Obama reachesto women who backed Clinton

By Margaret Talevand William Douglas - McClatchy Newspapers

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Barack Obama kicked off his last week of campaigning before the Democratic National Convention by reaching out Monday to a still-elusive bloc — working women who preferred Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

Addressing a women's roundtable Monday in Albuquerque a day after Clinton had been in town stumping for him, Obama talked about his support for equal pay legislation and described the struggles of his single mother. He said that women on average earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men and that he didn't want his own two daughters, 10 and 7, to face gender discrimination.

”When I hear that women are being treated unfairly in the workplace,“ he said, ”I get mad and I get frustrated.“

In the week before the Democratic National Convention, Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain are looking to cover lots of ground.

McCain, campaigning in Florida, accused Obama of being weak on foreign policy and unwilling to admit that President Bush's ”surge“ policy in Iraq is working.

”With less than three months to go before the election, a lot of people are still trying to square Senator Obama's varying position on the surge in Iraq,“ McCain told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Orlando.

”First, he opposed the surge and confidently predicted that it would fail. Then he tried to prevent funding for the troops who carried out the surge. Not content to merely predict failure in Iraq, my opponent tried to legislate failure. This was back when supporting America's efforts entailed serious risk,“ McCain said.

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