WASHINGTON - John McCain said Democratic rival Barack Obama is bad for business in a speech to small business owners. McCain said Tuesday that Obama’s policies would mean higher taxes and higher overhead costs. The Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting also criticized Obama for pledging to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
 
McCain said small businesses make the economy run and that his Democratic rival would slow the creation of new jobs.

“You work hard in small businesses to grow and create new jobs and opportunities for others,” McCain said. “The federal government shouldn’t make your work any harder.”

Economic issues have taken center stage in the early presidential race. Obama argues that McCain’s policies are no different from those of President Bush, and he blames those policies for the slumping economy.

Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration’s tax cuts for upper-income workers and has called for new taxes on oil companies and wealthy individuals, along with $1,000 tax cuts for the middle class tax.

McCain said small businesses would bear the brunt of the tax increases proposed by Obama. McCain called for phasing out the alternative minimum tax and allowing businesses to write off some new investments.

“I don’t want to send any more of your earnings to the government,” the Arizona senator said.

McCain, who was introduced by eBay Inc. CEO Meg Whitman, was briefly interrupted by protesters who yelled that war is bad for small business. The protesters were booed, and McCain used the interruptions to call for a civil debate in the campaign.

[Source: Yahoo News]

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. - The presidential campaign’s focus turned sharply to the economy Monday, an inopportune time for Republican John McCain as Americans cope with record-high gasoline prices and a spike in job losses.

Democrat Barack Obama seized on the issue by launching a two-week economic tour meant to highlight his differences with McCain on taxes, spending priorities and other matters. At every turn he is tying McCain to President Bush, whose approval ratings are consistently low.

McCain pushed back, saying Obama’s bid to end the Bush administration’s tax cuts for upper-income Americans would only worsen the already struggling economy. He is airing TV ads in key states on the Iraq war, which he sees as a better issue this fall. But he took questions on the economy from donors in Virginia on Monday, and planned a speech Tuesday to small business owners in Washington.

With many voters blaming Bush for the economic woes, Republican candidates for federal and state offices are scrambling to distance themselves from the bad news without abandoning core principles such as low taxes and modest government intervention in activities like banking and lending.

Democrats are trying to cut off any escape routes.

The centerpiece of McCain’s economic plan “amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush’s policies,” Obama told about 900 people in Raleigh.

North Carolina is not a state ordinarily pursued by Democratic presidential nominees. But it gave Obama a crucial victory in his primary battle against Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he hopes to put it into play this fall — or at least force McCain to spend time and money here.

In the audience was former presidential rival John Edwards, who lives nearby. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards — who refrained from endorsing Obama when her husband did so last month_also attended.

Obama offered no new policies in his speech, which he read from teleprompters. Rather, he used the occasion to emphasize his economic differences with McCain and to summarize earlier proposals. They include raising income taxes on wealthy Americans, granting a $1,000 tax cut to most others, winding down the Iraq war, tightening credit card regulations and pumping more money into education, alternative fuels and infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

Obama took part of his speech from headlines across the nation, noting that the average price of gas just hit $4 a gallon for the first time. The news followed an unusually sharp spike in the unemployment rate on Friday.

Repeatedly linking McCain to Bush, Obama said, “our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs.”

Obama criticized McCain for originally opposing Bush’s first-term tax cuts but now supporting their continuation. He said he would increase taxes on oil companies while McCain would reduce them.

“At a time when we’re fighting two wars, when millions of Americans can’t afford their medical bills or their tuition bills, when we’re paying more than $4 a gallon for gas, the man who rails against government spending wants to spend $1.2 billion on a tax break for Exxon Mobil,” Obama said. “That isn’t just irresponsible. It’s outrageous.”

At a fundraiser in Richmond, Va., McCain noted that he supports a temporary suspension of the federal tax on gasoline, which Obama dismisses as a gimmick that will not bring down prices.

“Talk to somebody who owns a couple of trucks and makes a living with those trucks,” McCain said. “Ask them whether they’d like to have some relief — 18 1/2 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24 1/2 cents for diesel. They say it matters.”

The two differed somewhat on energy production as well. Obama called for greater government investments “in a renewable energy policy that ends our addiction on foreign oil, provides real long-term relief from high fuel costs, and builds a green economy that could create up to five million well-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced.”

He did not mention nuclear power, although in the past he has said he would not rule out a greater role for nuclear energy.

McCain was more gung-ho about nuclear power and expanded domestic drilling for oil and natural gas. When a donor in Richmond summed up his advice as, “nuclear, and drill wherever we’ve got it,” McCain responded: “You just gave my speech. Thank you, my friend.”

McCain added, “Long-term, we’ve got to become used to nuclear, wind, solar, tide, all of the alternate energy, including a battery that will take a car 100 miles or 200 miles” before being recharged.

“Nuclear power, for all kinds of reasons, needs to be part of the solution,” McCain said.

Obama said he would pay for all of his new proposals from sources including the higher taxes on wealthy Americans and an end to the Iraq war. His aides said he will provide more details as the campaign goes on.

–

Associated Press reporter Matt Apuzzo contributed from Richmond, Va.

WASHINGTON - Anti-war Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, a strong backer of the Iraq conflict, were reaching out to veterans on Monday, the country’s Memorial Day holiday, as the presidential candidates inched closer to a likely faceoff in the November general election.
Obama’s longshot rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, continued to campaign Monday in Puerto Rico. The U.S. Caribbean territory’s primary next week is one of just three left as the intense battle for the Democratic race begun in January winds down.

On Sunday, Obama struck a conciliatory note with McCain, whom he had been hammering for days, and urged unity in service of a greater good in a speech to university graduates.

Obama was filling in for U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor last week and had planned to deliver the graduation address at Wesleyan University. Kennedy has endorsed Obama over Clinton and has campaigned for him.

“We may disagree as Americans on certain issues and positions, but I believe we can be unified in service to a greater good. I intend to make it a cause of my presidency, and I believe with all my heart that this generation is ready and eager and up to the challenge,” Obama told the graduating class of 2008.

Obama spent much of the week criticizing McCain, the Republican presumptive nominee, for opposing a college aid bill for military veterans, part of a strategy to link the conservative Republican to the deeply unpopular Bush administration. But he stepped back from the topic ahead of the Memorial Day holiday honoring fallen U.S. servicemen and women.

On Monday, Obama was holding a town hall meeting with veterans in Las Cruces, New Mexico. McCain visiting a memorial for veterans, also in New Mexico.

Over the weekend, McCain turned his attention to the search for a vice presidential running mate. He was hosting at least three potential running mates at his home in Sedona, Arizona — Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and his former key rival, ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Clinton, meanwhile, was in Puerto Rico, where she hopes for a big primary victory June 1, Clinton told churchgoers that faith has sustained her through her arduous and faltering duel with the ascendant Obama.

“If I had listened to those who had been talking over the last several months we would not be having this campaign in Puerto Rico today,” she said, alluding to calls during the past few months for her to drop out of the race and support Obama.

Clinton is trailing Obama and has almost no chances of getting the Democratic nomination. Some prominent Democrats have been calling for her to step down, fearing that a protracted nomination battle might ruin the party’s chances in November.

The latest to do so was former President Jimmy Carter, who said Sunday during an interview with Sky News in London that Clinton should abandon her battle by early June.

But the former first lady spoke of her determination to stay in the race despite trailing Obama, who picked up three more superdelegates in Hawaii on Sunday, giving him a total of 1,977 delegates, just 49 delegates short of the 2,026 needed to clinch the nomination. Clinton has 1,779.

After Puerto Rico, there are just two primaries left: Montana and South Dakota on June 3.

Puerto Rico has 55 delegates. Clinton is expected to win there, thanks partly to her ties to the large Puerto Rican community in her home state of New York.

Meanwhile, a third party on Sunday officially chose a former Republican congressman to be its candidate. Former Rep. Bob Barr will run on the Libertarian Party ticket in November. A third-party candidate has not won the presidency in the country’s modern history, but they have sometimes siphoned off voters from one of the two main party candidates.

[Source:Yahoo News]

By Steve Holland

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Wednesday he has begun compiling a list of potential vice presidential running mates as he visited the U.S. Naval Academy on a nostalgia tour.

McCain, talking to reporters on his campaign bus, also attacked Democratic candidate Barack Obama, saying Obama’s talk of leaving a “strike force” in Iraq left him puzzled because Obama has often talked of a troop withdrawal.

“I know he’s inexperienced and I know he’s got a lack of knowledge” about national security, McCain said.

McCain, 71, talking by telephone to radio talk show host Don Imus, earlier said he and his campaign staff had just started putting together a list of possible vice presidential candidates and was having them vetted.

He joked that his decision was of added importance. “I’m aware of the enhanced importance of this issue given my age,” he quipped.

The Arizona senator said the list included about 20 names but he would give none of them. A host of Republican politicians have been mentioned as possibilities. “It’s every name imaginable,” he said.

McCain said “a couple of people” have been approached about heading his vice presidential search committee, with no decision made yet.

He would like to have his running mate set before the Republican convention in Minneapolis in early September that will nominate McCain as the party’s choice to face either Obama or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the November election.

“I’d like to get it done as early as possible,” McCain said.

NO REGRETS

Blasted by Democrats for saying the United State might have a 100-year military presence in Iraq, McCain told reporters he had no regrets for having made the comment, saying it was in the context of lengthy U.S. military presences in Japan and South Korea.

“For me not to say that would mean I don’t think we should have a presence in South Korea,” he said.

McCain was in Annapolis to review his adventuresome four years here prior to training as a fighter pilot and heading to Vietnam, where his plane was shot down and he spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.

He is on a tour of places important to developing his character as he fights for media coverage dominated by the extended battle between Obama and Clinton.

He started the day giving the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag at crowded Chick and Ruth’s Delly restaurant, a political hangout in the Maryland capital of Annapolis where patriotism ranks as high as the crab omelets served up by fast-moving waiters.

McCain has spent all week talking about his transformation from bad boy to war hero and there was more of the same at Annapolis. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

“In truth, my four years at the Naval Academy were not notable for exemplary virtue or academic achievement but, rather, for the impressive catalogue of demerits I managed to accumulate,” McCain told a small crowd of invited guests at the academy football stadium. A brisk, chilly wind had U.S. flags behind him flapping.

Asked by Imus what his father and grandfather, who were both admirals, would have thought of his Naval Academy tenure, McCain said it would not have mattered.

“Neither of them were accorded any special honors upon their graduation,” he said.

Turning to the future, McCain said Americans are cynical about their country and their idea of liberty is “the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.”

McCain, who would be the oldest person ever elected to a first presidential term, said Americans need to take up a cause greater than themselves — join the military, help feed the hungry, seek public office.

“If you find faults with our country, make it a better one,” he said.

(Editing by Jackie Frank and David Wiessler)

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters “Tales from the Trail: 2008″ online at http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)

David Paul Kuhn
A new analysis of March polling data suggests that John McCain’s cross-party support surpasses that of either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton.

According to data provided by the Gallup Organization at Politico’s request, in a hypothetical contest between McCain and Obama, McCain wins 17 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic, while Obama wins 10 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

In a potential contest with Clinton, McCain wins 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners while Clinton wins 8 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

By way of comparison, exit polls in 2004 reported that George W. Bush won 11 percent of Democrats and John F. Kerry won 6 percent of Republicans.

The new analysis, calculated from a compilation of Gallup’s daily polls between March 7 and 22, seems to indicate that there are more “McCain Democrats” than the much-ballyhooed “Obama Republicans” — or “Obamacans,” as they are sometimes referred to.

The polls were aggregated at Politico’s request as part of an effort to assess the cross-party appeal of each candidate. The compilation created a larger sample size, allowing pollsters to more accurately decipher voting patterns by party affiliation.

McCain’s potential to win more crossover votes than either of the Democrats, a finding that also surfaces in surveys conducted by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics and in private GOP polls, could upend the political calculus for the November general election.

Equally important, Gallup finds that McCain wins independents against either Democrat — 48 to 23 percent against Clinton, and 40 to 31 percent against Obama.

In 2004, exit polls showed independents cast 26 percent of the vote, splitting their support evenly between Bush and Kerry.

Both the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign are depending upon McCain’s potential appeal to Democrats and independents to compensate for the depleted Republican ranks.

“Democrats currently have a lead in voter identification; it’s axiomatic that you have to look beyond your party’s base to get to 50 percent,” said Frank Donatelli, the deputy chairman of the RNC.

Late February polling by the RNC, passed along to top officials in the McCain campaign, also found that more Democrats said they would vote for McCain than Republicans said they would vote for Obama, according to an RNC operative and a senior adviser to the McCain campaign.

“There will be something in the range of a quarter of Democrats available or accessible to him when the this Democratic contest is over but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to work for them,” said a senior McCain adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That estimate may prove optimistic, though not wildly.

A Fox News poll released last week also found that McCain wins 18 percent of Democrats while Obama wins 11 percent of Republicans. McCain maintains his advantage among independents in the Fox poll, as well.

Clinton, according to the Gallup findings, hemorrhages slightly fewer Democrats than Obama. But Obama more than compensates for Clinton’s strength among Democrats with his greater capacity to narrow McCain’s advantage among independents. Private polling conducted by Republican strategist Tony Fabrizio reflects the same trend.

“There’s going to be McCain Democrats,” Fabrizio said, adding that it was only a question of whether they will be a small sliver of the political left or a movement toward McCain.

If Obama is the Democratic nominee, the McCain adviser said the campaign will target male and female blue-collar white Democrats, a group viewed by Republicans as Obama’s soft spot.

“They already sense that [Obama] may be too liberal,” the adviser added. “They tend to also agree with McCain on the war and on social issues and we’ll have to satisfy them that McCain agrees with them on the economy.”

McCain’s appeal to Democrats has some Republican strategists envisioning a Ronald Reagan-like road map for the 2008 race. Today, most of the so-called Reagan Democrats have become independents.

“One similarity between 1980 and 2008 is you have a very tough Democratic primary,” said the RNC’s Donatelli, who served as the political director in the Reagan White House. “After that ended, there were a lot of bruised feelings and Democrats who would not vote for the winner.”

Gallup published results Wednesday that showed evidence supporting a similar scenario for 2008. Twenty-eight percent of Clinton’s supporters say they would vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee. The data, aggregating the same period of March polling, also showed 19 percent of Obama’s supporters pledging to back McCain if Clinton wins the nomination.

“The bulk of the Democrats you would try to appeal to are not Harvard-educated lawyers who are feminists. They’re working-class Democrats that you have more of a shot at getting. And the core of that appeal is social conservatism, right to life, Second Amendment and obviously national security,” Donatelli said.

Comparing Reagan to McCain, Donatelli said “both of them were and are viewed as mavericks, and a lot of that is character, and a lot of that is the persona of the individual. And it’s issue-based too, because you’ve challenged the orthodoxy on occasion.”

Democrats say they must undercut McCain’s maverick image in order to shore up their flank.

“People tend to confuse maverick with moderate,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Democratic leader in mobilizing voters. Rosenthal said Democrats must position McCain as a conservative and introduce them to the “real John McCain” on issues ranging from abortion to the war in Iraq to the environment.

“If Republicans are successful in defining John McCain as a moderate who can work across party lines and is a straight talker, then we will be in a real battle to win Democrats in some of these swing states,” he continued.

“Against McCain,” Rosenthal said, “it’s clear this is going to be an extremely close race. Anybody who thought that Democrats were going to waltz to the White House in 2008 is crazy.”
[Source: Yahoo News]