BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania - Republican John McCain’s military history is famous, but the service of his sons is less well known. And until recently, that’s exactly how the presidential candidate and his wife, Cindy, wanted it.
 
But on Wednesday, Mrs. McCain made a rare reference to her sons when criticizing the Illinois senator for his 2007 vote against a war funding bill. McCain has two sons in the military, and one has served in Iraq.  “The day that Sen. Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body,” McCain told a crowded rally in Pennsylvania, an electoral battleground state.
 
“I would suggest that Sen. Obama change shoes with me for just one day and see what it means … to have a loved one serving in the armed forces and more importantly, serving in harm’s way,” she said. “I suggest he take a day and go watch our fine young men…and women deploy, get on those buses and leave with a smile.”
 
McCain also invoked vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s son, who recently deployed to Iraq.
 ”We have a lot in common, the McCain family and the Palin family,” she said. “We represent between us the Army, the Navy and the United States Marine Corps.”
 
Obama voted against the funding bill in 2007 but supported a version that included a timetable for withdrawal for U.S. troops from Iraq.
 
The son of Obama’s vice presidential running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, has just been sent to Iraq with the Army National Guard, and will be there for about a year. Obama has two young daughters. 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Up until now, the mud slinging in the presidential race has mostly been the Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama accusing the other of lying about each other’s record and views on health care, taxes and the Iraq war.
 
Now, with less than a month to go until voters go to the polls, the McCain campaign has sent out on the attack his vice presidential running-mate Sarah Palin where she is slinging some serious dirt, accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”

She was referring to William Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam War-era militant group the Weather Underground. Obama met him decades later in the 1990s when he first began his political career in Chicago and the two served on an education board together.

Two days later, she adjusted her language slightly in Florida, not repeating the line about “palling around with terrorists” but saying Obama was “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.” 

The Obama campaign showed it would match the mud-slinging fistful for fistful, immediately bringing up McCain’s role in the “Keating Five” scandal, noting he was one of the senators who met federal regulators on behalf of a California savings and loan institution that collapsed in 1989. 
 
Here’s a clip the Obama campaign released from a 13 minute documentary about McCain’s role in the scandal to be released later on Monday.  
 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

CHICAGO - Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, trying to step up his role of attack dog, on Monday labeled Republican John McCain as a “profoundly out of touch” politician using dishonorable tactics to try to win the White House.

In excerpts from a speech he is to give in Michigan, Biden, running mate to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, said both McCain’s policies and his campaign strategies mirror those of the unpopular U.S. President George W. Bush.

“We’ve seen this movie before, folks. But as everyone knows, the sequel is always worse than the original,” Biden will say in the speech he will give in St. Clair Shores, Mich.

“If you’re ready for four more years of George Bush, John McCain is your man. Just as George Herbert Walker Bush was nicknamed ‘Bush 41′ and his son is known as ‘Bush 43,’ John McCain could easily become known as ‘Bush 44,’” Biden plans to say.

Opinion polls show a dead-even race between Obama and McCain with less than two months to go before the Nov. 4 election.

Helped by his pick of Sarah Palin as his No. 2, McCain erased the lead that Obama held for most of the summer, leaving many Democrats nervous and impatient for Obama to begin hitting back at attacks they contend are straight out of the playbook of former Bush adviser Karl Rove.

In lambasting McCain, Biden is stepping into the traditional role for a vice presidential candidate of attack dog. He has been critical of McCain in previous speeches but Monday’s speech marked an escalation of the tone. Part of Biden’s difficulty in playing the attack-dog role effectively is that he is not getting nearly the media spotlight that Palin, a new face on the national political scene, is receiving.

Recalling the many years he has been a Senate colleague of McCain, an Arizona senator, Biden accused McCain of selling out his principles to win the election.

“The campaign a person runs says everything about the way they’ll govern. John McCain has decided to bet the house on the politics perfected by Karl Rove,” Biden says in the speech.

McCain campaign spokesman Ben Porritt dismissed Biden’s comments as those of a “long-time Washington insider, entrenched in the status quo.”

“Regardless of their rhetoric, Barack Obama and his running mate can’t distance themselves from their records which gives voters zero confidence that they can deliver change when we need it the most,” Porritt said.

The Obama campaign also released a new ad saying McCain was taking “the low road” in some of his campaign’s ads and attacks on the Democratic candidate, citing commentary in newspapers such as the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune that criticized the McCain ads.  

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Biden during a campaign stop in Ohio in late August.)