Obama, McCain agree to tone down personal attacks on campaign trail
Published Saturday October 11th, 2008
PHILADELPHIA - Democrat Barack Obama joined John McCain in toning down personal attacks on Saturday while asking voters to have faith in him as the next president.
Even as he criticized John McCain's economic policies, Obama acknowledged that the GOP nominee has asked his supporters to temper their attacks.
"I appreciated his reminder that we can disagree while still being respectful of each other," Obama told thousands of supporters at the first of four outdoor rallies in Philadelphia.
"Senator McCain has served this country with honour," he said two hours later, in the city's Germantown neighbourhood. "He deserves our thanks for that."
McCain, for his part, focused his speech in Davenport, Iowa, on Saturday on the economy and other policies, a striking change from just days ago when his campaign redoubled its challenge to Obama over his association with a former 1960s radical.
McCain's most serious criticism of Obama on Saturday was over health care, not character.
His advisers say that they will aggressively challenge Obama's record but will not to make it personal. The two are to meet for a third and final debate on Wednesday.
At a town-hall event Friday in Minnesota, McCain took the microphone from a woman who challenged Obama's fitness for office and mistakenly called him an Arab.
McCain said, "No, ma'am," and described Obama "a decent, family man."
McCain drew jeers at the same event when he told a supporter who expressed fear at the prospect of Obama's election that the Democrat is a "person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."
Those reassurances aside, McCain's TV ads continue to attack Obama sharply, including some that attempt to link the Democrat to a former radical who co-founded a violent anti-war group in the 1960s.
Obama referred to the ads Saturday. "We've seen rough stuff on the TV from them," he said.
"I can take it for four more weeks," but the United States cannot take "four more years of Bush-McCain economics," he said.
Polls show Obama leading in several battleground states, and some of his top surrogates feel victory is nearly in reach.
"The one thing we can't let happen is for us to be overconfident," Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell told donors at a Friday fundraiser, where he introduced Obama.
Although Obama says anything can happen in the campaign's final weeks, hints of his optimism are creeping into unscripted remarks.
"In some ways this is a celebratory event" as "we're now coming to the end of what has been a two-year process, an extraordinary journey," Obama said at a second Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. The host, Comcast executive David Cohen, said the two events raised more than $5 million.
As 250 major donors ate beet salad and mahi-mahi under a huge tent, Obama seemed to look ahead to his first term as president.
"We're going to have to make some priorities, we're going to have to cut some things out," he said, referring to expensive goals such as improving health care, schools and college affordability.
"I'm going to be in some fights with my own Democratic party in getting some of that done," he said.
Obama told supporters he is leading McCain in the normally Republican-leaning states of Montana and North Carolina, while he claimed his lead in Virginia, which Democrats last carried in 1964, is six or seven percentage points.
"(But) Who knows what can happen in the next 25 days?" he added.
Obama's barnstorming of Philadelphia on Saturday was designed to drive his base vote in Pennsylvania as high as possible.
Democrats have carried the state in recent presidential elections, although sometimes narrowly. They usually win huge margins in Philadelphia and try to minimize their losses in the state's smaller cities and more rural areas.
McCain has campaigned aggressively in Pennsylvania, but polls show Obama leading.
Under a brilliant blue sky, thousands turned out at each Obama campaign stop Saturday.
In some cases, thousands more were unable to get through the gates. They stood on cars and craned their necks for a glimpse, sometimes blocks away. Crowds cheered Obama's motorcade as it arrived and left each site.
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