WASHINGTON - The anticipated record turnout of voters in Tuesday’s U.S. election did not materialize, with the percentage of eligible Americans casting ballots staying virtually the same as 2004, a report said on Thursday. 

The number of Americans voting is projected to reach between 126.5 million and 128.5 million, meaning the percentage who cast a ballot will be between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent — roughly the same as in 2004, according to Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
    
The lower-than-expected turnout was the result of a downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls, he said.
    
Predictions of high turnout were fueled by an increase in voter registrations and long lines at polling booths.
 
“But we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats,” Gans said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok (Voters fill their ballots at St. Jerome Parish in Los Angeles on Nov. 4)

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)

NEW ORLEANS - A half-sister of Cindy McCain has emerged to speak in an interview with National Public Radio, complaining that she feels hurt when she hears the wife of Republican Sen. John McCain describe herself as an only child.

Cindy McCain’s father was the late Jim Hensley, founder of the Hensley & Co. beer distributorship, from his second marriage, while her half-sister Kathleen Portalski was Hensley’s daughter from his first marriage, NPR said in the exclusive report that aired on Monday.

Portalski, 65, is retired and lives in Phoenix.

Her son Nicholas Portalski contacted NPR after hearing the radio station’s profile of Cindy McCain last week  that described her as an only child.

Cindy McCain often calls herself an only child and has been described as such in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek and ABC, NPR said.

“I’m upset,” Kathleen Portalski said in the interview with NPR correspondent Ted Robbins. “I’m angry. It makes me feel like a nonperson, kind of.”

Portalski said she saw her father a few times a year, such as Christmas and birthdays, and that he gave her money for school clothes. He also provided money for college tuition to his grandchildren and left Portalski  $10,000 in his will when he died in 2000, NPR said.

The Portalskis say they were disappointed when Cindy McCain inherited the bulk of her father’s fortune. She now serves as chairman of  Hensley & Company, one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the nation.

Portalski’s son said the family came forward because “we’ve never been recognized, and then Cindy has to put such a fine point on it by saying something that’s not true.”

“It’s just very, very hurtful,” he said.

Hensley was still married to his first wife when he met Marguerite Smith, who would become his second wife and Cindy McCain’s mother, NPR said.

Hensley divorced his first wife and married Smith in 1945, NPR said. Cindy McCain was born in 1954.

Kathleen Portalski told NPR she would like an acknowledgment and an apology.

NPR asked the McCain campaign and Cindy McCain to comment but said neither responded to its requests.

The Portalskis also told NPR they are Democrats.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Chris Keane (Cindy McCain)

ASPEN, Colo. - Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain said on Thursday the recent sharp fall in the price of oil had been helped by the end of the U.S. federal offshore drilling moratorium.

“I think several factors have contributed to the recent drop in the price of a barrel of oil. I think the practice of conservation and the reduction in our demand has probably been a major factor,” he told the Aspen Institute.

“I also don’t think it was entirely accidental that the day that the president announced lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, the price of a barrel of oil dropped.”

Despite the decline in oil prices from record highs above $140 a barrel in July to around $115, gasoline prices remain a crucial issue in the election campaign, pinching Americans as they cope with falling house prices.

McCain’s call for offshore drilling to boost domestic oil supplies, which he says will provide a bridge to a time when new, greener, energy technology is in place, has been slammed by critics who say it would be a disaster for the environment and not make any difference to oil prices.

The Arizona senator rejects this view, and on Thursday he reiterated his position that it could help straight away.

“I met with a group of independent petroleum producers in Bakersfield, California. They said, using existing facilities, you could have an immediate impact on our supply of oil. With exploration of known areas … within a year or two, they could increase our oil supply,” McCain said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

DES MOINES, Iowa - Republican presidential candidate John McCain conducted a whistle-stop tour through the Iowa State Fair on Friday but Freight Train was unimpressed.
 
The Arizona senator did what all politicians do at the fair. He pressed the flesh. He mounted a soapbox, actually a microphone placed behind bales of straw, and munched on some pork chops on a stick.
 
He may have won some votes when he praised the fair and its 1 million-plus visitors as true to the heartland of America. But he didn’t win over Freight Train.
 
The prize boar — all 1,259 pounds of him — stayed resolutely asleep throughout his visit, resting his enormous bulk on a bed of sand.
 
“I saw the new champion and world record-breaker boar, Freight Train. He’s in good health. I can tell you that,” McCain later said at a fund-raiser.
 
“I lament and had thought with some nostalgia about last year’s winner Big Red who is no longer with us. But perhaps I had part of him in a pepperoni pizza — who knows,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Ilya Naymushin (A wild boar stands in an open cage at a zoo in the Siberian city of Krasnoyark in 2006)

ORLANDO, Fla. - Democrat Barack Obama agreed on Saturday to a formal proposal for three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate, effectively scuttling Republican White House rival John McCain’s hopes for a series of one-on-one town hall meetings.
 
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe informed the Commission on Presidential Debates of the decision, which proposed the schedule, in a letter. Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel will represent the campaign in talks on the format and details.
 
The late conventions and short period before the first debate — the Republican convention ends on Sept. 4 and the first debate is scheduled for Sept. 26 — made it “likely” the four debates proposed by the commission “will be the sole series of debates in the fall campaign,” Plouffe wrote.
 
McCain had suggested the two candidates could appear together at a series of town-hall meetings, but negotiations between the two sides never produced an agreement.
 
The McCain campaign used the decision to take another poke at Obama’s “celebrity” image.
 
“We understand it might be beneath a worldwide celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude to appear at town hall meetings alongside John McCain and directly answer questions from the American people, but we hope he’ll reconsider,” spokesman Brian Rogers said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Scott Audette (Obama laughs alongside Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League in Orlando, Florida, on Aug. 2, 2008)

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.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

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

While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton criss-cross North Carolina hunting for votes ahead of the May 6 Democratic primary election, one prominent resident of the state is missing: John Edwards.

He’s gone to Disneyworld, for a long-planned vacation with his family.

Edwards, who withdrew from his second presidential race in January, has not yet endorsed a candidate, though both Clinton and Obama have wooed him.

Though they’re supposedly away from the political infighting while at Disneyworld, Edwards’ wife Elizabeth is keeping her feet wet.

Elizabeth, who has had a recurrence of breast cancer, is now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, specializing in health care. While at Cinderella’s Castle she took a  break for a phone call to talk with colleagues about Republican John McCain’s health care plan.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Lee Celano (Edwards waves as he walks with his family before announcing he would withdraw from U.S. presidential race) 

INDIANAPOLIS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday returned a compliment to Colin Powell after the former Bush administration secretary of state told an interviewer that he was impressed with Obama.

Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, has been criticized by Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain, as lacking experience on foreign policy.

Powell told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Obama seemed to be a quick study. 

“Sen. Obama, he didn’t have a lot of experience in running a presidential campaign, did he, but he seems to know how to organize a task and he seems to know how to apply resources to a problem at hand,” Powell said.

“So that gives you some indication that (despite) his inexperience in foreign affairs and domestic affairs, he may be somebody who can learn quickly.”

Asked about Powell’s comments, Obama described Powell as “an outstanding public servant.” 

“He’s somebody who I’ve known for some time and I have extraordinary respect for him,” the Illinois senator told reporters … So I appreciate the kind words.” 

Powell, who served as secretary of state in Bush’s first term, helped Bush to build a case with the United Nations for the Iraq war. 
 

But in “Plan of Attack,” a book by journalist Bob Woodward that gives an account of the behind-the-scenes debate within the administration about the war, Powell is described as having privately counseled Bush not to go to war because of concerns about the chaos that might ensue after an invasion. 

Even though he has served in Republican administrations, Powell is not automatically throwing his support to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. 

“I’m looking at all three candidates, I know them all very, very well, I consider myself a friend of each and every one of them, and I have not decided who I will vote for yet,” he told ABC.

Asked how frequently he speaks to Powell, Obama said: “We’re not speaking on a regular basis but we speak occasionally and every time that we do I find it very useful because he’s somebody who I think has good judgment, loves his country and is somebody whose counsel I actively seek.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: REUTERS//Frank Polich  (Obama speaks during a campaign stop in Gary, Indiana)

DENVER, Colo. - Mitt Romney , until a few weeks ago Sen. John McCain’s rival in a sometimes bitter contest for the Republican Party presidential nomination, says getting back on the campaign trail with the presumptive nominee is fun.

Romney traded blows with McCain for several weeks earlier this year before dropping out of the race and conceding defeat after losing crucial primary contests on Super Tuesday on Feb. 5.

With past battles behind them, Romney joined the Arizona senator in Salt Lake City, Utah, at a fund-raising event on Thursday, and then flew with him to Denver, Colorado.

“It’s a lot of fun again. It’s nice not to feel any pressure at all, I don’t have to worry about goofing up,” he told reporters on the flight over the Rocky Mountains.

“I can just stand behind the nominee and do my very best to support his campaign.”

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, and Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah stood beside McCain at the campaign stop in Salt Lake City in a show of party unity.

McCain said he hoped Romney would join him on the campaign trail in the weeks ahead as he sought to energize the party in the run up to the election in November.

He will face Democrats Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois or Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (McCain (L) listens to Romney at a news conference in Denver on March 27, 2008)