BOWLING GREEN, Kentucky - Katelyn Jenkins got a surprise visit from Sen. Hillary Clinton on one of the biggest days of her life so far. But odds are, she didn’t even notice.

The eight-week-old girl was getting baptised on Sunday morning at the State Street United Methodist Church, where the Democratic presidential contender paused in her campaigning to attend services.

At the sight of the former first lady, the baby’s father said: “I was pleasantly surprised and amazed.”

As for the red-haired baby in her father’s arms, she slept a bit, looked around a bit and fussed a bit.

“She just knew there was a big crowd, and everyone was looking at her,” said the baby’s father, adding that he was ”possibly” a Clinton supporter. The candidate briefly chatted with the baby’s parents after the service ended.

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Photo credit:  Reuters/Jason Reed (Clinton speaks at her West Virginia Presidential Primary night rally in Charleston, West Virginia on May 13, 2008)

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - We’ve seen him play basketball, he has been teased mercilessly about his dismal bowling skills and he even pretended to take part in a 400-meter hurdles race at a track meet last week. But pool?

Barack Obama loves it. And he decided to spend part of a 6-hour campaign stop in West Virginia — just one day before the primary election there — playing pool.

“The sign of a misspent youth,” Obama joked as he walked around and eyed the table in the smoky Schultzie’s Billiards in South Charleston.

“Obviously I wasn’t doing wholesome things like bowling,” Obama added to laughter, referring to a horrible showing in the bowling alley during a stop in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.

The days of his youth came back quickly in the game against against Paul Scott, a local army veteran of the Iraq war. From the opening break, Obama sank several good shots — drawing some shouts of ‘whoa’ from the steadily growing crowd.

“Oh, it worked,” he said after he made one particularly tricky shot that sunk a ball into the opposite corner pocket. He also hammed it up for the crowd of photographers: contorting himself as he played with the idea of a behind-the-back shot.

The men played a gentleman’s game of pool, continuing on even though Obama sank the 8-ball early on. ”That’s what you’re supposed to do with a senator,” he said to his opponent as they kept playing.

After Scott sank his final ball with one of Obama’s remaining, the presidential candidate shook his hand and patted him on the back.

“I didn’t embarrass myself,” Obama said, then went on to the business of campaigning during his final minutes in the state.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama plays basketball during a campaign stop in Indiana on May 4) 

CHICAGO - As Barack Obama celebrated his compelling win in North Carolina and the unexpected closeness of the Indiana race on Tuesday night, his senior strategist said one of the campaign’s top tasks now is to court influential Democratic Party figures.
 
The Democratic senator from Illinois was seen as showing resilience after a bumpy ride in which he has struggled with questions about his former pastor’s fiery sermons and efforts by Clinton to paint him as an “out of touch” elitist.
 
Analysts said his rival Hillary Clinton, who won only narrowly in Indiana where she had been favored to do well, was likely to face increased pressure to exit the race because her showing did little to advance her argument that she would be more electable than Obama in a matchup against Republican Sen. John McCain.
 
Asked by reporters whether there would be a slew of new endorsements from the party stalwarts and officials known as the “superdelegates,” Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, was careful not to reveal too much.
 
“We’re going to be reaching out to them,” Axelrod told reporters as Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, flew back home to Chicago from his evening rally in North Carolina.
 
The Obama strategist said the message in these conversations would be a simple one: “Read the newspapers.”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Chris Keane (Obama waves to supporters at his North Carolina and Indiana primary election night rally in Raleigh.)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Wednesday he’s likely to make another major speech at the Republican National Convention later this year, as he did in 2004, and that he’s going to join his buddy John McCain on the campaign trail later this year.

The governor spoke of his plans during a lunch session for participants at the Milken Institute Global Conference on the economy.

Schwarzenegger announced on Jan. 31 that he is supporting McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The governor noted that his wife, Maria Shriver,  is a lifelong Democrat who supports Barack Obama. 

Schwarzenegger told the conference that he likes the environmental stands of each of the three presidential candidates: McCain, Obama and Democrat Hillary Clinton.  But said he sided with McCain because he knows him best and has a long working relationship with the Arizona senator.

On Tuesday night, the Milken audience was asked, by a show of applause, which of the three candidates they supported. It was a close call between McCain and Obama who the audience liked the most. Only a handful put their hands together for Clinton, who won the California primary over Obama handily earlier this year.

Because he was born outside the United States, the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger is not eligible to run for president. If he were, perhaps he would not have uttered the line on Wednesday that “Nobody is dying to go to Iowa,” the state that holds the first contest in the presidential nominating process and one where candidates are expected to spend alot of time wooing voters. Schwarzenegger said that when he was extoling the virtues of California.

Reporting by Bernie Woodall

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Photo credit: Reuters/Phil McCarten (Schwarzenegger participates in a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif.)

WASHINGTON - Former President Bill Clinton has leaped into the debate over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s exaggerations about her 1996 trip to Bosnia — and got his facts wrong.

Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. first lady, has been accused of playing loose with the facts ever since her dramatic description of arriving in Bosnia under sniper fire was contradicted by the actual videotape of her visit.

The controversy had seemed to run its course — until Thursday, when Bill Clinton got into the act while campaigning for his wife in Indiana.

“There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated, and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995,” Clinton said, according to MSNBC.

The former president accused the news media of hyping the story.

“You would’ve thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them when they’re 60 they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11:00 at night, too,” he said.

In fact the trip was in 1996, not 1995 as Clinton said, and Hillary Clinton did not speak about Bosnia at 11 p.m., but repeated the exaggeration several times during day-time campaign events.

Neither did Clinton immediately apologize for the remark. Instead, she has simply said she misspoke.

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PHILADELPHIA - Visiting Philadelphia, presidential contender Hillary Clinton couldn’t resist evoking the image of the city’s fictional boxing hero Rocky Balboa , who famously struggled to go the distance in his first big bout.

“When it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up,” the Democratic New York senator said while she campaigned on Tuesday in the city where the popular movie, starring Sylvester Stallone as the tenacious fighter, was set.

In the original 1976 “Rocky,” which spawned several sequels, the underdog boxer trained by running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Clinton, facing calls for her to drop out of the race, in which she trails Sen. Barack Obama in the quest for Democratic presidential delegates, brought up the boxer’s determination in a speech to members of the AFL-CIO union.

“Sen. Obama says he’s getting tired of the campaign. His supporters say they want it to end,” she said. “Well, could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten half way up those art museum stairs and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s about far enough?’

“That’s not the way it works,” she said.

Organizers of her campaign events in Pennsylvania also got into the act, playing the theme song from “Rocky” and also the song “Eye of the Tiger,” from “Rocky III.”

Locals say it’s not uncommon for visiting politicians to Philadelphia to channel “Rocky” themes and for campaign handlers to take advantage of the films’ rousing music.

Clinton skipped over one famous “Rocky” moment. Unlike some visitors to Philadelphia who like to re-enact one of the movie’s most famous scenes, the former first lady did not run up the art museum’s steps with her arms raised and fists clenched in victory.

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Photo: Reuters/Tim Shaffer