contested states won by Bush (Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico) and Kerry (New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).
Polls show Obama leading or tied in all of those.
