Victory for Obama
Before a vast crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, Barack Obama delivered a powerful victory speech after winning a remarkable election victory. Here it is in two parts:
Campaign Trail 2008 »
-
-
Couric posts final Obama interview
CBS news anchor Katie Couric has just posted her final interview with Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama on YouTube. It has some good moments.
-
Rev Wright Returns
A few months ago, John McCain rebuked North Carolina Republicans for using controversial statements by Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright in an attack ad against the Democrat. Some conservatives believe McCain’s high-mindedness deprived his campaign of a useful weapon against Obama, who has renounced Wright after a relationship lasting 20 years.
Now, Pennsylvania’s Republican Party has revived Wright as an election issue in this ad, which is airing in the state in the closing hours of the campaign:
-
Obama’s Big TV Show
Barack Obama’s 30-minute infomercial, broadcast in primetime on most of the major networks on Wednesday, was flawlessly produced, featuring the stories of middle class Americans and testimonials from prominent Democrats and Republicans. The tone was entirely positive, with no mention of John McCain, deftly weaving Obama’s personal narrative into the stories of contemporary American life and the struggles of hardworking voters. Here it is in four parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
-
Even-handed Reporting in Florida
Florida TV interviewer Barbara West is being celebrated as a conservative martyr following an interview with Democratic running mate Joe Biden. The Obama campaign has threaten to boycott West’s TV station because of the tone of the interview, during which she quoted Karl Marx and asked Biden to explain exactly how Barack Obama is not a Marxist.
West told Bill O’Reilly that she had subjected John McCain to an equally tough interview, a puzzling claim when you hear the questions she asked him:
-
Closing Arguments
As the campaign enters its final week, the candidates are preparing to make their closing arguments. Barack Obama has bought 30 minutes of prime time on all the major networks on Wednesday and in Canton, Ohio on Monday, he unveils a new speech.
“In his speech, Senator Obama will tell voters that after twenty-one months and three debates, Senator McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” according to his campaign.
“Obama will ask Americans to help him change this country, and say that in just one week, they can choose an economy that rewards work and creates new jobs and fuels prosperity from the bottom-up, they can choose to invest in health care for our families and education for our kids and renewable energy for our future, and they can choose hope over fear, unity over division and the promise of change over the power of the status quo.”
John McCain and Sarah Palin will spend much of this week in Pennsylvania, a state where Obama enjoys a double-digit lead but which the Republican thinks he can flip. Winning Pennsylvania would allow McCain to survive the loss of states such as Colorado or Virginia, which President George Bush won in 2004, as long as the Republican holds Ohio and Florida.
In Denver on Sunday, Obama drew a crowd of more than 100,000, according to police estimates, just a week after a similarly mammoth audience turned out to hear him in St Louis.
-
Candidates get Tearful over Birthdays and Death
As campaign events become more tightly scripted in the final days of the presidential race, there are fewer opportunities to view the candidates unplugged. Last week’s Al Smith dinner in New York gave John McCain and Barack Obama a chance to show off their sense of humour. On Wednesday night, CBS news anchor Katie Couric probed their sentimental side, asking each candidate when he last cried – and why:
-
Rats, Ships and Neocons
Colin Powell’s declaration of support for Barack Obama prompted some commentators to note the irony of a candidate who owes his party’s nomination in great measure to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq receiving his most important endorsement from the man who made the fraudulent case for war to the United Nations Security Council.
If Powell was a reluctant supporter of the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq, the same can’t be said for Obama’s latest groupie from the right – Ken Adelman, a former sidekick of Donald Rumsfeld and one of the noisiest neo-conservative voices in support of the war.
Along with many of the war’s early cheerleaders, Adelman jumped ship when things started to go wrong, telling Vanity Fair last year:
“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
Adelman sang a different tune in April 2003, crowing in the Washington Post that analysts who warned that thousands of US troops could be killed in a war in Iraq had been shown to be wrong.
“Now is not an occasion for gloating,” he gloated.
“But now is an occasion for pride, and for thanks to our fighting men and women and those leading them. My confidence 14 months ago sprang from having worked for Don Rumsfeld three times – knowing he would fashion a most creative and detailed war plan – and from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz well for many years.”
Now Adelman is clambering aboard the Obama caravan, telling George Packer in the New Yorker that the Democrat has the right temperament to be president.
“When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird,” Adelman wrote in an email to Packer.
”Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.”
Adelman identified McCain’s pick of Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate as the trigger for his decision to back a candidate who opposes everything the neo-conservative movement stood for:
“That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office – I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign – Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.”
-
McCain on the possibility of losing
It’s been a tough weekend for John McCain and a sensational one for Barack Obama, who drew 100,000 people to a rally in St Louis on Saturday and revealed on Sunday that his campaign raised a record-breaking $150 million in September. Then came Colin Powell’s endorsement, which was striking as much for his blistering criticism of the Republican campaign as for the general’s praise for the Democrat:
Powell’s intervention will have been painful for McCain but Obama’s financial haul may have a bigger impact on the race. McCain accepted public financing for the general election, a decision that limited what he could spend between the end of the Republican convention and Election Day to just $84 million. The Republican National Committee has been raising money but it can’t compensate for Obama’s huge financial edge.
In all the battleground states, Obama’s television ads outnumber McCain’s by three or four to one. The Democrat has more offices, more staff and a more thorough and sophisticated organisation. Even after he buys up every remaining advertising slot in the swing states, Obama will have plenty left over to fund a first-class voter turnout operation on 4 November. His team is planning a massive effort in the final four days of the campaign in an effort to counteract the impact of the Republicans’ 72-hour campaign that has proved so successful in recent presidential elections.
At a McCain rally in Northern Virginia on Saturday, many of the supporters I met appeared to be in denial about the state of the race. Many claimed that the polls were either rigged or flawed and most blamed the media for boosting Obama. The crowd booed whenever McCain mentioned the media and one man charged up to the cameras to berate reporters for not applauding the candidate’s remarks.
“That man nearly gave his life for you,” he roared.
“All he’s looking for is a fair shake.”
In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, McCain sounded wistful as he spoke about the possibility of losing the election:
-
Candidates turn comics at Al Smith dinner
John McCain and barrack Obama took an evening off the campaign trail on Thursday to deliver comedy turns at the annual Al Smith dinner in New York. The charity event for needy children is run by the Catholic archdiocese in memory of the four-term governor of New York and the first Catholic to run for the White House on behalf of a major party.
McCain’s comic tour de force was a reminder of what a refreshing politician the Republican can be, full of self-deprecation and jibes at his colleagues that went right up to the line:
Obama seemed a little less comfortable with the after dinner format:
Search Campaign Trail 2008
ADVERTISEMENT
