|
WASHINGTON: Both intent on redrafting the US political landscape,
Barack Obama and John McCain on Monday started the first full week
of their head-to-head battle for the November presidential election.
After Hillary Clinton’s exit from the primary
race and fulsome endorsement of Obama 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 percent
of the time with [President] George Bush last year, and 90 percent
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. 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, who officially
stands down in January.
The Illinois senator’s itinerary takes him far
from Democratic strongholds, giving an insight into his strategy to
become the nation’s first black president.
On Monday Obama launches a two-week, nationwide
economic tour starting in North Carolina, which has not voted for a
Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976.
The tour takes Obama Tuesday to Missouri, which
has not chosen a Democrat since voting for Bill Clinton in 1996,
having already visited Virginia last week (previous Democratic
victory: 1964).
Both candidates rolled out biographical
television spots to re-introduce themselves to voters after the
grueling 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 percent
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.
Clinton was not entirely out of the picture yet,
with surrogates for the former first lady 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 on Thursday.
-- AFP
|
