BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Democrat Barack Obama raked in $9 million at fundraisers on Tuesday night flanked by celebrities. But he stopped far short of celebrating.

The White House hopeful kept the tone of his remarks  somber as he talked of the financial crisis that has cast a pall over the economy to an audience that included Pierce Brosnan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodi Foster and Jamie Lee Curtis.

“This should be a celebratory evening. We’ve got 48 days to go in a campaign, a campaign that started 19 months ago, at a time when a lot of folks thought we might not get here,” Obama told a reception of 800 people at the swank Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

“I’m not in a celebratory mood,” he said, listing recent events such as the financial turmoil, a deadly train crash in Los Angeles and Gulf Coast hurricanes.

Obama’s Republican rival, John McCain, mocked him for mingling with his “celebrity friends” while middle-class Americans were spending their time worrying about the economy.

At one reception, where donors contributed $2,500 a piece to Obama’s campaign coffers, singer-actress Barbra Streisand gave a rare singing performance.

At an earlier dinner of around 300 people at the Tudor-style Greystone mansion in Beverly Hills, donors paid $28,500 a plate to the Democratic Party and dined on beef filet, asparagus and salad with goat cheese.

Asking them to work hard to help get him elected, Obama said the financial crisis “has reminded people what’s at stake.”

“It’s reminded people that this is not a game. This is not a reality show,” he said and then added, to laughter, “No offense to any of you here.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/ Tobias Schwarz (Barbra Streisand, shown in a 2007 performance in Berlin, sang at an exclusive fundraiser for Obama Tuesday night.)

So what does Barack Obama do after a hard day of defending the common man during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
 
Throw a $28,500-a-head fundraising dinner, of course.
 
Followed by a $2,500-a-head reception featuring Barbra Streisand singing a song or two.

The Democratic presidential candidate spent the day Tuesday campaigning in Colorado, where he talked to supporters about the mortgage crisis that has reshaped Wall Street and caused many people to lose their homes.
 
Speaking a day after the stock market had its worst day since 2001, he assured a rally in the Denver suburb of Golden that he understood the impact the crisis was having from Wall Street to Main Street.
 
“Jobs have disappeared, and peoples’ life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet,” he said.
 
“These are the struggles that Americans are facing. This is the pain that has now trickled up.”
 
Then he jetted off to Los Angeles Tuesday evening for a pair of glitzy fundraisers that could be the biggest for Democrats during this election cycle.
 
Republican John McCain lost no time pointing out Obama was courting the stars instead of ordinary folk. 
 
“(He) talks about siding with the people, siding with the people — just before he flies off to Hollywood for a fundraiser with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends,” McCain told a rally in Vienna, Ohio, a critical battleground state. “Let me tell you my friends, there’s no place I’d rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio.”

Streisand, a Democratic activist and Oscar-winning actress and singer,  initially endorsed Hillary Clinton but has embraced Obama since he won the nomination.
 
The Illinois senator has put together a formidable fundraising machine that has attracted hundreds of thousands of small donors, pulling in $66 million in August alone. That compared with $47 million for McCain.
 
Obama’s fundraising skill prompted him to forego federal campaign financing, despite earlier pledges not to do so. That enables him to raise and spend more than he could if he accepted federal money. But it also means he has to spend more time off the campaign trail raising money.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (Obama speaks in Golden, Colorado)

In the annals of inventor-lawmakers, Republican presidential candidate John McCain may rank even higher than Al Gore.
 
Gore famously said in 1999 as he was preparing to launch his presidential bid that he helped create the Internet while he was a member of the Senate.
 
He was roundly ridiculed for the comment, which rumor and repetition quickly converted into an urban myth that Gore claimed to be the inventor of the Internet.

McCain evidently has been busy in the Senate too. Even though he doesn’t use computers or e-mail, the Arizona senator helped create the BlackBerry. So says one of his economic advisers, Douglas Holt-Eakin.
 
“You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” Holtz-Eakin told reporters while brandishing a BlackBerry wireless e-mail device during a briefing in Miami.
 
Holtz-Eakin’s remarks came as he was defending McCain’s knowledge of the economy while stock markets reeled from the financial crisis.
 
Early in the campaign, McCain said his economic understanding wasn’t all that great. He’s been trying to claw back that statement ever since.
 
Holtz-Eakin cited McCain’s work on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees telecommunications and the senator chaired for a time, as evidence of his economic experience. Then followed the BlackBerry proclamation.
 
The Obama campaign, aware of the ridicule Gore suffered over the Internet, was quick to try to tar McCain with the BlackBerry.
 
“If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. 
 
Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Robert LeSieur (McCain in New Hampshire Sept. 14)

MIAMI - The polls may show him advancing past Democrat Barack Obama, but Republican John McCain is still holding on to one of his favorite titles: underdog.

The Arizona senator told a Republican fundraising event that raised some $5.1 million on Monday that he and running mate Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, were still coming from behind in the race toward the Nov. 4 presidential election.

“We’ve got a strong headwind and we’ve got a lot to do,” he said to a group of donors. “No matter what you see in the polls recently, Governor Palin and I are the underdogs. We’re the underdogs. That’s where we like to be.”

McCain seems to perform the best when he’s not in the lead.

The 72-year-old former fighter pilot turned his campaign around from near death more than a year ago and formally accepted his party’s nomination earlier this month.

McCain is not permitted to raise money directly for his campaign since accepting public financing, but he still participates in party fundraisers. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Robert LeSieur (McCain speaks in New Hampshire Sunday)

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.  
       

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is using a scathing new attack ad to challenge the fundamental perception that John McCain – former Navy aviator and prisoner of war — is honorable.
 
It was bound to happen. The McCain camp has been doing the same thing to Obama for weeks, trying to turn public perceptions about his strengths into weaknesses using attack ads and ridicule.
 
McCain went after Obama’s popularity and his strength as an orator. His campaign even tried to defuse the race issue by accusing Obama — who would be the first black U.S. president if elected — of racism.
 
So it was inevitable the Obama camp would eventually strike back — and it did after McCain was roundly criticized in the press for an ad that falsely accused the Illinois Democrat of favoring sex education for kindergarten children.
 
“What’s happened to John McCain? He’s running the sleaziest ads ever. Truly vile,” the narrator of the ad entitled “Honor” says as quotes pulled from newspaper columns scroll over an ever-shrinking photo of the Arizona senator.

“Dishonest smears that he repeats even after its been exposed as a lie. Truth be damned. Disgraceful, dishonorable campaign. After voting with Bush 90 percent of the time proposing the same disastrous economic policies, it seems that deception is all he has left,” it says.
 
McCain often speaks of duty, honor, country, sacrifice and has cultivated the image of being a man of honor.
 
The ad takes aim at that perception, asking if McCain is honorable, why is he running this kind of campaign.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Neal Hamberg (Obama speaks in New Hampshire Sept. 13)

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.)

JACKSONVILLE, Florida - Take it from an expert. Karl Rove, known as the architect of President George W. Bush’s electoral victories, believes White House candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have gone too far in their attacks on each other.

Rove, speaking on the television program Fox News Sunday, said an ad by the Democratic presidential nominee and Illinois senator criticizing McCain for not being e-mail savvy was unfair.

“His war injuries keep him from being able to use a keyboard. He can’t type. You know, it’s like saying he can’t do jumping jacks,” Rove said of the Arizona senator and former U.S. prisoner of war in Vietnam.

But pressed by the program’s host to find fault on both sides, Rove said the Republican presidential nominee was equally guilty.

“McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test,” Rove said.

The Obama campaign seized on the comments, which it felt validated growing criticism that McCain’s operation had turned increasingly negative.

“In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove — the man who held the previous record — said McCain’s ads have gone too far,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.

Rove said both campaigns were making a mistake by pushing the envelope with their assaults.

“They don’t need to attack each other in this way,” he said. “They have legitimate points to make about each other.”

Words to live by as the 2008 campaign enters the home stretch?

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Fred Prouser/Reuters (Karl Rove at a panel discussion in Beverly Hills, California on July 14, 2008)

MANCHESTER, N.H. - As Hurricane Gustav threatened to wreak havoc on the Gulf Coast two weeks ago, Democrat Barack Obama made a point of toning down his campaign rhetoric during a swing through the Midwest, saying it was not a time for politics.

The White House hopeful and his Republican opponent John McCain also took a day off from battling each other on Thursday to observe the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in a solemn ceremony at Ground Zero in New York City.

But Obama, who has faced complaints from some supporters that he is not fighting back hard enough against McCain’s attacks, was undeterred in his determination on Saturday to keep up a more aggressive tone to his campaigning as Hurricane Ike raked Texas.

Obama used the first several minutes of his rally speech here to express sympathy for people in Texas whose lives have been “upended as a consequence of Hurricane Ike.”

Then he transitioned back to the campaign by saying that Americans across the country are facing a “quiet storm” because of the failed policies of the Bush administration.

He lambasted McCain as someone offering more of the same, saying he was “out of touch” while latching onto the Democrat’s message of change.

“You’ve got John McCain, my opponent in this election, who has been standing up since his convention suggesting that somehow he and his running mate are going to be the original mavericks and are going to shake things up in Washington,” Obama told the outdoor rally of about 7,000 people.

That prompted McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds to point out that Obama had canceled plans to appear on Saturday Night Live this weekend because of Hurricane Ike but did not set politics aside. Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, scrapped plans to attend the Manchester rally with Obama in light of the storm.

“Today’s attacks mark a new low from Barack Obama,” Bounds said, adding that “it says a lot about Barack Obama’s judgment.”

Obama spokesman Bill Burton volleyed back with a scathing criticism of McCain as someone who is “cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.”

The statement was one of blizzard of e-mails the Obama campaign sent out during the day bashing McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin.  One such e-mail was a lengthy memo cataloguing what it characterized as the McCain campaign’s “lies and spin”.

McCain was off the campaign trail for the day while Palin held a rally in Alaska before heading to campaign in the lower 48 states.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/ Neal Hamberg (Obama at a New Hampshire rally.)

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has canceled plans to appear on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live after his campaign decided this weekend was not a time for humor in light of the expected devastation from Hurricane Ike.

In what may be the worst storm to hit Texas in nearly 50 years, the hurricane was packing high winds and U.S. officials warned storm waves could cause a catastrophe along the state’s coastline.

“In light of the unfolding crisis in Texas, Sen. Obama has decided it is no longer appropriate to appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow evening,” said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Obama has been campaigning in the battleground state of New Hampshire and is to speak at a rally in Manchester on Saturday morning. Instead of flying to New York afterwards to appear on the show, Obama will fly back to his home in Chicago.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: NOAA handout

CONCORD, N.H. - Barack Obama accused Republicans on Friday of trying to shift the focus of the presidential debate away from serious issues such as the economy and toward frivolous subjects like lipstick, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Taking on a feistier tone, the Democratic presidential hopeful sought to show his supporters he wants to fight back aggressively against escalating attacks by his rival John McCain.

Democrats have become concerned about the momentum gained by McCain and his new running mate as polls have shown McCain has pulled even or slightly ahead of Obama, erasing the lead the Democratic presidential nominee held throughout the summer.

“You’ve seen the other side not want to spend any time talking about the issues,” Obama said. “I mean, what have they been talking about? They’ve been talking about lipstick. They’ve been talking about pigs. They’ve been talking about Britney. They’ve been talking about Paris.”

“These are serious times and it requires a serious debate,” he said. Obama was referring to a blitz of ads McCain has run, including one that likened him to celebrities such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

In another ad, McCain accused Obama of trying to smear Palin, an Alaska governor and self-described “hockey mom,”  when he likened the Republican’s plans for government reform to putting “lipstick on a pig.”

The McCain campaign has suggested that Obama was making reference to Palin’s joke that the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was lipstick but Obama’s campaign denies his comment had anything to do with Palin.

Some of Obama’s backers worry that Obama won’t push back hard enough against the kind of “Swift Boat” attacks used against Democrat John Kerry in his failed 2004 White House bid.

But Obama has been emphasizing he is not going to shrink from the fight against tactics he compares to those of President George W. Bush’s strategist, Karl Rove.

“Here’s what I can guarantee you: We are going to be hitting back hard. We have been hitting back hard. We have been hitting back hard but we’re hitting back on the issues that matter to families,” Obama said earlier in the day at an event in Dover, N.H.

Obama was responding to a question at a town-hall style event from 39-year-old Glenn Grasso, who pressed the Democratic candidate on how he would respond to Republican “attack ads and the smear campaigns.” 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Mike Segar (Obama at forum on national service in New York on Sept. 11). ABC handout (McCain appearance on The View).