WILMINGTON, Del. - With a sick relative and a son headed off to war, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden has grounded his campaign for a few days. 

Biden canceled a visit to Washington, D.C., on Saturday night and a trip to Virginia on Sunday because of what a spokesman called “a serious illness” in the family of his wife, Jill.

 ”Hospice has advised the Bidens to remain close by, and we appreciate everyone’s respect for the family’s privacy,” the spokesman, David Wade, said in a statement.

Biden didn’t campaign on Friday, either. 

Instead, he spent the day after his big debate with Republican rival Sarah Palin in his home state of Delaware.

His only public appearance was at a departure ceremony in Dover for 112 members of the Army Delaware National Guard, including his son, Beau, who is being deployed to Iraq for about a year. 

In brief remarks, Biden bid the soldiers a safe farewell. He made no mention of his campaign. Aides said he spoke as a father and senator, not as a vice presidential nominee. 

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Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria (Biden hugs wife Jilll at the end of his debate with Palin)
            

ST. LOUIS - President George W. Bush gave Kenny Hulshof a ride on Air Force One to a fundraiser on Friday for the Republican congressman who just hours earlier had voted for a second time against the financial bailout package. 

 Bush attended the fundraiser that was expected to raise $1.5 million for Hulshof who is running for governor of Missouri and trailing in the polls against Democrat Jay Nixon. 

Bush and Hulshof emerged from Air Force One side-by-side and waved to onlookers at the airport. 

 Hulshof voted against the $700 billion bailout on Friday, when it passed the House and was quickly signed into law by Bush. On Monday his vote helped defeat the original bill. 

 ”The president supports his election for governor,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters traveling with Bush when asked whether the president was miffed at Hulshof for voting against the legislation. 

 Stanzel said that Bush was “very pleased” Congress had passed the bill.

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Photo credit:  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

WASHINGTON - Republican White House hopeful John McCain, fresh from his first debate with Democratic rival Barack Obama in Mississippi, expressed regret on Saturday that his performance didn’t win over all the pundits in the press.
 
“I was a little disappointed the media called it a tie but I think that means, when they call it a tie, that means we win,” McCain said during a telephone call that was caught by cameras filming him at his campaign headquarters.
 
Both camps claimed victory after the 90-minute debate on Friday.
 
Meanwhile, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, sought to lower expectations for the next debate in Tennessee on Oct. 7. It will be conducted in a town-hall style with questions from an audience.
 
“We will be a decided underdog in that encounter, and John McCain is the undisputed town hall champion,” Plouffe told reporters on a conference call, noting that McCain — who is fond of the format — had challenged Obama to do joint town hall meetings throughout the summer.
 
“He clearly feels, even more than the foreign policy debate, this is his home turf. So if we can just escape relatively unscathed against the undisputed town hall champion in Tennessee, we’ll be thrilled.”
 
Obama has held regular town halls of his own throughout the 2008 campaign and does not appear to struggle with the format.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain talks on the phone at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on Sept. 27)
 

WASHINGTON - John McCain should have seen this one coming.
 
The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign and dramatically announced he was going to Washington to help hammer out a $700 billion bailout to save the U.S. economy.
 
Then he called to cancel with David Letterman. At the last minute. Leaving the wickedly funny late night comic with blank airtime to fill. Probably not the smartest move.
 
“Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president, was supposed to be on the program tonight,” Letterman said in an opening volley. “But had to cancel the show because he’s suspending his campaign because the economy is exploding.”
 
“You know who John McCain is,” he added to laughter from his live audience. “He’s the running mate of Sarah Palin, you’re aware of that?”
 
And that was just the start. Letterman wasn’t about to let it go. After heaping praise on McCain as an American hero, it was right back to the cancellation.
 
“When you call up and you call up at the last minute and you cancel a show, ladies and gentlemen, that’s starting to smell,” Letterman said. “This, this is not the John McCain I know, by God. It makes me believe something’s gone haywire with the campaign.”
 
“This just doesn’t smell right because this is not the way a tested hero behaves. Somebody’s putting something in his Metamucil,” he said.

A presidential candidate doesn’t just suspend the campaign, Letterman insisted.

“You go back to Washington. You handle what you need to handle. Don’t suspend your campaign. Let your campaign go on, shouldered by your vice presidential nominee, that’s what you do. You don’t quit,” Letterman said, pausing to let his audience mull over the idea of McCain letting the little-experienced Alaska governor take over the campaign.
 
“Or is that really a good thing to do?” Letterman asked.
 
The jibes kept coming. McCain’s age — at 72 he’ll be the oldest president to start a first term in office — and Palin’s inexperience.
 
He reacted with mock astonishment when he discovered McCain had not raced back to Washington but was instead being interviewed for the CBS evening newscast with Katie Couric. Letterman watched a live TV feed from the studio as McCain’s face was patted with makeup.
 
“Doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport, does he?”
 
“Hey John, I got a question. You need a ride to the airport?”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Molly Riley (McCain at U.S. Capitol on Thursday after returning to Washington for talks on U.S. financial crisis)

Immigration has been absent from the presidential campaign for months, but it came to the front again this week in a controversial television spot for Barack Obama.

The Democratic presidential candidate sought to cast Republican rival John McCain as an anti-Hispanic hard-liner and link him to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

The Spanish language TV ad — dubbed “Dos Caras,” or “Two Faces” — aired on Wednesday. It courted Hispanic voters who make up 9 percent of the electorate and who could help swing the outcome in battleground states in the U.S. southwest as well as in Florida on Nov. 4. 

The 30-second spot begins with a voice-over attacking the Republicans: “They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance … they made us feel marginalized in the country that we love so much.” The screen then shows two quotes from widely syndicated radio host Limbaugh, one reads “stupid and unskilled Mexicans,” the other, “You shut your mouth or you get out!”

The paid spot then says: “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote … and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush, which puts special interests ahead of working families.” It closes with the line “more of the same Republican lies.”

The advertisement is a stretch. McCain was the co-author of a bi-partisan bill that sought a path to citizenship for millions of mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants living in the United States. It was backed by President George W. Bush, but was ultimately killed by Senate Republicans last year.

His support for the measure brought McCain the ire of many immigration hard-liners in his own party, and met with scorn from cigar-chomping Limbaugh, who was outspoken in his opposition to the veteran Arizona senator during the primary election process.The McCain campaign shot back on Thursday with a rebuttal of the television spot. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, calling the immigration ad “offensive and dishonest.”

“Instead of making false ads with baseless attacks, Barack Obama should be apologizing to the Latino community,” he said.

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Photo Credit: Reuters/David Allio (Obama speaks in Las Vegas Sept. 17)

Sarah Palin has energized the Republican base since John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate, but one prominent Republican is not impressed.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican, is questioning whether Palin has enough foreign-policy experience to serve as the country’s second-in-command. “She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

“I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,” he added. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

A conservative Vietnam War veteran and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, Hagel has cultivated a reputation as somebody unafraid to buck his party.

Hagel traveled with Democratic candidate Barack Obama to Afghanistan in July and was mentioned as a possible Obama running mate. He had kind words for Obama’s eventual pick, Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden.

“An Obama-Biden ticket is a very impressive and strong team,” Hagel said in August.

photo: REUTERS/Ali Jarekji (Obama and Hagel visit Amman, Jordan in July 2008)

MIAMI - The polls may show him advancing past Democrat Barack Obama, but Republican John McCain is still holding on to one of his favorite titles: underdog.

The Arizona senator told a Republican fundraising event that raised some $5.1 million on Monday that he and running mate Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, were still coming from behind in the race toward the Nov. 4 presidential election.

“We’ve got a strong headwind and we’ve got a lot to do,” he said to a group of donors. “No matter what you see in the polls recently, Governor Palin and I are the underdogs. We’re the underdogs. That’s where we like to be.”

McCain seems to perform the best when he’s not in the lead.

The 72-year-old former fighter pilot turned his campaign around from near death more than a year ago and formally accepted his party’s nomination earlier this month.

McCain is not permitted to raise money directly for his campaign since accepting public financing, but he still participates in party fundraisers. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Robert LeSieur (McCain speaks in New Hampshire Sunday)

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JACKSONVILLE, Florida - Take it from an expert. Karl Rove, known as the architect of President George W. Bush’s electoral victories, believes White House candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have gone too far in their attacks on each other.

Rove, speaking on the television program Fox News Sunday, said an ad by the Democratic presidential nominee and Illinois senator criticizing McCain for not being e-mail savvy was unfair.

“His war injuries keep him from being able to use a keyboard. He can’t type. You know, it’s like saying he can’t do jumping jacks,” Rove said of the Arizona senator and former U.S. prisoner of war in Vietnam.

But pressed by the program’s host to find fault on both sides, Rove said the Republican presidential nominee was equally guilty.

“McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test,” Rove said.

The Obama campaign seized on the comments, which it felt validated growing criticism that McCain’s operation had turned increasingly negative.

“In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove — the man who held the previous record — said McCain’s ads have gone too far,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.

Rove said both campaigns were making a mistake by pushing the envelope with their assaults.

“They don’t need to attack each other in this way,” he said. “They have legitimate points to make about each other.”

Words to live by as the 2008 campaign enters the home stretch?

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Photo credit: Fred Prouser/Reuters (Karl Rove at a panel discussion in Beverly Hills, California on July 14, 2008)

ST. PAUL - Faith-based community organizers have a message for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin: they have “actual responsibilities” thank you very much.

In a pointed barb aimed at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket said her experiences as a small town mayor in Alaska were far more taxing than that of a community organizer.

Obama was a community organizer in Chicago two decades ago.

“A small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” the Alaska governor told the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night in a rousing speech peppered with jabs at Obama.

“Contrary to Palin’s disparaging remarks, organizers have major responsibilities for creating policy changes. Feeding the hungry and housing the homeless are clearly responsibilities of people of faith. We do that by providing food and shelter and more importantly, by organizing to address the causes of injustice and inequity which lead to hunger and homelessness,” said Kim Bobo, Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a congregation-based community organization in Chicago.

Bobo was quoted in a statement issued by several faith-based community organizations that bristled at the remarks by Palin, who has revved up other people of faith — the conservative Christians who comprise the Republican Party’s key base.  

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Rick Wilking, Sept. 3, 2008, USA)

ST. PAUL - Barack Obama wants the country to know that he’s a regular, beer-drinking guy. But don’t count on him to throw the first punch in a bar brawl.

During an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday, the Democratic presidential nominee bristled when his interviewer implied that he had recently sipped a beer to gain favor with blue-collar voters. CBS’s Steve Kroft added, “I know you don’t particularly like…”

Obama cut off Kroft, saying, “Steve, I had a beer last night. I mean, where do these stories come from man?”

This wasn’t the first time in his presidential campaign that the Harvard-educated Obama has had to fend off suggestions that he might be too erudite for Joe Six Pack.

It’s an impression he’ll want to shake if he hopes to win enough votes in important blue-collar states like Pennsylvania and Ohio this fall.

In support of that effort, Obama went bowling during one campaign appearance and at the beginning of a foreign tour in July he grabbed a basketball and sunk a now-famous “three-pointer.”

Even so, Kroft was compelled to ask Obama whether he lacked a “killer instinct” and if being confrontational was just not in his DNA — something voters might be weighing with so many bad guys lurking out there in the world.

“The fact that I don’t go out of my way to call people names, or try to take cheap shots, and that I try not to throw the first punch,” Obama said, “sometimes leads people to underestimate what I’ve got.” 

The 47-year-old senator from Illinois then issued a warning: Not only can he take a punch, occasionally he throws one.

Otherwise, “I wouldn’t be sittin’ here” as the first black major party presidential nominee, Obama said.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jason Reed.  Sen. Barack Obama drinks a beer at the Raleigh Times Bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, May 6, 2008

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