WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says Harry Truman, the common sense everyman from Missouri, was one of his favorite presidents. On Monday, he took a few minutes on the campaign trail to soak up some Truman history.

After Obama delivered a speech on the meaning of patriotism at an auditorium in the Truman presidential library complex in Independence, Missouri, he strolled over to Truman’s old house a few blocks away.

He stopped to visit well-wishers along the way, shaking hands and joking with supporters, who poured out of neighboring houses to say hello and stopped on the street to cheer him.

When one man yelled that his wife thought he was cute and he had her vote, Obama laughed and said “I like that.” Looking at the woman, he jokingly asked: “Does he always embarrass you like that?”

Later he admired a t-shirt given him by Tootie Williams, 68. It said “Obama in the House” over a rendering of the White House.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Obama said.

Once he reached the Truman house, where the 33rd president lived from 1919 until his death in 1972 (except for the years when it served as the summer “White House”) he received a tour from Norton Canfield, a gray-haired, bearded park ranger with a braided ponytail.

When he saw a portrait of Truman’s daughter, Margaret, he sympathized with the president’s threat to punch a newspaper critic who had panned her singing.

“I would have done the same thing if someone had said something mean about my daughter,” Obama said.

Obama also admired a 1972 Chrysler Newport purchased just six months before Truman’s death. “I wonder what kind of mileage this gets,” Obama said. His personal assistant, Reggie Love, pondered its fuel efficiency.

When Canfield showed Obama a hat and coat belonging to Truman hanging beyond the foyer, the Illinois senator sounded positively nostalgic for the days when he could wander the streets without a tailing crew of media and security.

“The thing that I envy most about Truman was that when he was in the White House, he could go out and take a walk. He could put on that fedora and take a stroll, without someone following him,” he said — as the milling crowd outside waited to swarm him when he left the house. 
   

ST. LOUIS - The doctor was in on Tuesday, as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made the rounds at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the battleground state of Missouri with a cardiac nurse.

Obama, hoping to highlight his health care proposal and show local voters a more personal side, visited patients, pushed a cart and conferred with nurses during a two-hour stint in the hospital’s cardiac unit.

His guide for the early-morning shift was nurse Kate Marzluf, 26, who good-naturedly answered his questions and tried to ignore a swarming media contingent while handing out medicine and checking on patients.

At one point, as the nurse filled him in on her tasks, Obama said it “makes me faint just to think about it. You’re not drawing any blood, are you?”

During later check-ups, two patients reported sharply higher blood pressure than normal. Obama told the first patient he sympathized.

“When reporters are around me, my blood pressure goes up too,” he said, smiling. At the next stop, he was even more direct.

“The press has the same effect on me. They get my blood boiling,” Obama said. He smiled again.

 Later, Obama praised Marzluf and the hospital staff.

“If there is one thing that is right about health care in this country, it’s the extraordinary men and women who are entering the medical profession,” he told reporters.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama on campaign plane June 3)

DES MOINES, Iowa - John McCain has always had an uneasy relationship with the state of Iowa. On Thursday, he may have ruffled a few feathers in the farming state when he said he didn’t support a farm bill being hammered out in Congress.

McCain told a town hall meeting designed to tout his health care plan that subsidies in the farm bill were unnecessary.

House and Senate negotiators headed up by Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, are trying to iron out compromise legislation.

“I do not believe we should have tariffs against imported products, but I want to promise you as president of the United States of America I will recognize one fundamental fact, and that is the farmer in the state of Iowa and the United States of America is the most productive, the most efficient and the best, and I will open every market in the world to your products and I will sell them,” McCain said.

McCain skipped the state’s caucuses that kick off the presidential race during his failed 2000 White House run, and he campaigned fitfully there ahead of the 2008 contest. He finished fourth.

But Iowa promises to be a battleground in the November presidential election, and he made it the fourth swing state he visited on a weeklong tour to push his health care plans. He opened in Florida, then hit Pennsylvania and Ohio before a town hall in Des Moines. He closes the tour in Colorado on Friday.

In the end, McCain promised to be back for a staple of  presidential political campaigning — a visit to the usually sweltering Iowa State Fair in August and the strange array of delicacies it offers.

“Iowa will again be a battleground state. I intend to spend a lot of time here. I also look forward very much to going back to the Iowa State Fair and having a pork chop on a stick, followed by a deep-fried Twinkie.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria (McCain speaks during Miami news conference)

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - Republican presidential candidate John McCain frequently rails against “earmarks,” the special spending projects that members of Congress procure for their home districts, often with little or no oversight. 

But Wednesday he admitted he sometimes admired the results. 

On a visit to an Allentown hospital during a week-long campaign swing featuring health care issues, the Arizona senator met a woman with ovarian cancer who was treated in a $80 million clinical trial program funded by an earmark. 

McCain praised the woman’s treatment and later said some earmarks were clearly worthy. 

“It’s the process I object to,” McCain told reporters. “We need to start over from scratch.” 

McCain told reporters that wasteful spending projects had drained away money that could have been used for infrastructure improvements that would prevent tragedies like last year’s deadly bridge collapse in Minnesota. 

He has promised to eliminate earmarks and make spending projects compete for funding in congressional budget deliberations. 

“When you earmark in the middle of the night you have no budgetary constraints,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria. (McCain listens speaks during a news conference at Miami’s Children Hospital in Florida April 28, 2008.

WASHINGTON - The long-running feud between Republican presidential front-runner John McCain and the Federal Election Commission got longer just as his presidential bid takes off.
 
The agency, which the Arizona senator has not been shy about publicly criticizing, says the White House hopeful may not be able to simply withdraw from the public financing system as he believed he had two weeks ago.
 
The reason? FEC Chairman David Mason said in a letter that the agency wants to know if McCain used the possibility he would receive public financing for his campaign as collateral for an additional $1 million loan he received from a Bethesda bank in December.
 
The loan helped McCain keep his campaign afloat before he caught fire in New Hampshire and began his march to the brink of clinching the Republican nomination.
 
Theoretically, the issue could be a big one for McCain because the public funds come with spending limits that would severely hinder his campaign until he accepts the nomination at the party’s convention in early September.
 
Making the issue even more difficult to resolve is the FEC’s lack of a quorum since the beginning of the year as the Senate has been unable to approve four pending nominations to the panel.
 
But McCain’s campaign said he did not use a promise of public funds as collateral, does not plan to participate in the voluntary system and does not need FEC approval to withdraw.
 
And without a quorum, FEC appears to have few options for further action with McCain.  

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/John Sommers II (McCain at a campaign stop in Ohio)   

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama made an appearance — via satellite while campaigning in Beaufort, South Carolina — on David Letterman’s “Late Show” on Thursday to read the show’s traditional “Top 10″ list. 

The Top 10 Barack Obama campaign promises:

    10. To keep the budget balanced, I’ll rent the Situation Room for sweet 16s.
    9. I will double your tax money at the craps table.
    8. Appoint Mitt Romney secretary of lookin’ good.
    7. If you bring a gator to the White House, I’ll wrassle it.
    6. I’ll put Regis on the nickel.
    5. I’ll rename the 10th month of the year “Barack-tober.”
    4. I won’t let Apple release the new and improved iPod the day after you bought the previous model.
    3. I’ll find money in the budget to buy Letterman a decent hairpiece.
    2. Pronounce the word nuclear, nuclear.
    1. Three words:  Vice President Oprah.

When the Top 10 was finished, Letterman said, “Sen. Barack Obama, thank you very much for helping us out, senator.  Good luck with the campaign.”

Obama replied, “Thank you so much, David, but you can’t muss my hair” — a reference to Letterman messing up rival John Edwards’s hair during his Late Show appearance on Tuesday.

Said Letterman, “OK, whatever you say.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Lott (Obama speaks during a town hall in South Carolina.)

Democrat Barack Obama was fired up and ready to go on Tuesday on a visit to the birthplace of his presidential campaign rally cry.

The story is a staple of Obama’s campaign rallies — the wet, tired, dispirited candidate, visiting rural Greenwood, South Carolina, last year to court the support of a local state representative, was inspired by a woman in a church hat who got the small, quiet crowd roaring with the chant “Fired Up! Ready to Go!”

Obama uses the story as an example of how “one voice can change a room,” and how the ripple effect can “change the world.”

The chant also can change a campaign event, as thousands of Obama backers have roared it from Iowa to South Carolina, including his big rallies with talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

Suddenly, Obama noted, even “Oprah is saying fired up, ready to go.”

On Tuesday, Obama was joined by the chant’s originator, Edith Childs, a Greenwood city councilwoman and local celebrity who joined him on stage and led a crowd of about 2,000 in a spirited version.

With Obama joining in and dancing behind her, she added an extra chorus.

“Go out and vote, go out and vote, Obama, Obama, will be our next, will be our next, president, president.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Chris Keane (Obama at a campaign rally in Greenwood, South Carolina, January 22.)

NASHUA, N.H. - Combative conservative Fox News talk host Bill O’Reilly, who usually limits his fighting to verbal attacks, scuffled with an aide to Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama at a New Hampshire rally on Saturday.

O’Reilly had a confrontation with Obama’s campaign travel coordinator, Marvin Nicholson, as O’Reilly tried to talk to Obama after a rally in Nashua.

Nicholson said O’Reilly, who briefly spoke to Obama, was yelling at him to “move” out of the way.

“He grabbed me by the arm with both hands and tried to push and shove me out of the way,” Nicholson told reporters. “I asked him not to push me anymore and he said I was ‘low class.’”

The U.S. Secret Service, who are guarding Obama, intervened and the confrontation ended quickly.  Obama told O’Reilly he would consider giving him an interview after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

The conservative news talk host was following Democrats during the day. He also appeared earlier at a Hillary Clinton rally in Penacook, New Hampshire, and asked a kid in the audience to ask Clinton about her Iraq policy.

When the kid told Clinton that O’Reilly had planted the question, the crowd booed. “Hello, Bill,” Clinton said, telling the crowd to give him credit for showing up.

– Additional reporting by Mark Egan

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg

Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson bills himself as a consistent conservative, but he had to defend his credentials at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and launched a shot at rival Mitt Romney after doing it.

The former Tennessee senator was questioned from the audience about his support for the Senate’s 2002 overhaul of campaign finance laws, which has been a source of anger for many conservatives who say it restricts political speech.

Thompson was one of the biggest Republican backers of the bipartisan McCain-Feingold law named after its sponsors, Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and rival 2008 presidential hopeful, and Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat.

He said he supported the law’s ban on the unlimited donations to political parties, known as soft money, but called the law’s provisions restricting ads by outside groups “a mistake.”

“That was an error, I was wrong, I wouldn’t do that again,” he told about 75 people at a morning stop on his bus tour through Iowa, which kicks off the presidential race on Jan. 3.

Questioned later by a reporter about criticism of his campaign finance stance by some unnamed campaign rivals, Thompson quickly jumped on Mitt Romney.

“Mitt Romney has changed his position on that just as he has on so many other things,” he said of the former Massachusetts governor, who has publicly changed his stance on abortion to become a staunch opponent of abortion rights.

He said Romney supported McCain-Feingold at the time and “he supported public financing in Massachusetts, which no one that I know of who supported McCain-Feingold has gone that far.”

Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Romney supported “transparency and accountability” in campaign finance, but agreed with conservative activists the law backed by Thompson “was an abomination that restricted the First Amendment rights of conservative advocacy groups.”

He said Romney “will not relent in his disagreement with Fred Thompson and John McCain on their support of that legislation that hindered the conservative movement’s role in the political process.”

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed

At a town hall meeting in Cedar Falls, Iowa, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani decries the growth in lawsuits and its effect on businesses and the legal system, citing a judge’s quirky and ultimately unsuccessful $54 million lawsuit against a Washington dry cleaner who misplaced his favorite pants.

Video by John Whitesides