You Can Get With This, or You Can Get With That
Obama, in a high-energy appearance in this northeastern Ohio city, sought to remind supporters of the gravity of next week's election, saying the outcome will determine whether the economy will create "bottom-up" prosperity, families will see healthcare relief, and America will finally commit to renewable energy. He implored the raucous crowd to maintain its intensity right up until the polls close...
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In many ways, Obama's closing argument completes a circle he began drawing with his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in Boston, where he burst onto the national stage with his call for the country to bridge the "red state-blue state" rifts permeating American politics...
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Obama's appeals for unity have helped him attract enough independents and Republicans to put him in position to win traditionally Republican states such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia. But at the same time, Obama has engaged in partisanship himself, using tens of millions of dollars in TV ads attacking what he calls the failed Republican policies of the last eight years...
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In his Canton speech, Obama asked voters to consider their future. "The question in this election is not, 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' " Obama said, referring to Republican Ronald Reagan's winning indictment of President Jimmy Carter in 1980. "We all know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' "
As he shapes his concluding argument to voters with just a week until Election Day, McCain's campaign has worked furiously to exploit distrust of incumbent Washington - South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has been exhorting supporters to "take your country back." And McCain has continued to distance himself from the Republican administration, while Obama has sought to blur any distinction, referring Sunday to a "Bush-McCain philosophy..."
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The remarks inaugurated a final phase in the campaign in which advisers said McCain - implicitly acknowledging that Democrats are likely to strengthen their hold on both chambers of Congress - would offer himself up as a bulwark against the hazards of single-party dominance of the legislative and executive branches...
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Delivered with little advance warning to the media as Obama prepared to present his own "closing argument" at his own event 60 miles away, McCain's address offered no new policy details or prescriptions. Instead, McCain articulated in his most dire terms yet what has become the dominant theme of his campaign in the last two weeks: that Obama's plans to raise income taxes and fine companies that do not provide employee health insurance would be obstacles to small-business growth, and kill jobs just when new ones are needed most. "It's a difference of millions of jobs in America, and Americans are beginning to figure that out," he said. "With one week left in this campaign, the choice facing Americans is stark..."
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McCain has had greater difficulty sketching that choice in clear ideological terms since the emergence of a national credit crisis in September, his advisers acknowledge, given that both he and Obama voted for a $700 billion financial-services bailout...
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McCain has not historically campaigned as a messenger of sharp philosophical distinctions, and through much of the campaign he identified wasteful spending as the most urgent economic problem facing the country. Advisers said McCain was obliged now to define his differences with Obama in ideological terms to remind voters that "this is a big election," as Graham put it in an interview...
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As a result, McCain has worked harder to portray Obama as outside the mainstream of American thought on economic issues. At two rallies yesterday, McCain read from a 2001 interview in which he claimed that Obama said it was a "tragedy" that the Supreme Court had not pursued the "redistribution of wealth."
In other words: Hope, Unity and Change versus Fear, Intolerance and Misinformation.
Comments
"through much of the campaign he identified wasteful spending as the most urgent economic problem facing the country"
Everybody knows that. What we cant agree on is which part is wasteful? Republicans would say that hel[ping poor people is wasteful. Democrats would say the helping rich corporations is wasteful.