By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign announced Friday that he will campaign with former rival Hillary Rodham Clinton next week, a step toward unifying a fractured Democratic Party after a bruising primary fight.

Obama’s campaign said in a brief e-mail that said the two senators and former opponents will campaign together for the first time on Friday, June 27, and more details would be forthcoming.

A day earlier, Obama and Clinton also plan to meet in Washington with some of her top contributors in an effort to calm donors who remain frustrated with Obama’s presidential campaign. The former first lady will introduce Obama to her financial backers.

Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, suspended her campaign for the Democratic nomination earlier this month after Obama, an Illinois senator, secured enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

Obama’s campaign disclosed the joint appearance — but offered few details — one day after announcing that he would reverse an earlier position and reject some $85 million in public financing for the general election. That announcement opened him up to a flood of criticism and dominated the news cycle.

Thus, Obama’s campaign sought to redirect attention by putting word out a full seven days in advance that Obama and Clinton would campaign together.

Clinton ended her campaign on June 7, four days after Obama got enough delegates to clinch the nomination. “I endorse him and throw my full support behind him,” she said at the time.

The two met privately on June 5 after ditching reporters to make sure there would be no photos or coverage of the first post-race meeting. Obama was asked Wednesday whether they were talking.

“I have not had conversations with Senator Clinton because she has been getting a well-deserved vacation,” he said at the time. “We will be speaking I think in the next few days or certainly the next week and will be having an ongoing conversation.”

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.

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Associated Press reporter Matt Apuzzo contributed from Richmond, Va.

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Monday called Democrat Barack Obama the candidate most advanced on social issues running for U.S. president but said his speech on Cuba last week was a “formula for hunger.”
In one of his periodic newspaper columns published in Communist Party newspaper Granma, Castro said he had “no personal rancor” toward Obama, but “if I defended him I would do a huge favor for his adversaries.”

Obama, speaking before an influential Cuban-American group in Miami, said Cuba deprived its people of civil liberties and free elections, and vowed to maintain, with modifications, a 46-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the island.

Obama has called for lifting restrictions on travel to Cuba and the amount of money people in the United States can send to relatives in Cuba.

“Obama’s speech can translate into a formula of hunger for the nation (Cuba), the remittances like alms and the visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable lifestyle that he sustains.

“How is the very grave problem of the food crisis going to be confronted? Grains must be distributed among human beings, domestic animals and fish, which year by year are smaller and more scarce in the over-exploited seas,” Castro said. “It’s not easy to produce meat from gas and oil.”

“Obama overestimates the possibilities of technology in the struggle against climate change, although he is more conscious than (President George W.) Bush of the risks and the little time available,” he said.

Obama “without doubt is, from the social and human point, the most advanced candidate” running for the U.S. presidency, Castro said. But he accused him of reviving the Monroe Doctrine, which stated in 1823 the United States would not permit European countries to further colonize or interfere in the Americas.

Last week, Castro blasted Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a newspaper column for their criticisms of the Cuban government. McCain, he said, showed why he finished near the bottom of his class in college.

Castro, 81 and not fully recovered from intestinal surgery in July 2006, took power in a 1959 revolution but stepped aside in February and was succeeded as president by his younger brother Raul Castro. He is still head of the Communist Party and said to be involved in governing.

(Reporting by Jeff Franks; editing by Jackie Frank)

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]