Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama greets two United States Army soldiers on the tarmac at the airport in Springfield, Missouri, yesterday. - ap photos
WASHINGTON (AP):
With two days remaining in the hard-fought presidential contest, Republican John McCain set out yesterday on a dizzying campaign charge through three states where victory could yet tip the presidential contest in his favour. Front-running Democrat Barack Obama looked to battleground Ohio to clinch the race.
McCain's scrappy closing scramble in what has been America's longest presidential campaign underlines his promise of a come-from-behind victory against Obama, the 47-year-old first-term Illinois senator who would be the country's first African-American president.
A victory for the four-term Arizona senator would mark a true upset, given Obama's solid lead in most national and key state polls. An Associated Press-Yahoo News national survey of likely voters put Obama ahead, 51 to 43, with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. The Gallup Poll tracking survey calculated Obama's margin at 10 percentage points, 52-42.
As Obama focused on Ohio's three major cities, including an appearance in Cleveland with singer Bruce Springsteen, McCain was dashing from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire and then to Florida for a late-night rally.
Pennsylvania
The 72-year-old former Navy fighter pilot, who was held prisoner and tortured by the North Vietnamese, has made up ground in Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania with his appeal to white working-class voters, many of whom supported Obama's primary rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"The most important state to watch now is Pennsylvania. We're doing great there," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said on Fox television Sunday morning.
Obama campaign chief David Plouffe disagreed in an appearance on the same network. "We do not see the kind of tightening in Pennsylvania that Rick mentioned," Plouffe said in a rare television interview.
He also disagreed with Davis' claim that Obama's lead was slipping in the Southwest - the states of Nevada and New Mexico - and in mountain-state Colorado.
McCain was also campaigning yesterday in New Hampshire, solidly in the Obama column, in a bid to remind voters of his primary season resurrection in the state, where he won even after his campaign had nearly collapsed in the autumn of 2007. In Florida, Obama holds a slight lead in the state that is viewed by many as a must-win for McCain.
McCain's path to accumulating the necessary 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency has become increasingly narrow. Most state-by-state surveys show Obama holding leads in enough states to assure victory.
Plouffe said yesterday that Obama has expanded the electoral map by aggressively campaigning in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, Colorado and Nevada.
"We did not want to wake up on the morning of November 4 waiting for one state. We wanted a lot of different ways to win this election," Plouffe said.
The popular vote does not decide the contest, but rather candidates must win 50 per cent plus one of the 538 electoral votes that are roughly apportioned to the states according to population.
McCain acknowledged he was fighting from behind during an appearance Saturday in once-reliable Virginia, where Obama is leading. The state has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.
"We're a few points down, but we're coming back," he told supporters. "I'm not afraid of the fight, I'm ready for it, and you're going to fight with me."
Closing the gap
Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain emphasises a point during a campaign rally in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, yesterday.
McCain's campaign says the Arizona senator is closing the gap in the final days. Privately, McCain's aides said he trailed Obama by just four points nationwide in internal polling.
According to the AP-Yahoo poll, one in seven voters, 14 per cent of the total, said they were undecided or might yet change their minds. But a rule of thumb among pollsters is that undecided voters generally split evenly between the leading candidates.
For Obama, the final days of the brutally lengthy campaign was marked by soaring rhetoric and forays deep into Republican territory, buoyed by record campaign donations and encouraging poll numbers.
"We have a righteous wind at our back," he said Saturday.
Obama on Saturday campaigned in Nevada, Colorado and Missouri, all states that voted for President George W. Bush four years ago. Obama hoped to add Ohio to his column as well. No Republican has won the presidency without victory in Ohio.
McCain's hopes hinged on winning all or nearly all the states that carried Bush to victory in 2004, and possibly carrying Pennsylvania to give him a margin for error. But that looked increasingly unlikely.
And Obama has hammered away at his campaign themes, promising tax breaks for middle-class families, lower health care costs and an end to the Iraq war.
He also sought to saddle McCain as a policy clone of the unpopular Bush, who has avoided Republican campaign events apparently because of his low approval ratings.
While the president remained on the sidelines, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Saturday the US "cannot afford the high tax liberalism of Barack Obama and Joe Biden" and supported McCain.
Not the change we need
Early Sunday, Obama's campaign released a new 30-second television spot highlighting the unpopular vice president's endorsement of McCain and running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
An announcer says McCain earned Cheney's support by voting with the White House 90 per cent of the time. "That's not the change we need," the announcer says.
McCain's campaign responded by noting the issues on which McCain disagreed with Bush.
"It was John McCain who fought Vice-President Cheney on Big Oil's energy bill, the administration's wasteful spending and argued for a different, successful course in Iraq, not Barack Obama," said McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds.
McCain appeared late Saturday on Saturday Night Live, a satirical television show, to poke fun at his presidential campaign's financial shortcomings and his reputation as a political maverick.
He made a cameo appearance at the beginning of the show, with Tina Fey reprising her memorable impersonation of Palin. During the show's Weekend Update newscast, he announced he would pursue a new strategy in the closing days of the campaign.
"I thought I might try a strategy called the reverse maverick. That's where I'd do whatever anybody tells me," McCain said. And if that didn't work, "I'd go to the double maverick. I'd just go totally berserk and freak everybody out."
