Barack Obama and John McCain on Monday started the first full week of a five-month election campaign, intent on redrafting the United States political landscape to capture the White House in November.
After Hillary Clinton’s exit from the primary race and fulsome endorsement of Obama on Saturday, supporters of the Democrat and his Republican rival hammered two of the defining themes for the presidential election: the economy and Iraq.
“The fact is that John McCain voted 95% of the time with [President] George Bush last year, and 90% of the time with George Bush over the entire presidency,” said John Kerry, the Democrats’ defeated nominee in 2004.
“That’s not a change. That’s not reform. That’s not a difference,” the Massachusetts senator told ABC News.
McCain backers cast Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal whose first instinct was to thrust big government into every corner of US society. And his inspirational oratory had no substantive underpinnings, they said.
“When it comes to Senator Obama, it’s all talk,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said.
“[He] never did anything the left didn’t want to hear, whether Iraq policy or anything else, and John has been his own man for a long time,” he said, touting the Arizona senator’s maverick appeal to independent voters.
But Obama (46) is not ceding the centrist electorate that could well decide who succeeds Bush next January.
The Illinois senator’s coming itinerary is to take him far from Democratic strongholds, giving an insight into his strategy for making history as the nation’s first African-American president.
On Monday Obama launched a two-week, nationwide economic tour starting in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976.
The tour was to take Obama on Tuesday to Missouri, which has not chosen a Democrat since voting for former president Bill Clinton in 1996, having already visited Virginia last week (previous Democratic victory: 1964).
Hurricane-force winds
Both candidates were rolling out biographical television spots to re-introduce themselves to voters after the gruelling primary season.
Obama’s story is of a mixed-race trailblazer who, he says, personifies hope and the American dream. McCain (71) is the grizzled veteran and war hero who survived five years of torture during captivity in Vietnam.
Opinion polls indicate that more than 80% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction — a signal of a problem for the party in power. “The atmospherics for the Republicans haven’t been this bad since 1974,” said former McCain adviser John Weaver.
“We have a president who is at Richard Nixon numbers, we’re entering into a recession, we are approaching $5 a gallon gasoline and we’re in the sixth year of an unpopular war,” Weaver added. “So McCain is sailing into hurricane-force winds.”
The former first lady was not entirely out of the picture yet, with Clinton surrogates flagging up her 18-million primary votes to press her qualification to be vice-president in an Obama administration.
“I’ve looked at every other possible candidate. No one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings,” said California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who hosted a fence-mending meeting between the two Democrats late on Thursday.
Clinton campaign spokesperson Howard Wolfson reaffirmed that the New York senator was not agitating for the vice-presidency under Obama.
“Senator Clinton said she will do whatever she is asked to do to elect Barack Obama. She’s not seeking the job and it is Senator Obama’s decision, solely his decision,” he told CNN.
There was praise, meanwhile, for Clinton’s elegiac concession speech, which contrasted with her defiance on Tuesday night when Obama clinched enough delegates to become the Democrats’ new champion.
“She knocked it out of the park with her speech,” Virginia’s Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, told Fox News on Sunday.
“And the match-up between Senator McCain and Senator Obama couldn’t be more clear,” he said, adamant that Democratic wounds would heal in time for the November 4 election. — AFP