Here are eight articles from both the US and international media about the US Presidential race. Highlights of each article provided with a link to the full article.
McCain Campaign Is at Odds Over Negative Attacks’ Scope
By Monica Langley and Elizabeth Holmes in the Wall Street Journal.
Top McCain campaign officials are grappling with how far to go with negative attacks on Sen. Barack Obama in the final weeks of what is turning into a come-from-behind effort.
Sen. John McCain has allowed a series of increasingly harsh broadsides in new campaign ads and in speeches by his wife, Cindy, and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. But the Arizona Republican has rejected pleas from some advisers to launch attacks focusing on Sen. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Some McCain campaign officials are becoming concerned about the hostility that attacks against Sen. Obama are whipping up among Republican supporters. During an internal conference call Thursday, campaign officials discussed how the tenor of the crowds has turned on the media and on Sen. Obama.
Hispanics Turn Cold Shoulder to McCain
By Ben Smith writing for Politico.
Polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole’s dismal 1996 result than to Bush’s historic 40% four years ago.
McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.
And he’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.
As October puts four states with large Hispanic populations – Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico – at the center of the presidential contest, what appeared at first to be a possible strength for McCain has emerged as a profound weakness.
“I feel bad for McCain,” said Sam Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and a prominent supporter of George W. Bush in 2004, who is neutral this year. “We find ourselves between the proverbial rock and the hard place. We really like John McCain. We really don’t like the Republican Party.”
I am surprised by it but yes Hispanics will be voting in droves for Senator Obama. The holdouts are as usual the Cubans in Florida and New Jersey who will vote for McCain. I was wrong. I really thought the gap would be 3:2 for Obama but it looks like at least 3:1 or even 4:1.
McCain’s Absence Vexes Nevada Backers
By J. Patrick Coolican and David McGrath Schwartz in the Las Vegas Sun.
Conservative activists, operatives and officeholders are anxious about John McCain’s Nevada campaign, fearing the Arizona senator lacks the ground operation and commitment to win Nevada.
Concern grew last week after McCain canceled a Nevada visit. A new Reno Gazette-Journal poll showed McCain trailing by 7 percentage points, with Democratic challenger Sen. Barack Obama competing in traditional Republican strongholds here.
“People I talk to wonder where the campaign is,” said Chuck Muth, a conservative activist who regularly speaks to dozens of other conservatives — north and south — through his newsletter.
I almost sense that McCain sees the writing on the wall and is just going through the motions.
NRA Ad Uses Clinton’s Words Against Obama on Guns
From KSL-News in Salt Lake City.
The NRA’s Political Victory Fund planned a national newspaper ad Thursday reviving a Clinton mailing that accused Obama of waffling on gun issues. Clinton’s campaign sent the mailing when the New York senator was challenging Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. It accuses Obama of changing his statements on gun issues to try to fit the audience he was addressing.
“Hillary was right: You can’t trust Obama with your guns,” says the NRA political action committee’s ad, scheduled to run in USA Today. The PAC has spent at least $2.3 million on anti-Obama efforts, including more than $100,000 on the new USA Today ad.
The NRA ad includes a reproduction of Clinton’s mailing, which mentioned Obama’s comment at an April fundraiser in San Francisco that some small-town voters bitter about lost jobs “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Democrats Hold Big Cash Edge In Battle for Control of Congress
By Greg Hitt and T.W. Farham in the Wall Street Journal.
The Democratic Party is heading into the campaign homestretch with a decisive spending advantage in the fight for control of the U.S. Congress, as Republicans scramble to prevent a blowout loss.
The Democratic money edge extends across all congressional races, but is most pronounced in House contests. Through Wednesday, the party had spent $23.5 million, compared with $1.5 million spent by national Republicans. The money is being used on television and radio advertisements, as well as direct mailings, aimed at swaying undecided voters and moving supporters to the polls.
Hoover vs. Roosevelt?
By E.J. Dionne for Real Clear Politics.
Hope versus fear, new versus old: Barack Obama and John McCain have placed their bets. These are the terms on which the 2008 presidential campaign will be decided.
That’s why it’s unfair for political bystanders to attack Obama and McCain for offering few specifics as to how they’d fix an ailing economy. And it’s foolish to ask them to jettison their campaign promises in order to pay homage to the God of Balanced Budgets.
Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
Piles of prescriptions would be useless because this crisis is moving so fast. New ideas could become obsolete in a few days — or require substantial redrafting on the run, as happened with McCain’s sketchy mortgage purchase plan floated during Tuesday’s debate.
In this financial catastrophe, last week’s unthinkable idea quickly becomes this week’s imperative. The Bush administration is wisely contemplating following the lead of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in having government take ownership shares in many banks to get them more cash and allow them to lend again.
If Obama had suggested such a thing, he would have been condemned as a socialist and the administration might well have had to shelve a necessary idea. Better that the candidates acknowledge that they are powerless until after Nov. 4.
Bad News for McCain In Colorado Springs
By Ernest Lunning in the Colorado Independent.
A New York Times blogger discovers the news is not good for John McCain in Colorado Springs, where a lifelong Republican on the city council says she is abandoning her party’s nominee to vote for Barack Obama this year. Further endangering McCain’s prospects in Colorado’s largest Republican stronghold, the pastor who replaced former GOP heavyweight Ted Haggard leading one of the city’s largest mega-churches is staying on the sidelines, urging his flock to vote “for any political party.”
Seattle-based Timothy Egan visited Colorado Springs, dubbed “the Vatican of evangelical political power,” after the second presidential debate and comes to one conclusion: “My friends: it’s not good for Senator McCain.”
President Bush held John Kerry to 32 percent of the vote in Colorado Springs 2004 but Democrats are confident Obama will reap 40 percent this year, enough to keep McCain from winning the state’s hotly contested nine electoral votes. Disenchantment with the McCain campaign, along with a surge of newly registered voters, are responsible, Egan reports.
The Chameleon: Who is the Real Sarah Palin?
By Ian Cobain in the UK Guardian.
When the man working for Frommer’s, America’s best-selling travel guide, alighted on the small town of Wasilla in south-central Alaska, he concluded glumly that the place should be condemned as “the worst kind of suburban sprawl”. To the European eye it would barely be a town at all. Rather, it is a four-lane highway that clatters across the magnificent, mountain-fringed Matanuska-Susitna valley, dumping seven miles of strip-malls, petrol stations and supermarkets in its wake.
Wasilla is home to 9,780 people, hundreds of small businesses, a dozen evangelical Christian churches, and a handful of gun stores. The churches are places where many of the faithful see signs that judgment day cannot be far away and where the infallibility of the Bible is rarely, if ever, questioned. The gun stores are places where you can pick up the new Ruger 10/22 carbine, the one that comes in bright pink with a 10-round magazine – “perfect for your wife or daughter”.
Famously, Wasilla is also the home town and launch pad for Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate. Palin is a woman for whom many Republicans have high hopes, despite performances in early television interviews that were so wobbly they have become YouTube classics. She remains a politician who many in the party would like to believe could be a future president.