WASHINGTON - If mud is the currency of political campaigns, the U.S. presidential race is on sounder footing than Wall Street.
 
Just look at the latest crop of campaign ads.
 
The way they tell it, voters on Nov. 4 are either going to elect a president with crooked friends or one who wouldn’t mind seeing them sick and poor in retirement.
 
Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s new commercial portrays rival Barack Obama as being part of a corrupt Chicago political machine.
 
It revives questions about Obama’s links to political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who raised up to $250,000 for the Illinois senator’s previous political campaigns.
 
Rezko was convicted of fraud, attempted bribery and money laundering earlier this year. Obama has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Rezko but has acknowledged an error of judgment in a land deal with the businessman.
 
McCain’s ad tries to tar Obama with his fundraiser’s misdeeds, and with his connections with Chicago politicians who have been investigated for various issues.
 
“His money man Tony Rezko. Client. Patron. Convicted,” the ad announcer intones. His political godfather Emil Jones. Under ethical cloud. His governor Rod Blagojevich. A legacy of federal and state investigations.”
 
“With friends like that, Obama is not ready to lead,” the ad says.

The Illinois Democrat takes a few shots — and a few liberties — in two of his own new ads that try to raise voter fears about McCain.
 
One portrays the Arizona Republican as wanting to gamble away people’s Social Security in the stock market.
 
“A broken economy, failing banks, unstable markets, families struggling. To protect us in retirement, Social Security has never been more important,” the ad says.
 
It notes that McCain has favored privatizing Social Security by letting people invest some of their Social Security retirement savings in the stock market. And it quotes him saying he campaigned for Bush’s plan to do that.
 
“Cutting benefits in half. Risking Social Security on the stock market,” the ad says. “The Bush-McCain privatization plan. Can you really afford more of the same?”
 
Sounds worrisome, but FactCheck.org dismisses the benefit cutting as false. It says no one now getting benefits or close to retirement would have seen any reduction in benefits under the plan McCain supported. 
 
In another ad, Obama says deregulation of the financial industry led to the current U.S. economic crisis.
 
It accuses McCain of being a backer of that deregulation and says he now wants to do the same with health care.

“McCain just published an article praising Wall Street deregulation, said he’d reduce oversight of the health insurance industry too ‘just as we have done over the last decade in banking,’” the ad says.
 
“Increasing costs and threatening coverage. A prescription for disaster. John McCain. A risk we just can’t afford to take.”
 
FactCheck.org says the deregulation claim is taken out of context. In fact, he was only calling for deregulation to enable the sale and purchase of health insurance across state lines, FactCheck says. 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit:  Reuters/Tim Shaffer (McCain speaks in Media, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 22) ; Reuters/Chris Keane (Obama at rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sept. 21)

WASHINGTON - Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin sounds a bit wary about her upcoming debate with her really, really, really experienced Democratic rival.
 
“Senator (Joe) Biden has a tremendous amount of experience,” she told Fox News. “I think he was first elected when I was like in the second grade.”
 
If her running mate John McCain, 72, wasn’t hoping to be the oldest person to begin a first term as president, one might think Palin was suggesting Biden, 65, was old. 
 
“He’s been in there a long, long, long time,” Palin said. “So he’s got the experience. He probably has the sound bites. He has the rhetoric. He knows what’s expected of him. He is a great debater, also.”
 
“So yes, it’s going to be quite a task in front of me,” she said.
 
Palin also said she didn’t mean to insult Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in her nominating speech when she belittled his experience as a community organizer. 

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” she told the Republican convention.
 
“I certainly didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” Palin told Fox News. “Didn’t mean to offend any community organizers either.”
 
She said she did it because Obama had taken a shot at small town mayors.
 
The Alaska governor, little-known before being chosen as McCain’s running mate, said she respected former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton but disagreed with her on the issues.
 
Clinton has been campaigning on behalf of Obama since losing the Democratic nomination, but she has avoided direct confrontation with Palin.
 
Clinton planned to speak at a demonstration against the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, near the United Nations which convenes its annual General Assembly next week but she canceled the appearance on Wednesday after learning Palin would also address the crowd.
 
A Clinton adviser said the protest had not been billed as a partisan political event.
 
Organizers of the demonstration subsequently announced Thursday they had decided not to let any American political personalities appear.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

So what does Barack Obama do after a hard day of defending the common man during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
 
Throw a $28,500-a-head fundraising dinner, of course.
 
Followed by a $2,500-a-head reception featuring Barbra Streisand singing a song or two.

The Democratic presidential candidate spent the day Tuesday campaigning in Colorado, where he talked to supporters about the mortgage crisis that has reshaped Wall Street and caused many people to lose their homes.
 
Speaking a day after the stock market had its worst day since 2001, he assured a rally in the Denver suburb of Golden that he understood the impact the crisis was having from Wall Street to Main Street.
 
“Jobs have disappeared, and peoples’ life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet,” he said.
 
“These are the struggles that Americans are facing. This is the pain that has now trickled up.”
 
Then he jetted off to Los Angeles Tuesday evening for a pair of glitzy fundraisers that could be the biggest for Democrats during this election cycle.
 
Republican John McCain lost no time pointing out Obama was courting the stars instead of ordinary folk. 
 
“(He) talks about siding with the people, siding with the people — just before he flies off to Hollywood for a fundraiser with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends,” McCain told a rally in Vienna, Ohio, a critical battleground state. “Let me tell you my friends, there’s no place I’d rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio.”

Streisand, a Democratic activist and Oscar-winning actress and singer,  initially endorsed Hillary Clinton but has embraced Obama since he won the nomination.
 
The Illinois senator has put together a formidable fundraising machine that has attracted hundreds of thousands of small donors, pulling in $66 million in August alone. That compared with $47 million for McCain.
 
Obama’s fundraising skill prompted him to forego federal campaign financing, despite earlier pledges not to do so. That enables him to raise and spend more than he could if he accepted federal money. But it also means he has to spend more time off the campaign trail raising money.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (Obama speaks in Golden, Colorado)

In the annals of inventor-lawmakers, Republican presidential candidate John McCain may rank even higher than Al Gore.
 
Gore famously said in 1999 as he was preparing to launch his presidential bid that he helped create the Internet while he was a member of the Senate.
 
He was roundly ridiculed for the comment, which rumor and repetition quickly converted into an urban myth that Gore claimed to be the inventor of the Internet.

McCain evidently has been busy in the Senate too. Even though he doesn’t use computers or e-mail, the Arizona senator helped create the BlackBerry. So says one of his economic advisers, Douglas Holt-Eakin.
 
“You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” Holtz-Eakin told reporters while brandishing a BlackBerry wireless e-mail device during a briefing in Miami.
 
Holtz-Eakin’s remarks came as he was defending McCain’s knowledge of the economy while stock markets reeled from the financial crisis.
 
Early in the campaign, McCain said his economic understanding wasn’t all that great. He’s been trying to claw back that statement ever since.
 
Holtz-Eakin cited McCain’s work on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees telecommunications and the senator chaired for a time, as evidence of his economic experience. Then followed the BlackBerry proclamation.
 
The Obama campaign, aware of the ridicule Gore suffered over the Internet, was quick to try to tar McCain with the BlackBerry.
 
“If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. 
 
Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Robert LeSieur (McCain in New Hampshire Sept. 14)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is using a scathing new attack ad to challenge the fundamental perception that John McCain – former Navy aviator and prisoner of war — is honorable.
 
It was bound to happen. The McCain camp has been doing the same thing to Obama for weeks, trying to turn public perceptions about his strengths into weaknesses using attack ads and ridicule.
 
McCain went after Obama’s popularity and his strength as an orator. His campaign even tried to defuse the race issue by accusing Obama — who would be the first black U.S. president if elected — of racism.
 
So it was inevitable the Obama camp would eventually strike back — and it did after McCain was roundly criticized in the press for an ad that falsely accused the Illinois Democrat of favoring sex education for kindergarten children.
 
“What’s happened to John McCain? He’s running the sleaziest ads ever. Truly vile,” the narrator of the ad entitled “Honor” says as quotes pulled from newspaper columns scroll over an ever-shrinking photo of the Arizona senator.

“Dishonest smears that he repeats even after its been exposed as a lie. Truth be damned. Disgraceful, dishonorable campaign. After voting with Bush 90 percent of the time proposing the same disastrous economic policies, it seems that deception is all he has left,” it says.
 
McCain often speaks of duty, honor, country, sacrifice and has cultivated the image of being a man of honor.
 
The ad takes aim at that perception, asking if McCain is honorable, why is he running this kind of campaign.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Neal Hamberg (Obama speaks in New Hampshire Sept. 13)

LANCASTER, Pa. - The work of community organizers, who work  for low salaries to help people in impoverished communities,  is getting lots of attention this week as Republicans poke jabs at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s job experience.

The three years Obama spent as a community organizer “maybe … is the first problem on the resume,” said former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in his speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday.

Giuliani, who failed in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and now runs a lucrative consulting firm, said community organizing sounded as though Obama had “immersed himself in Chicago machine politics.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin also took a swipe in her speech,  saying her experience as a small-town mayor in Alaska was similar to being a community organizer, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Obama was a community organizer after college in Chicago. He worked with a church-based group trying to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods and communities hurt when steel plants closed, according to his official campaign website.

He then went to Harvard Law School, became a civil rights lawyer, taught law and ran for the Ilinois State Senate. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

On the campaign trail on Thursday, Obama told a crowd in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that the Republicans “really had fun talking about the work I did after college.”

“I don’t know if they understand what it means for a young person, at the age of 22 or 23, to pass up more lucrative options and work with people who are having a tough time and seeing that when people work together, we can do amazing things, rebuilding communities and setting up job training centers and setting up afterschool programs for kids.

“Maybe that’s not really interesting work for Rudy Giuliani, but for the people on the ground who are seeing a difference in their lives, that’s important stuff,” he said.

At another campaign stop in York, Pennsylvania, he said the remarks about community organizing showed Republicans were out of touch.

“Why would that kind of work be ridiculous?” he asked. “Do they think that the lives of those folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try and improve their lives, is somehow not relevant to the presidency?

“I think maybe that’s the problem. That’s part of why they’re out of touch, and they don’t get it because they haven’t spent much time working on behalf of those folks,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Matt Sullivan (Obama campaigning) 

FORT MYERS, Florida - Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, mocked by Republicans as a “gaffe machine,” took a swipe Wednesday at a remark by John McCain’s campaign manager that “this election is not about issues.”
 
“This election is not about issues?” Biden asked rhetorically, drawing hoots and hollers at a town-hall style meeting with several hundred people in Fort Myers, Florida. Noting Americans have difficulty paying for such basics as health insurance and gasoline for their cars, Biden said, “Where I come from, that’s an issue.”
 
Campaign manager Rick Davis, in an interview with The Washington Post, said, “This election is not about issues.” He said, “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” He predicted that the more voters get to know McCain and Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama, the more they will like the Republican ticket.
 
Biden bristled. “You have the greatest character in the world, but you are not going to give me a fighting chance that would keep my job. I love ya, but I don’t want you as president,” he said.
 
During 35 years in the Senate, the fast-talking, often long-winded Biden has earned a reputation for gaffes. Republicans count two since last week’s Democratic National Convention — when he referred to Obama as “Barack America” and put himself on the top of the ticket by saying he was “running for president.”
 
On Wednesday, Biden made another slip of the tongue. In promising to help Americans if elected, he said, “the Biden, excuse me, the Obama-Biden administration.” Amid laughter, he added, “Believe me, you all got it right: Obama-Biden.” 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young 

Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr has crashed the Republican convention.

Barr, a former Republican congressman now running for president on the Libertarian ticket, was spotted inside the Xcel Center on Wednesday morning, near the talk-radio jocks on “Radio Row.”

What was he doing here? How did he get in? What did he think of Sarah Palin?

Barr said it wasn’t a good time for questions.

“I have to visit the men’s room,” he told Reuters.

Some analysts believe Barr could serve as a spoiler candidate by pulling votes from Republican John McCain in states like Georgia.

But Barr is significant in other ways.

“He is the first mustached American running for president since Thomas E. Dewey in 1948,” the American Mustache Institute wrote in a press release. 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo: REUTERS/Molly Riley (A mustachioed Barr speaks in a Reuters interview, April 4 2008)

SCRANTON, Pennsylvania - Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden told his boyhood companions that Barack Obama would have been one of their friends, if he had been around when they were growing up.

“This guy gets it,” Biden, 65, said of his 47-year-old running mate, who could become the first black U.S. president.

Biden made the comments on a campaign visit to his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a blue collar city in a state central to his and Obama’s run for the White House. He described his old and predominately white neighborhood, known as Green Ridge, as a patriotic place where a person’s word was his bond and people stood up for what they believed in.

“I promise you. If Barack had been born here, he would have been our friend,” said Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware since 1973. “He’d cover your back.”

Under blue skies and a bright sun, Biden sat in the shade of a big tree in his old backyard with his mother, Jean, 90, and scores of old friends and neighbors and supporters.  He quoted his late father, Joseph, a former car salesman, as saying, “the measure of success is not whether you get knocked down. It is how quickly you get up.”

Biden and his family moved from Scranton to Wilmington, Delaware, in 1953. He is affectionately referred to as “Pennsylvania’s third senator” for repeatedly helping out the state during 35 years in the U.S. Senate.

Among those who greeted Biden in Scranton was Jimmy Kennedy, 68, a friend since grade school.   “He was a scrappy kid and when he got knocked down he jumped right back up,” recalled Kennedy, who is now a judge.

“He was little and scrawny and people would ask when we played football iin the alley, ‘Why would you pick him?’ I told ‘em,’ You’ll soon find out.’ He was the toughest kid out there.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Matt Sullivan

MONACA, Pennsylvania - Barack Obama distanced himself on Friday from his campaign’s initially critical statement about his rival John McCain’s choice of first-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.
 
McCain, a 72-year-old veteran Republican senator from Arizona, picked a political unknown and self-described “hockey mom” who will become the first woman Republican vice presidential candidate.
 
When the surprise decision was announced, Obama was on the tarmac at a Denver airport preparing to depart for a bus tour in the industrial Midwest with his running mate, Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate had just made history by becoming the first black to accept a major-party presidential nomination.
 
His spokesman, Bill Burton, issued a statement suggesting Palin was too inexperienced to be vice president. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” it  said.
 
The McCain campaign quickly shot back that it was “audacious” for aides to the 47-year-old first-term Illinois senator to accuse Palin of inexperience.
 
Later in the day, Obama told reporters that the campaign’s early statement was “hair-trigger” and did not reflect his sentiments.
 
“I haven’t met her before. She seems like a compelling person. Obviously, a terrific story, personal story,” he said while touring a biodiesel plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania.
 
Obama said the choice of Palin was “one more indicator of this country moving forward” and a hit against the glass ceiling that has limited women’s advancement.
 
In a phone call to Palin, Obama told her he thought she would be a terrific candidate and wished her luck “but not too much luck,” according to Robert Gibbs, his senior adviser.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress (McCain stands with his vice presidential running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in Dayton, Ohio, Aug. 29, 2008)