McCain struggles to gain ground on Obama in Ohio
By DOUGLAS BIRCH
Associated Press
October 31, 2008
Page 2 of 2
The Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, also was in Missouri on Thursday. She spoke in the Mississippi River city of Cape Girardeau, where she said Obama would be an "untested Commander in Chief." She described herself and McCain as outsiders who would bring reform and help get the economy back on track.
Obama's vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, appeared Thursday in an area of Missouri hit hard by layoffs at a local Chrysler automotive plant, and mocked Palin and McCain for calling themselves political mavericks.
"You cannot call yourself a maverick when all you've been for the last eight years is a sidekick," Biden said. "They are the Bush administration's sidekicks."
Obama on Thursday also sought to shackle McCain to the policies of President Bush, whose popularity has plummeted as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on and the U.S. economy has stumbled.
The candidate compared the White House to a car, and said McCain was waiting to take the wheel from Bush and continue to steer the country down a dead-end.
"After nine straight months of job losses, the largest drop in home values on record, wages lower than they've been in a decade, why would we keep driving down this dead-end street?" Obama said.
As evidence, Obama pointed to federal data released Thursday showing that the economy -- the world's largest, generating about one fifth of global gross domestic product -- shrank in the third quarter of the year.
U.S. consumers, meanwhile, cut back on their spending by the biggest amount in 28 years.
McCain, in Ohio, also seized on new data -- in this case reports of record profits by Exxon Mobil Corp. -- to point out that in the U.S. Senate Obama voted for new tax breaks for the oil industry.
"I voted against it," the Arizona Republican said. "When I'm president, we're not going to let that happen."
McCain was likely referring to Obama's 2005 vote on a Republican-crafted energy bill. Obama and other Democrats supported the bill after major tax breaks for alternative energy and conservation were added.
Both campaigns have invested heavily in turning out early voters, with Obama expected to reap the most votes.
According to Dr. Michael P. McDonald of George Mason University, 17.5 million Americans have already cast ballots under provisions for early voting, about-- percent of the 124 million cast in the 2004 elections.
But the campaign has generated such intense interest that some experts are still predicting long lines at the polls on election day.
Officials in North Carolina said roughly 30 percent of all registered voters had already cast ballots -- about 1.7 million in all. But the Board of Elections has ordered the state's 100 counties to keep longer voting hours.
Both Republicans and Democrats are voting early. But officials in Iowa, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada as well as North Carolina said more Democrats that Republicans had cast ballots, in some cases by lopsided margins.
The political attacks on Obama have intensified as the election has approached.
An automated phone call blitz by McCain's campaign in Illinois is trying to revive the issue of Obama's ties to a convicted felon, claiming the Democrat hasn't fully explained the relationship.
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