Obama and McCain dive into campaign's final foray

Barack Obama and John McCain battled on Saturday into the final weekend of the marathon campaign for the White House, jetting between a handful of states that could yield a Democratic landslide or deliver Republicans one of the greatest comebacks ever.

"Don't believe a second that this election is over," Obama told a crowd outside Las Vegas.

McCain agreed. "Volunteer! Knock on doors!" he exhorted supporters in rural Pennyslvania. "With your help we can win."

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers walked precincts and worked phone banks across the country, collaring undecided voters and urging the committed to mail their ballots or, if possible, vote early.

The TV airwaves hummed in more than a dozen hard-fought states with a last burst of advertising, appealing to the hearts and guts of Americans besieged by hard economic times. On the radio, the two rivals used a national broadcast to present their platforms, and deliver a few more jabs.

Each was reaching for history. Obama, 47, and a freshman senator from Illinois, is vying to become the nation's first black president. McCain, 72, and a 26-year veteran of Congress, is bidding for an upset to rival Harry S. Truman's resurrection in 1948.

Opinion surveys, nationally and across the most important battleground states, gave Obama the advantage, with multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Campaigning in Nevada, however, the Democrat warned against complacency.

Faith in country

"We've got to work like our future depends on it in these last three days, because it does," Obama told a crowd of about 15,000 gathered at a high school football field in Henderson, Nevada.

McCain concentrated on two states vital to his chances, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Republican seized on a line Obama delivered on Friday in Des Moines, Iowa, and misinterpreted it to suggest that Obama needed a victory in the Iowa caucuses to vindicate his faith in Americans. "My country's never had to prove anything to me," McCain said disdainfully at an airport rally in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. "I've always had faith in it."

The Obama campaign noted the line was one Obama has delivered often - including before he won Iowa - to praise the thoughtfulness voters bring to the political process and their willingness to look past labels to solve problems.

The candidates' itineraries reflected the tilt of the political map, with Obama eyeing a much broader expanse than his Republican foe. He spent Saturday in Nevada, Colorado and Missouri, all states the 'Grand Old Party' (GOP) usually counts on. His closing schedule takes him to states President Bush won in 2004 - Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia - and McCain almost surely needs to prevail.

"We're competing in a much broader array of states than any Democratic nominee has in a long time," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist.

McCain's foray into Pennsylvania was his one stop on Saturday on Democratic turf. But polls do not bode well, with Obama holding a comfortable lead. In the final days, McCain will visit some traditional battlegrounds: Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire. But he is being forced to defend several states, including Virginia, Indiana and Nevada, that Republicans usually take for granted.

Yet McCain has rallied from deficits before - his campaign nearly collapsed in the summer of 2007 - and aides said the race is still competitive. "We are witnessing, I believe, probably one of the greatest comebacks that you've seen since John McCain won the primary," said campaign manager Rick Davis.

Not optimistic

Others in the party, however, were less upbeat. Republican Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, one of the GOP's most astute analysts, said McCain needed to "draw an inside straight" to win. "I'm not going to predict a McCain victory because I have my reputation on the line," Davis said on Bloomberg Television. "But it's going to be a close race."

Part of McCain's problem has been his association with the deeply unpopular Bush administration. It was Obama, not McCain, who trumpeted Vice President Dick Cheney's Saturday endorsement of the GOP nominee at a Wyoming rally.

"I'd like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it," Obama said in Pueblo, Colorado. "... Senator McCain had to vote 90 per cent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it."

The strong early vote reflects enthusiasm that began in the primary season. In Colorado, more than half of registered voters have turned out. In Florida and North Carolina, early-voting hours have been extended.

The returns have been promising for Obama, with Democrats outpacing Republicans in the early vote in several key states, including Florida, North Carolina and Colorado.

While the two campaigns engaged at the ground level, the candidates took to the radio airwaves to offer their summary arguments.

Obama lumped McCain with Bush and promised to end "the tired old trickle-down, on-your-own philosophy that got us into this mess."

He pledged to end the war in Iraq, cut taxes for 95 per cent of workers and their families, make health care cheaper and more accessible and create millions of jobs through public works program and renewable energy programs. "We can choose hope over fear, unity over division, the promise of change over the power of the status quo," Obama said.

McCain was more combative, lacing into Obama as ill prepared and wed to a philosophy of wealth redistribution. "I believe that the only way to pull our economy out of this terrible time of worry and hardship is to spread opportunity," McCain said.

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

By Michael Finnegan

A top adviser to Barack Obama shrugged off the potential effect on Saturday of a report that one of the Democratic nominee's Kenyan aunts is an illegal immigrant living in Boston.

"I think people are suspicious about stories that surface in the last 72 hours of a campaign, and they're going to put it in that context," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist.

The Associated Press reported on Friday that Zeituni Onyango, a half-sister of Obama's late father, was denied asylum by an immigration judge four years ago. The judge instructed Onyango, a resident of public housing, to leave the US.

Money returned

"Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws should be followed," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said.

Obama met Onyango on two separate trips to Kenya, his father's birthplace, and he last heard from her two years ago when she called to say she was living in Boston, the campaign said.

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Obama's campaign would refund $265 (Dh973) in donations from Onyango. Foreign nationals are barred from contributing to US presidential campaigns.

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service