National News
McCain volunteers make a final push in Colorado
CENTENNIAL, Colorado (CNN) -- Although John McCain is 7 percentage points behind in the polls, his supporters in the major battleground state of Colorado are still hitting the streets and burning up the phone lines.
Volunteers fueled by dozens of doughnuts hurry in and out of an office building in Centennial. With all the landlines occupied, some call voters on their cell phones.
Working off a script, they try to talk the person on the other end over to their side.
When their conversation seems successful and they have a promised vote for McCain, they ring a bell and the room applauds.
Slogans on a whiteboard declare "Victory is ours" and advise volunteers to "Portray your passion" but "Stick to the script."
"I love the days when the bells just ring non-stop," said Jennifer Raiffie, 38, who is known at the campaign office as "Jen, the security guard." Laid off from a tech company, the 38-year-old has been working the night shift as a security guard.
When her shift ends at 8 a.m., she pitches in at the campaign office. Raiffie began volunteering a month ago after speaking with John McCain when he stopped in Denver. Raiffie considers herself an Independent and loves bringing like-minded voters to McCain's side.
Cassena Henning, a 28-year-old stay-at-home mom from Fort Knox, Kentucky, has been in Colorado working for the campaign for two months. She is bunking with her sister while her husband, a Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army, stays home with their two kids.
She expects he'll deploy soon, but the couple is unsure where. Henning wants someone with military experience in the White House.
"It's John McCain's story that got me here," she said. "It's very important to me that John McCain is his commander in chief."
Mark Rubinson, a 22-year-old Denver college student, said he gets dirty looks when he wears his John McCain shirt on campus. But on this day, he's wearing Denver Broncos pajama bottoms, an orange satin Broncos jacket and a rubber Broncos hat in the shape of a horse's head. It's game day for the Broncos and crunch time for McCain. Rubinson appears in his element as he phones voters.
"John McCain likes being the underdog," Rubinson said. "The only place you can go when you are on top is down, but when you are the underdog you can move up."
The Broncos, three-point underdogs going into Sunday's game, lost to the Miami Dolphins, 26-17.
Barbara Piper, a 67-year-old part-time real estate agent from the Denver suburbs, has been volunteering for two months. She has election fatigue like so many others and knows that political ads and campaign rhetoric only go so far. But she smiled and nodded her head when asked if she has ever swayed an undecided voter to her side.
"I think a lot of people don't listen to commercials, but one-on-one they are willing to listen to you," she said.
Carol Hobson, a 41-year-old corporate security expert, came to Colorado from Phoenix, Arizona, and spent the weekend going door to door. She and a team of volunteers skip houses with Barack Obama signs and even those with McCain signs.
"If they have a sign they'll probably vote," she said. "We focus on the people who need a little push."
Hobson is energized by McCain's lagging poll numbers.
"It's a huge motivator," she said.
Palin: 'Far-left wing of the Democrat Party’ could takeover
LAKEWOOD, Ohio (CNN) – With her voice beginning to crack on this final marathon day of campaigning, Sarah Palin promised an audience in Ohio: “We will win!”
“You can just feel it here,” she said at a rally in the Cleveland suburbs. “You can just feel it here in Ohio, victory's coming, we can do this, we can win, we can win Ohio. And we must win for you.”
The crowd chanted “We will win! We will win!” throughout her remarks. At one point, Palin warned with urgency: “We must win.”
“We must win,” she said, “because Ohio, the far-left wing of the Democrat Party, not mainstream Democrat ideology, the values, the planks in the platform of the Democrat Party. It's the far-left wing of the party is getting ready to take over the entire federal government.”
Palin again accused Barack Obama of wanting to bankrupt the coal industry, citing an interview the Democrat gave to the San Francisco Chronicle in January in which he discussed his “aggressive” cap-and-trade proposal to limit carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
“Just yesterday, revelation, an audiotape surfaces,” Palin argued, despite the fact that the Obama interview has been posted online for nine months. “People are starting to hear in his own words what Sen. Obama’s intention is for the coal industry. You got to hear this tape. You’re going to hear Obama saying it, talking about bankruptcy, bankruptcy there in the coal industry. He’s explaining all this to the San Francisco Chronicle, and he says …”
Palin was interrupted by an audience member who shouted “Liberal!”
She continued: “And there must be something about San Francisco and he because it’s like I heard on Fox News today, it’s like a truth serum where when he’s there, he seems to be more candid, and remember it was there that he talked about, there you go, the bitter clingers, the cling-ons, all of us, I guess, you know holding on to religion and guns and, um, so something about he being there in San Francisco.”
Obama says attacks on wife 'completely out of bounds'
CNN – Looking back at his two-year marathon for the presidency, Barack Obama told CBS he was most angered by "right-wing" attacks on his wife, Michelle, and said many of them were "completely out of bounds."
"I do believe there is a Republican or right-wing media outlet, or set of media outlets, that went after my wife for a while in a way that I thought was just completely out of bounds," Obama told CBS' Katie Couric in an interview that aired Monday morning.
"Frankly, I would never have considered or expected my allies to do something comparable to the spouse of an opponent. I just feel like family are civilians."
Mrs. Obama took particular heat from conservative circles for comments she made during the primary season, when she said that for the first time in her adult life "I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Those comments were highlighted by several Republican state party chapters in an effort to paint the potential first lady as angry, leading the Democratic presidential nominee to call on them to "lay off my wife" in an ABC interview in May.
Mrs. Obama was also been labeled "Obama's baby mama," by Fox News and "Mrs. Grievance" by the conservative National Review. Some conservative outlets also buzzed last summer about the possibility of a tape, which has never appeared, that showed her using the word "whitey" from the pulpit of Trinity United Church. The Obama campaign said Mrs. Obama had never uttered the word and that no tape existed.
"I just feel like family are civilians, and they don't sign up for this stuff… They really should be bystanders in this process, even if they're campaigning for you," Obama told CBS in the interview that aired Monday.
Protesters make noise at Biden event
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) – Just two days after completing a three-day bus tour of central and southern Florida, Joe Biden is back in the state for three events Sunday, this time in the north as part of campaign’s final battleground state push before Tuesday’s election.
On the campus of Florida State University Sunday morning, Biden continued to deliver the campaign’s ‘closing arguments’ that include a plea to supporters to reach out to Republicans after the election in order to bridge the partisan divide.
For the first time since being named the Democratic vice presidential nominee, a small group of McCain and Palin supporters tried to interrupt the Delaware senator’s remarks from the public sidewalk about 150 yards from the podium. Their chants inaudible through a megaphone, they took to using the device’s siren to disrupt.
Biden referred to “the people in the parking lot” four times, using them as an example of those that Democrats will have to reach out to after Tuesday.
“I mean it literally. Not a joke. I know you find some of that obnoxious,” said Biden. “We gotta end this. Somebody's got to be big enough to stand up and end this.”
There’s also a practical reason, Biden argued, legislation won't be able to pass without bi-partisan support.
“You think we're going to get education reform? You think we're going to re-establish and end this war and re-establish our place in the world without getting a significant portion of Republicans to agree with us as well? No one party can do this.”
Barack Obama and Biden have been targeting McCain and Palin over the past two days for the endorsement they received from Dick Cheney on Saturday, asking if any more proof is needed that this Republican ticket would be a continuation of the Bush-Cheney administration.
“Folks, John McCain and Sarah Palin can have Dick Cheney’s endorsement,” said Biden, We’ll settle for people like Warren Buffett and Colin Powell.”
After Sunday in Florida, Biden continues the swing state tour in the campaign’s final hours, heading to Missouri Monday morning, Ohio in the afternoon and Philadelphia at night. After voting at home in Wilmington Tuesday morning, he will visit at least one more swing state before joining Barack Obama in Chicago.
