EAST LANSING - With a little over a month to go until the Nov. 4 U.S. presidential election, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has no time for fainters. At an outdoor rally on Wednesday at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, the Democrat was all business.

Interrupted during his speech by a signal from someone in the crowd that a person may have fainted, Obama pointed medics to the area and had this advice for their potential patient — “Next time, if you come to a 20,000-person rally, remember to eat something before you get here.”

Back in January on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, another Obama supporter fainted as the U.S. senator from Illinois spoke at Dartmouth College. Back then Obama waited a full 15 minutes for medics to arrive and treat the patient before continuing with his speech. 

(Reporting by Mark Egan)

PICTURE: REUTERS/Jason Reed (Obama waves on stage at the end of his campaign rally at Michigan State University in East Lansing October 2, 2008)

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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ARLINGTON, Va. - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama likes his chances in the White House battle with Republican John McCain, telling a fundraising reception the odds of his winning are “very good.”
    
“Let’s face it, there weren’t too many people who thought we were going to pull this off,” Obama told a fundraiser attended by about 40 people on Monday in Arlington, Virginia, in the suburbs of Washington.
    
“We are now in a position where the odds of us winning are very good. But it is still going to be difficult.”
    
Obama said he was pleased with his trip to Europe and the Middle East — “we executed very well” — but did not expect it to give him a big bump in polls.
    
He said people were still evaluating his candidacy because he was a new face in national politics.
    
“I don’t look like any presidential candidate America has ever seen,” said Obama, the son of a black African father and white mother from Kansas who spent part of his youth in Indonesia.
    
“It’s not just a function of race, it’s background, experience, resume — this is new for them, and new for us as a country,” he said. He expects a close race to the end.
    
“We’re not going to see some huge gap develop, some huge separation develop between now and Nov. 4,” he said. “This is going to be a close election for a long time because I’m new on the national scene. 

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BERLIN - Barack Obama may be itching to tell the world ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ in the same city that fell in love with John F. Kennedy for his famous 1963 address to frightened West Berliners in freedom’s most famous outpost.
 
But Obama’s possible trip to the German capital later this month has provoked a German domestic free-for-all — drawing page one headlines and putting new strains on the governing coalition.
 
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s No. 1 conservative, sent her spokesman out on Wednesday to say she’s against any “electioneering” in Berlin, while Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, leaders from the center-left Social Democrats, said the exact opposite — that Obama would be warmly welcomed to speak in the German capital.
 
From the protocol perspective, Merkel has no say about who visits or speaks at the Brandenburg Gate — it’s the Berlin’s mayor decision. Neither does Steinmeier, who is the SPD’s likely candidate to run against Merkel in next year’s federal election.
 
So it’s remarkable that the two German heavyweights have waded into the debate with their different points of view on Obama.
 
Their disagreement surfaced in a tense government news conference Wednesday in Berlin where the respective spokesmen openly contradicted each other
 
Obama reportedly wants to come to the heart of Berlin — just a few weeks after the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-led Air Lift — while U.S. President George W. Bush spent only a few brief minutes in Berlin airport getting off his plane and into his helicopter on a two-day visit with Merkel to an isolated village 60 miles north of Berlin.
 
Bush never returned to Berlin after facing 10,000 anti-war protesters on his one visit to the German capital in 2002. Still very unpopular in Germany, Bush went to the provinces on his four other trips. A German opinion poll, showed recently that Obama would win 72 percent of the vote in Germany if Germans could vote in the U.S. election.

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Photo credit: Top: Reuters/Tami Chappell (Obama speaks in Georgia on Tuesday) ; Bottom: Reuters/Ho New (Merkel with Bush at G8 meeting on Wednesday)

DALLAS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s promise on Tuesday of a more robust approach to faith-based social programs has been blasted from the left and the right — and raised some pointed questions from academia.

But it has also won support from the religious left and centrists, the groups it is aimed at as the Obama campaign seeks to woo wavering evangelicals.

Obama unveiled the plan in Ohio, pledging to beef up the faith-based community programs pioneered by President George W. Bush.

On the left, Americans United for Separation of Church and State decried Obama’s promise to expand it, saying : “Rather than try to correct the defects of the Bush ‘faith-based’ initiative, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would do better to shut it down.”

Obama did lay down one rule in his speech that has drawn some comment. He said: “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.”

This will be welcomed by many Americans who are uncomfortable with this mix of church and state but it has also raised some eyebrows.

“Certain religious groups in the United States are unabashedly focussed on converting others — it’s part of their faith. When the federal government stipulates that it will withhold funding from a group that proselytizes — as indicated by Obama’s ground rules above — is it not, ironically, discriminating against that group on the basis of its religion?,” asked Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University in a blog on Wednesday.

The “Religious Right” saw Obama’s announcement as a “faith-based feint.” Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, asked if Obama’s reported opposition to efforts to ban gay marriage in California meant “that faith-based organizations that support (traditional) marriage will be disqualified from federal funding under an Obama presidency?”

From the “Religious Left,” evangelical leader and Sojourners founder Jim Wallis told Reuters he welcomed Obama’s initiative.

“It shows that Obama is both comfortable and articulate about his faith and we haven’t always seen this from a Democrat,” he said.

If Obama has scored with the Religious Left then his faith strategy may be paying dividends.

Photo credit: Reuters/Matt Sullivan. Obama speaks at Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio, July 1, 2008.
 

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky - Democrats are acting more like Republicans by not counting the results of the Florida and Michigan primaries and by not seating those states’ party delegates, former President Bill Clinton said on Tuesday.

“The Republicans are supposed to be the people that don’t count votes in Florida, not Democrats,” said Clinton, campaigning with his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe, where she chatted with voters and he held an impromptu news conference.

The January votes in Michigan and Florida were deemed invalid by the national Democratic Party because both states moved their election dates forward in defiance of party rules.

“The Democrats said, ‘We’re going to decapitate them, smudge them, step on them, act like they never existed, act like they never voted,’” the former president said. “It’s very strange that the Democrats would be more authoritarian and more hostile to the voters.

Many Democrats, like Clinton apparently, believe the 2000 election recount in Florida unfairly favored the Republican Party. The dispute was resolved by the Supreme Court, giving Republican George W. Bush the victory and Democrat Al Gore the loss.

Hillary Clinton won Michigan’s Jan. 15 primary, which did not include Obama’s name on the ballot. She also won Florida and  is seeking to have the votes counted and the more than 350 delegates reinstated. The party’s rules committee meets next week in an effort to resolve the dispute.

Republicans were less harsh toward states that moved their contests early and stripped them of just half their delegates.

“Do the right and decent thing by Florida and Michigan. Don’t let the Republicans look more enlightened than us, which they do today. It’s unbelievable. I  never thought I’d see that,” Bill Clinton said.

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Photo: Reuters/John Sommers II (Hillary and Bill Clinton campaigning in Louisville)

Barack Obama says his campaign for U.S. president clearly has suffered damage from a series of controversies over the past few weeks, but he is trying to move forward without “obsessing” over the setbacks.

Obama says public comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, calling the Sept. 11 attacks retribution for U.S. policy and blaming the U.S. government for the spread of AIDS would no doubt be a factor in some voters minds.

But he said he would leave it to pollsters to analyze the extent of the impact.

“We’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I won’t deny that,” Obama told reporters. “I don’t think that what happened with Rev. Wright was helpful,” said the Illinois senator who forcefully denounced the minister’s rhetoric earlier this week.

The Wright flap is something that voters will “factor into the mix. How it plays itself out I can’t tell,” he said.

Obama has been honing his message on the economy and emphasizing a folksier, more personal campaigning style as he courts voters ahead of Tuesday’s contests in Indiana and North Carolina.

“What I don’t spend a lot of time doing is obsessing about what ifs and should’ve beens. We’ll see what happens on Tuesday and then we’re going to keep on going to the next contests.”

The Illinois senator is vying with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and the right to run against Republican Sen. John McCain in the November election.

He has been trying especially hard lately to court working class voters who have backed Clinton more heavily in recent contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In addition to the Wright controversy, Obama was hit by criticism from Clinton and McCain last month who seized on his comments about “bitter” small-town” voters to label him an elitist.

“I do think that one of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I were elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” Obama said. “We didn’t recognize the caricature I think that has being painted of us over the last couple of weeks and we want to make sure that that’s pushed aside.” 
     
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Photo credit: Reuters/Frank Polich (Obama greets Indiana supporters on Thursday)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Talk about a workout. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a basketball fan who takes to the court to stay in shape, got a run for his money on Tuesday during a scrimmage with the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.

The U.S. presidential candidate, 46 and 6′2″, played ball with students half his age and seemingly twice his height in an early morning match-up that sent him off to the sidelines for a break halfway through the game.

“These guys are a lot better than me,” he breathed to reporters while jogging down the court after one play.

Yes they are. But the lanky candidate, dressed in sweats, managed a few nice passes and a lay-up that looked like it should have made it in.

“Thought I had that one!” he winced after missing the shot.

The famous powerhouse college team did not exactly give the man who would like to be the next U.S. president a break, but Obama did his best to keep up and had a smile on his face throughout.

The bright side? At least he wasn’t bowling…

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Photo credit: Reuters/Frank Polich (Obama plays basketball in Indiana last week)

WASHINGTON - White House hopeful Barack Obama often says his “funny name” is one of the things that makes his status as the Democratic frontrunner so unexpected.
    But at a luncheon with U.S. newspaper publishers and editors on Monday, a publisher made an embarrassing gaffe when asking the Illinois senator a question about the Taliban and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — but accidentally said “Obama” instead of “Osama.”
    “I think that was Osama bin Laden,” Obama corrected him.
    Realizing he had made an error, the publisher, Dean Singleton, chairman of the board of the Associated Press and founder of the NewsMedia Group newspaper company, apologized.
    “If I did that, I’m so sorry,” Singleton said.
    Obama made light of the mistake, drawing a mixture of laughter and some relief in the audience, which had been taken aback by the gaffe.
    “No, no, this is part of the exercise I’ve been going through for the last 15 months,” Obama said. “Which is why it’s pretty impressive that I’m still standing here.”

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Cohn (Obama addresses members of the Alliance for American Manufacturing)

ATLANTA - Commentator and activist Tavis Smiley has quit the syndicated “Tom Joyner Morning Show” after 12 years because of the “hate” he got from the show’s mainly black audience over his criticism of Sen. Barack Obama, Joyner said.

Joyner shocked listeners when he announced Smiley’s departure from the influential radio show on Friday and said he believed Smiley “can’t take the hate” he’d received from listeners who support the Democratic presidential candidate.

“We (the show and its listeners) are so emotional about this Barack Obama candidacy. If you don’t say anything for Barack Obama, you’re considered to be a hater.”

“He (Smiley) loves black America and black America has been very critical of him,” Joyner said on his show, which has millions of listeners. He said he wanted Smiley to reconsider his decision.

Smiley criticized Obama, who would be the first black president, for declining to attend his annual “State of the Black Union” conference in February, a conference attended by Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.

Joyner’s comments raise an issue for blacks who have voted overwhelmingly for Obama in a string of primaries and caucuses: does support for Obama among them run so strong that those who express a different view get a hard time?

Commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson published an online column on Friday backing Smiley’s right to express a dissenting view on Obama and hitting back at his critics.
“Hang tough (Smiley) and don’t let the black Obama thought police run you out,” Hutchinson said in his weekly column.

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Photo credit: Reuters/John Sommers II (Obama speaks at a campaign stop in Columbus, Indiana, on April 11, 2008)