This is great. If you get doddering John on the mat, he’s never getting up. We’ll have to get him one of those medic alert bracelets. I’ve fallen, and I can't get up!
With Fall Vote in View, Obama Assails McCain on Economy
By JOHN M. BRODER
RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Barack Obama, with the Democratic stage to himself for the first time, began a two-week assault on Senator John McCain’s economic policies in a series of battleground states on Monday, moving to define the general election campaign by focusing on the economy as the central theme.
In a speech at the North Carolina state fairgrounds here, Mr. Obama assailed Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, for what he characterized as a dangerous ignorance of economic matters. His remarks signaled how he plans to pound away at his core argument: that electing Mr. McCain would mean four more years of what he termed the failed economic programs of the Bush administration.
Mr. Obama used the address to reach out to lower-income and lesser-educated Americans who rejected him in the Democratic primaries in favor of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who formally conceded the race on Saturday and pledged her support for Mr. Obama.
The speech came at the start of a tour that suggested where the Obama campaign saw the key battlegrounds in November: Monday’s speech was in North Carolina, which has long voted for Republican presidential candidates but which has a large black population, and he will be traveling to Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida to press the economic theme.
In his remarks on Monday. Mr. Obama spoke of hard-pressed workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana struggling to pay their bills and afford gasoline for their cars. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of President Bush and his Republican enablers, including Senator McCain.
“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history,” Mr. Obama said to an invitation-only audience here. “This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”
He added a moment later: “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. Were not going back.”
The pieces of the economic program that Mr. Obama laid out on Monday are not new, but the context assuredly is. This is the first full week of the general election campaign and Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are beginning what promises to be an aggressive fight over the economy and the Iraq war.
Mr. Obama, by announcing a two-week tour to stress economic issues, chose the ground for the first battles in this general election contest, shoving Iraq and national security matters, where Mr. McCain has far more experience, to the background for now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/politics/09cnd-obama.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
With Fall Vote in View, Obama Assails McCain on Economy
By JOHN M. BRODER
RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Barack Obama, with the Democratic stage to himself for the first time, began a two-week assault on Senator John McCain’s economic policies in a series of battleground states on Monday, moving to define the general election campaign by focusing on the economy as the central theme.
In a speech at the North Carolina state fairgrounds here, Mr. Obama assailed Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, for what he characterized as a dangerous ignorance of economic matters. His remarks signaled how he plans to pound away at his core argument: that electing Mr. McCain would mean four more years of what he termed the failed economic programs of the Bush administration.
Mr. Obama used the address to reach out to lower-income and lesser-educated Americans who rejected him in the Democratic primaries in favor of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who formally conceded the race on Saturday and pledged her support for Mr. Obama.
The speech came at the start of a tour that suggested where the Obama campaign saw the key battlegrounds in November: Monday’s speech was in North Carolina, which has long voted for Republican presidential candidates but which has a large black population, and he will be traveling to Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida to press the economic theme.
In his remarks on Monday. Mr. Obama spoke of hard-pressed workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana struggling to pay their bills and afford gasoline for their cars. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of President Bush and his Republican enablers, including Senator McCain.
“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history,” Mr. Obama said to an invitation-only audience here. “This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”
He added a moment later: “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. Were not going back.”
The pieces of the economic program that Mr. Obama laid out on Monday are not new, but the context assuredly is. This is the first full week of the general election campaign and Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are beginning what promises to be an aggressive fight over the economy and the Iraq war.
Mr. Obama, by announcing a two-week tour to stress economic issues, chose the ground for the first battles in this general election contest, shoving Iraq and national security matters, where Mr. McCain has far more experience, to the background for now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/politics/09cnd-obama.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
